“Anna, you're daydreaming again.”
The sixteen-year-old blinked a few times before looking down at her desk in embarrassment. She hadn't meant to drift off like that when talking to her classmates. However, she found that the memories were becoming more frequent these days and were negatively impacting her life. Anna turned even redder than she already was when she heard the snickers of her fellow schoolgirls. She had heard that they had started to call her loony and a narcoleptic after school. This made her want to bargain but the teenager just swallowed her anxiety for now and looked at her desk. It didn't take long for her to regain her composure and look up.
As she was used to this charade. “Sorry,” She felt her voice become its usual flat tone and her lips contorted into a plastic smile. “I didn't sleep well.” She lied with ease.
Lying was something she had gotten good at. Ever since she woke up in the body of the formerly comatose ten-year-old Eliana Narine, she had to lie. It was a troublesome experience at first. She didn't know what to do when a strange woman came running into the hospital room she was in. And when the woman began to call her Anna she physically recoiled and nearly vomited. That was the name her father had called her before he passed away. It was sickening to hear this stranger call her that with so much love and desperation. Her new mother ignored this act of disgust and quickly had a doctor come in. Apparently, she had been screaming in her comatose state as the woman had heard her down the hall. This was after the woman had been told that she may never wake up.
Once the doctors came in she was asked a series of questions. They wanted to know if she remembered who she was and she struggled to answer. This left the doctors troubled and her new mother sobbed, demanding answers. And what the raven heard destroyed her. Morwenna wasn't in her original body. She was in the body of a child who had a seizure a week prior and nearly suffocated against her pillow. The doctors claimed after some further examination with her new father present that the oxygen deprivation had affected her memory. Anything from before she was ten was gone and now Anna was a new person. Morwenna found herself a little relieved that she didn't need to come up with her lie. But she felt immense guilt seeing the original Eliana's parents beg her to recall childhood memories.
The couple were pretty nice. She found out that they weren't very well off compared to her original parents but they still spoiled Eliana. They watched her like a hawk along with the ten-year-old's sisters for the next six months. The two adult women were distraught when they found out about their sister's memory loss. They became enraged when they found the family member who left her unattended that night and Eliana was shocked by their brutality. This overprotectiveness subsided when Anna began to adopt parts of the old Eliana. She used accounts from Eliana's friends, family members, and her diaries to put up her mask. She stumbled at first but by the present day, she had gotten most of Eliana's personality down.
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Still, she made new friends along the way who never knew the old Anna. “You need to sleep more.” One of these new friends in question, a bubbly teen named Lizbeth commented. “You're lucky that our teacher likes you so much or else you'd be getting in trouble for constantly drifting off.”
Anna hummed and tapped her nails against her desk. The brunette was correct in that her teachers let her get away with things. She had spun a story to them using her new parents as backup. This story detailed Anna who struggled with night terrors and an illness. They took pity on her as the story wasn't half bad because it was partially the truth. This body was sickly as the seizure the ten-year-old had was very real and very detrimental. She wasn't as fit as she wanted and practicing the art of the Goddess zapped her energy. But she was largely exaggerating it to the outside world and her teachers ate it up. As long as she kept her grades up and attended all the priestess training classes, they stayed compliant with her desires. The teenager could tell though that this favoritism bothered everyone else.
“Don't worry about me. I'm going to work on my sleep schedule with the head priestess today. She's been recommending sage healing sessions and I might take her up on it.” This was something new from what Anna could tell. She’d never heard of this in her old life and she was interested in trying it.
But mainly she wasn't going there for curiosity but to gain information. Anna purposely applied to a school for priestesses due to her prior life. She had died as a woman who never connected properly to her inner magic. Morwenna hadn't ever dwelled into the art of the Goddess and that really bit her in the ass. In this life she wasn't going to risk making the same mistake. So, she applied to the priestess school her new family could afford and once accepted she worked her ass off. The class work was a pain in the ass but she learned a lot. And she made sure to network with some of the richer students. It was an all girls school that catered to wealthy families who wanted their daughters to be devout and traditional. While they saw her as lesser due to her lack of wealth, they respected her work ethic.
Lizbeth scrunched up her nose. “I heard those sessions can get pretty intense, why not go to a private priestess to get it done? Someone who doesn't know you.” Her large brown ringlets bounced as she leaned in closer and whispered. It was very amusing.
“I feel like the head priestess and I have a trustworthy relationship.” The woman understood the argument her friend was making. Having someone responsible for her grades knowing her innermost insecurities was risky.
But that was the whole point of accepting the offer. “My parents have already talked to her about topics she can't mention so I'm cool with it.” This was something her new parents jumped at joy for her to do. She could see that they hoped the act would help ‘Eliana’ regain that decade of lost memories. They were still desperate.
Anna struggled with the fact she didn't feel bad for deceiving them. At first, she felt like an awful person and wanted to tell them. But as time went on she started to see the couple as her parents. It wasn't like she purposely had replaced their daughter six years ago. She would have preferred to have never died in the first place. They both had been dealt a shitty hand by what she assumed were the Gods themselves. So, after three years she stopped feeling guilty and instead started to care for Eliana's family in her way. She could never love them as deeply as Anna knew she should but she didn't make that obvious to them. The mask she wore was going to be permanent until she didn't need the family anymore.