The girl is not real. She’s known it for some time now. Since she learned that most little girls don’t practice their words and smiles in a mirror; don’t feel the tingling of the fluorescent lights; don’t linger on the edges, always watching, searching for the rules everyone else seems to know by heart; don’t mold themselves like clay to fit whatever place they find themselves in.
Perhaps that’s what she is. Clay. A thing crafted from mud and moonlight and hope to fill the void when no babe came the way it should have. Only they didn’t do it quite right, Mama or Daddy or whoever dug up the dirt and prayed. They forgot some crucial piece of the spell, mixed the mud too wet or too dry, set the clay-formed babe to dry under the new moon when it should have been full. Maybe God Himself looked down on Mama and Daddy and their lump of molded clay and got so mad at their meddling with His will that he cursed them and their fake little girl.
Or maybe she’s a cruel trick. She’s read about them, real little girls stolen from their beds. Mamas and Daddies who find a different, new little girl tucked snug in the bed instead. A little girl who looks the same, with eyes like Daddy’s and hair like Mama’s, but different, wrong, deep down past where the eyes can see.
Maybe there’s another little girl, the real little girl, out there somewhere. Maybe she’s just as lost, just as alone in a world that doesn’t make sense, longing for her own long-lost home. And if that’s true, then maybe, just maybe, they can trade back, both return to the place where they’re supposed to be. Back to their real worlds, their real homes, their real selves.
So she looks. Day after day, she slips out into the woods, walks through mushroom rings and peeks her head inside hollow logs, scrambles over mossy boulders and wades knee-deep in the bog. All the places she’s not supposed to go.
‘Cause of faeries, they would have told her long ago. Sprites and pixies and will-o’-the-wisps that lure real little girls away from the path and into the waiting darkness.
Now it’s ‘cause of ticks and snakes and spiders and drowning if she steps too deep or trips and hits her head.
Some days, the bad days, when her practice smile breaks, and her eyes burn with tears–irrational, Daddy would call them, unhelpful, dramatic, excessive–when she practiced her words until she knew them by heart and the other girls laughed anyway, when the lights were too bright and the voices too loud and all of it wrong, those mundane dangers don’t seem so scary.
Maybe that’s how she’d find her way home.
That’s another thing real little girls don’t do. They don’t long to go home while they’re sitting at the dinner table or curled up safe in bed beside the soft glow of the princess nightlight they outgrew long ago. But sometimes she swears she remembers another place.
She never finds it.
Not, at least, in the way she thinks.
She never finds a portal to another world hidden in a hollow tree; a thin place between two ancient stones, just wide enough for a little girl to slip through; a map spun in the gossamer threads of a spider’s web showing her the way to somewhere both ancient and new.
But she finds quiet. Away from the buzzing fluorescent lights, she finds the soft kiss of the summer sun. She learns to let her face take whatever shape it wants, to laugh and smile and scream with no care for what others might think.
The woods don’t mind, anyway. The squirrels and birds are used to her by now; the butterflies don’t pause their fluttering when she sobs. The trees don’t scold her for how deep her feelings go, just tuck her close in the living cradle of their roots. The wind understands the shifts in her spirit, joins with her in gentle breezes and rushing gales, summons the rain to accompany her tears and dries them with a soft caress.
And, eventually, she finds others. Little ones, at first, then not so little as the saplings grow into mighty trees, stretching up to reach the sky.
The ones who call themselves false, who wonder how they came to be here in this world. The ones who seek their own solace, there amidst the trees. Their own freedom, or home, or escape.
The ones who see the pieces she’s learned to call broken, to hide behind her practiced smiles, because they have their own. Who slowly, shyly, peel away their own masks, carefully sculpted through the years. The ones who love her for all she is. The ones who make her real.