text: It was Wednesday. Average and uneventful for most--but not for *her*. Never for *her*. She was a small girl--only about 65 inches in height; her arms seemed to long for her body, and her eyes seemed too deep for her face. Her hair hung a bit further down than her ears, curling and twisting in various directions as though trying to fit more comfortably on her head; or perhaps it was trying to escape from her head altogether--it was hard to tell, really. The girl's face was closed and frightened--she tried to make herself seem open and approachable, of course. It just didn't work. Especially that day. That Wednesday. She wore thick, square glasses with rims too large for her face and a smile too bright for her soul. The girl didn't know her own name. But then again, people usually didn't know their real names; the only difference between her and the others was that she knew about her *lack* of a name. Her lack of identity. Others seemed to take whatever identity they were given, because they simply didn't care--but this girl would rather live without a name than be forced to live with one that wasn't hers. She walked around the outside of the large, stone building--there was a thick railing to her right, overlooking a deceptively cheerful garden. To her left, there was a row of grimy doors leading to brightly lit classrooms, containing rows upon rows of unmotivated students. With a quiet, "excuse me," the girl hurried towards a door with a sign above it marked 'Restrooms.' She pushed it open, finding herself facing a line of grimy urinals packed into the tiny space. She grimaced at the poorly-done grafitti covering the walls. there was one stall at the very end--it reeked of urine, defecation, and...other bodily fluids. Wrinkling her nose, the girl walked into the stall, closing the graffiti-covered door behind her. She noticed that its lock had been torn off, and decided that it didn't matter. With a sigh, she hung her backpack gingerly from the half-intact hook behind the door, noting that there was no toilet paper next to the toilet, which hadn't been flushed in several hours. With another sigh, she flushed the toilet and flopped miserably down onto the seat like a discarded pile of rags. Observing the walls around her, she noted the peeling paint and the incoherent messages scrawled across the cracked plaster like the nightmares of a madman. Right next to the girl's head were the words, "God loves you," with a poorly drawn heart under them in bold sharpie. The girl stared at the words--stared at them until her eyes burned--and then she began laughing. She didn't know why; there was nothing to laugh at, after all--and yet she was shaking with mirth, bordering on hysteria, gasps escaping her parted lips, tears streaming from her closed eyes... Then suddenly, her gasps weren't of mirth anymore, but of suffering; she felt her tears turn to shards of ice, piercing her mind and shattering her smile into a thousand broken pieces. *God is dead,* she heard herself think. *God died the same day people forgot their names--God died because we don't know God's name anymore.* She stared blankly at her backpack, hanging limply from the bathroom door like a hanged corpse. *Perhaps we never knew God's name, not really--maybe God isn't dead; it's possible that God simply never lived.* The girl looked down at her reflection in the dirty toilet water, glaring at the broken face staring back at her with empty eyes. She flushed the toilet again, watching the face break into fragments like a torn photograph. It reformed a few seconds later, grinning triumphantly at her. It taunted her, winking with its watery eyes and grinning through its discolored mouth. She could hear its voice--mocking her, whispering to her. *You don't belong,* it whispered. *Not here, not anywhere--there's nowhere to run from me, nowhere to hide. I'll come with you no matter how far you try to go, because in the end--you're always in the same place. You're in here, you're with me; you're always mine.* It laughed, causing her tears to fall harder and her gasps to become more saturated with pain. Her tears were flames now, dripping down her cheeks and onto her shirt, into the toilet below, setting the grinning face on fire. It kept laughing, mocking--its voice was deafening now; filling her ears, her head, her stomach... The girl felt sick, frightened, and broken. She tried to rise, but her legs refused to obey her. *You're a freak,* hissed the voice from beneath her. Its eyes flamed in their watery sockets, its crooked grin widening. The girl felt its cold grip on her arm; she forced herself to stand, grabbing her backpack and hurrying out the door, past the line of urinals--she stopped in front of the sink, raising her eyes up to the mirror. The face was there again, laughing at her. She tried to look through it, to find herself hidden inside it, behind it, cowering in a corner of the reflected room--but she wasn't there. There was nothing there--nothing but the face with the crooked smile and the eyes like shattered glass, reaching through and grasping her arm. Slowly, the girl raised her left arm, rolling up her