Reborn as My Enemy's Daughter novel · Chapter 1 of 16
Chapter 1: The Beautiful Little Girl
I died at sixteen, because of a locked door on the rooftop of my high school.
It was a Thursday in April, during recess, and no one came to let me out.
Then there was a long, warm darkness, like being inside a blanket.
Then there was light.
A white, harsh light that hurt my eyes.
I tried to scream, and what came out of my throat was a kitten's squeak.
Hands lifted me up.
A woman's voice said:
"There, there, my love. It's over now."
They placed me on a warm chest that smelled of milk and sweat.
A nurse said something about weight and height.
Someone else laughed and said I had the lungs of a singer.
I didn't understand what was happening.
My hands were tiny.
I couldn't focus on anything.
Then the woman holding me leaned over, and I saw her face for the first time.
Brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, dark circles from exhaustion, skin shiny with sweat.
Twenty-one, maybe.
It was a pretty face.
It was a face I knew better than my own.
I felt my heart—that tiny, brand-new heart—stop.
Jessica Ordaz.
The same turned-up nose.
The same mole beside her mouth.
The same sweet voice that, five years earlier, had said to me: "Come on, Perla, I want to show you something on the rooftop."
"Hello, my beautiful little girl," she whispered.
No.
No, no, no.
I tried to squirm.
My baby body wouldn't respond.
"There, my love, calm down."
She stroked my head with her thumb.
When she kissed my forehead, I felt the same vanilla perfume on my skin.
I used to smell it in the school hallway on the days I had to suffer.
A wave of disgust rose from my stomach.
It can't be, I thought.
It can't be that I ended up with her.
Someone came up to the bed.
A big man, about twenty-five, wearing a hospital gown over his clothes, his eyes red.
He was smiling with a goofy tenderness.
"Look at her, Jess. She's perfect."
"She looks just like you, Horacio."
"She has your mouth."
They looked at each other.
They kissed.
Meanwhile, I learned something new: that disgust is a feeling that fits perfectly inside a newborn's body.
The nurse settled her better on the pillow.
"Do you have a name yet?"
"Alma," said Jessica. "Her name is going to be Alma Cantú Ordaz."
Alma.
How ironic, I thought.
My soul, inside the body of my murderer's daughter.
The man extended an enormous finger and touched my little hand.
My fingers closed reflexively around his.
"Look, Jess. She grabbed me."
"She loves you."
I didn't love him.
I wanted to get out of there.
I wanted to scream, accuse, run and tell someone what that young, pretty woman had done to a sixteen-year-old girl.
But I had no words, no legs, no teeth.
I only had one thing.
Two small hands and an impulse.
Jessica brought her face close to look at me.
"What big eyes," she said, laughing. "You're definitely going to be very smart."
She was so close, so smiling, so sure that I was hers.
I moved my arm with all my strength.
I jabbed my right index finger directly into her eye.
"Ow!"
Jessica jerked back, her hand over her face.
"She poked me in the eye!"
The nurse laughed.
Horacio choked with laughter.
"She's got spirit, this one."
"That really hurt."
"She's a baby, my love."
I kicked against Jessica's chest with my chubby, trembling legs.
I kicked with everything I had.
With rage, with fear, with the sixteen years of a girl who never came back from the rooftop.
Jessica covered her eye with one hand and held me with the other, still laughing, tears on her face.
And she started to hum.
A soft lullaby.
A song I knew.
I had heard it only once in my life, when she whistled it while locking the rooftop door from the outside.
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