I hate apples.

It had only been half a year since everything happened, but it still felt like it was only yesterday that I was naively talking with with mother. Sitting by her hospital bed, smiling, looking up to her. It took one sentence to turn my whole life upside down, and she’d been the one to speak it.

It didn’t matter how many times I walked up and down the halls of the academy, I knew it would never truly feel like home, even though it was all I had now. Students running wild with excitement and anxiety, grueling over alchemical textbooks or procrastinating with their friends; this cacophony was all that filled the halls.

I tried to lay low through it all, but it was getting more and more difficult each day to hide what I truly am. With every breath I took, it was made abundantly clear what I was. Creatures like me were imprisoned and banished beneath the school, and the safety measures that made breathing the air within the school like poison were a constant stinging in my lungs. I coughed, as I often did, something I’d passed off as a chronic illness to my peers.

The air was poison, my brethren were regarded as monsters, and every student in this school was destined for failure at my hands. I couldn’t be close to any of them because of what I am. It tore me apart, but it was better than cherishing someone just to have them hurt at my hands.

I finally returned to my dorm, dropping my bag by the door and walking slowly towards my bed, pausing halfway there.

I stared into the full length mirror in my room, a smiling replica of my reflection staring back at me, chewing on a candy apple. She tilted her head, her eyes the color of the apple in her hand making contact with my own, a stark green contrast.

“How was school?”

I tried to walk away, but she reached through the glass and grabbed my wrist. She pulled me back, placing the stick the candy apple was pierced through in my hand, smiling still.

“Go on, Eve. You look hungry. Did you skip lunch again?”

“Don’t talk to me like we’re friends.” I glared at her, annoyed that one of the many banes of my existence shared my appearance.

“Of course we’re not. I understand that.” She took a bite of the apple as I still held it, smirking as I glared in disgust. “I am Adam, and you, Eve. I am the corrupt superior, and you’re the puppet who will take the blame. That is what we are.” She let go of my wrist, and as I yanked my arm out of the mirror, she turned to walk out of the frame’s view. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She walked off, leaving an empty mirror and a half-eaten apple in my hand. I felt sick, tearing the apple off the stick and grimacing at the sugar coating sticking to my hand. I fell onto my bed, eyes glued to the bright, unhealthy and sickeningly red apple, and took a ferocious bite out of it, like a lion tearing into a gazelle.

I hate apples.