shirtsleeve. she looked down at it, glared at the white lines crisscrossing up and down her forearm--each one a lost battle, a flaming mark carved into eternity. She stared into the mirror, into those cold, shattered eyes the color of muddy quicksand, wishing that she never had to see them again. She looked behind the face, looked at the row of grimy urinals, looked at the sign reading "Men's" in front of the door. She saw the sneering masks appearing behind the crooked grin, chanting a name that wasn't hers, chanting words that carved out pieces of her soul like knives, words that poured like gasoline onto her skin, burrowing into her like needles into a vein. The bathroom was empty. Empty, except for the girl and her demons, standing there in front of a dirty sink and a trash can overflowing with paper towels. It was a Men's bathroom, lined with urinals and a single stall--empty. Empty, except for a broken girl standing alone against a horde of demons that nobody else could see--a girl trying to ignore the darkness grasping at her, the icy tendrils of suffering squeezing at her lungs and seeping into her mind--a girl who didn't belong anywhere, who had nowhere to go--a girl who wore darkness like a shawl to cover up her brokenness, trying to collect all the jagged fragments of herself and stick them back together from whatever memory of herself she had left...whatever memory she had of who she was, of the name she didn't know. There was blood on the girl's hands and she couldn't quite tell whose it was--it might have been hers, or it might have been the blood of a demon. It was black and cold--she didn't know where it had come from. She looked down at her hands, except they *weren't* her hands--they were too big and too aggressive. She looked down at her arm and saw a new line among the old ones; a fresh battle, a fresh loss, another reminder of her own worthlessness. It was bleeding endlessly, bleeding cold and black, breaking into her soul. The girl was crying, but her tears were frozen again, freezing her wounds shut and turning her heart to ice. She felt the grinning face next to hers, laughing through the mirror and asking her how it felt to be a demon--to bleed cold and dark, to have blood like frozen tar and tears like ice. Its crooked smile widened as the girl sobbed, looking down at the hands that weren't hers, the wounds frozen shut...she felt her tears freeze in her eyes until all she was was ice, and all she could feel was the cold. Her heartbeat was slowing. Slowing, slowing--almost stopped. Her shawl of darkness had become a noose now, dragging her upwards to the ceiling of the bathroom--the only part without graffiti, ironically. The girl didn't struggle. To struggle was to fight, and fighting was for those who had hope. Fighting was for people with names. The girl rose past the mirror, seeing the masks laughing and cheering on her empty noose--and then she saw something else. Something that wasn't a mask. It was a face--not the face of a demon. The face of a girl. A girl with a name. She stood near the back of the room in the mirror, with black square glasses and a green backpack, wrinkling her nose at the graffiti on the walls. The girl outside the mirror watched her, watched the girl with a name--their eyes locked through the mirror, and the masks began to whisper to each other nervously. The girl without a name felt her noose begin to loosen, felt the ice begin to recede. The girl in the mirror was walking now--walking towards the mirror, smiling at the masks around her and watching them disappear in frightened puffs of empty smoke as she laughed. Her hair was long and black, stylishly messy; her eyes were a warm, liquid brown, piercing the mirror and melting the ice in the other girl's eyes and untying her noose. Her arms were long and graceful, her smile like warm sunshine. The girl without a name stood dumbfounded, watching the girl in the mirror banish the masks and the face with the crooked grin, watching her walk into battle with nothing but her own smile, her laughter, and her eyes like fiery brown galaxies. *She's beautiful,* thought the girl without a name. And then she was gone. The mirror was gone, the demons were gone--the bathroom was empty once more, except for a frightened girl staring at a hollow mirror, looking for those beautiful eyes again. And then she saw them. Saw those eyes, that hair, that smile--saw the girl with a name, and she *knew.* She knew who it was, who *she* was. She looked into the mirror and felt a smile cross her face, watched the girl in the mirror giggle happily along with her, her eyes warm and comforting. The girl smiled at her reflection in the mirror, where the demons used to be. She smiled because she remembered now, because she knew her name again--because she'd found the girl with the stylishly messy hair and the big square glasses. She whispered to herself, to her reflection, to the girl with the warm brown eyes; she whispered four words, words that could untie nooses and melt ice--words that could glue together pieces of a broken girl's soul. Smiling at the mirror, the girl whispered: *My name is Hope.