Stolen Identity

Katie Zimmer was adopted, this much she knew. What she didn't know was the one thing her adopted parents would never tell her. Whenever she asked them about her birth parents they would brush it off with something like, "You were born over in Russia." Whenever she asked them where in Russia , they would respond with, "Oh, it was some small village somewhere in the mountains. I don't remember the name of it."She'd been adopted when she was only a 2 months old. Like everything else concerning her roots, her parents gave nothing away about why she had been placed for adoption in the first place.

Katie was blond-haired, slim, and turning 18 in two days. Independence, at last! It wasn't that she didn't love her mom and dad, that wasn't it at all. What it was, was that she was free to make her own choices. Her parents had made very strange rules for her, like she was never EVER supposed to go into the woods. They always backed this up with, "there are rapists and pedifiles in the woods" and a bunch of other crap like that. She had only broken that rule once, when she was seven years-old.

Her dad had picked her up from school that day and had to stop by his work on the way home. He ran into a friend in the parking lot and they got talking. Katie was too young to understand adults' conversations yet, so she just began pacing around the outside of the car. That's when she looked over and saw the woods. A small woods, but woods all the same, off the side of the lot. Her dad was too caught up in his conversation to notice her slipping off into the trees.

She didn't mean to go in far, but something overtook her, and she found herself wandering about as if she owned the woods itself. She remembered liking the smell of the trees, the sounds of the little animals scurrying across the leaves.

She hadn't even realized she had been in there for a long while until it was too dark to see. She'd been scared then, and she did the first thing that came into her mind, and hid in a thicket. No one had ever told her this, of course not, since she was not allowed in the forest, but for some reason, it seamed like the right thing to do.

The night in the woods was terrifying. There were strange noises everywhere, screeching, growling, and squeaking, all around her.

And then there was the pain.

It was like a small twinge in her stomach when she first entered the woods, but as the evening wore on, it grew. By what must have been the middle of the night, she was shaking, her skin clammy, and all her bones on fire. She thought she was going to die.

Somehow, in the midst of it all she had fallen asleep, or maybe she'd passed out, but in the middle of the night, she heard voices calling her name. She could recognize her dad's among the ones calling.

She was crying when she ran into his arms and he picked her up. She swore to herself that she would never disobey her parents rules again.

That was all a very long time ago, but never since that day had she gone into the woods.

But now that she was turning 18 she would be free to do as she pleased. She would not spend her freedom recklessly, however. She was on a mission. The first thing she would do would not be a road trip with her friends to California, or going clubbing. No, she was going to unearth her past. Now that she was going to be of legal age, there was no one who could keep her information form her, not even her mom and dad. She was going to find out who she was, who her birth parents were, where she came from, and maybe, just maybe, she would find uot what had happened to her that night in the woods when her bones had been on fire.