▷ prologue: stock photos vs the real world ◁
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BEATRIX CASTRO GREW UP in what her grandparents call a stock photo family. Two radiant daughters, Beatrix and Beverly and wealthy, supportive parents who'd been high school sweethearts but hadn't fallen victim to increasing divorce rates.

Their father, Raymond, a professional college soccer coach, was a loose cannon; odd and unconventional in all the right ways. He'd come home, a big goofy smile on his face, piling his daughters into their car seats just to show them baby turtles he'd seen in a pond at central park or a mass of dirt they could climb on, pointing with beaming pride as if to say how cool is that. Their mother, Beth, an engineer who loved the scientific method more than most people she knew, would let the twins do practically anything if they called it an experiment.

To anyone who paid the slightest bit of attention, the Castros were everything a family should've been—happy and smiling and one thousand percent crazy about each other—they were almost annoyingly perfect, their grandfather would say, like the families you'd find in the stock photos that came in picture frames.

In stock photo families, parents love their kids unconditionally for whoever they are and whoever they want to be; they tell them to do whatever it is that makes them happy. And considering Beth Castro was an engineer who spoke on the subject at every chance she got, by Beatrix was five—around the time she'd snuck past her bedtime to secretly catch her parents' living room screening of The Matrix—Beatrix, while she'd completely misunderstood who the good guys in the Matrix were, decided robots made her happy whereas her sister Beverly had discovered the punk rock genre from one of their neighbors.

"Get over here," Beth would say to their grandparents at family reunions. "Look at the Lego MindStorm program Beatrix made! Oh, and Bev learned the chords to that one Nirvana song!"

The two, Beatrix and Beverly, had the ideal childhood; the type of youth that people wish they could've had and hope they'll be able to give. One where the only thing that mattered was being healthy, being happy and taking part in whatever special interest kept you that way.

Beatrix could watch her mother make blueprints on her laptop and small prototypes of the machines in her office for hours on end, completely ignoring the existence of anything else (such as, you know, other people or that humans need to consume food to function). In fact, they'd spent the vast majority of he primal years that way. 

Sometime in the middle of that, Beatrix's toddler-self had even become convinced she was a robot.

Don't get it wrong: looking back on it as a teenager, Beatrix felt like an absolute idiot but, at the time, as a creative little four-year-old, she was 100% certain the homo sapiens species just wasn't for her. Her stock photo family—specifically her parents—loved that too. Knowing she'd grow out of it eventually, they found this cute little quirk of her's entertaining. How beautifully imaginative this little specimen of theirs was! Not only did they allow her to believe this but Raymond had gone so far as to make her a robot costume (though it was really just a pair of yellow Trekkie Sunglasses paired with a yellow box that had two holes for her arms and buttons painted onto it).

For two years, five-year-old Beatrix wore the costume over her clothes every day, spoke only in a monotone "robot voice" (which her parents found absolutely adorable, by the way), she answered yes and no with beeps or boops and she asked people to refer to her as Trix 2.0.

Then, she was sent off to school.

Quickly, Beatrix discovered that it was not accepted outside of her stock photo family to dress up in a costume modeled after WALL-E, the automaton rover from the Disney movie, even if doing so made her happy. Apparently, happiness was not very valued outside of the Castro household.

        FUN FACT: If you show up at second grade with a box over your clothes on a day that wasn't Halloween—kids and parents tend to stare.

"What are you?" a little girl with ash brown hair in preppy pigtails had asked Beatrix once parents had left and Miss Sunshine's second-grade class began putting their stuff in cubbies.

Beatrix looked at the girl like she was stupid, which admittedly, she was. "I'm an automaton rover."

"A what?" The girl looked at young Beatrix like she was the weirdest thing she'd ever seen, which admittedly, she was, but even back then, Beatrix wasn't the best at recognizing facial expression so she didn't notice a thing.

"It's a robot that looks like WALL-E," Beatrix answered. "I have a toy robot at home that looks just like one. My mom helps me write the programs for it on her computer."

"You can write?" the girl asked, wide-eyed.

"Duh, we're in second grade, I'm not dumb. Basically everyone I know can," Beatrix said, failing to mention that the majority of the people she knew were adults. "Can't you?"

What followed was a look that anyone who wasn't a sheltered, naive, seven-year-old would have recognized as a red flag.

The brunette girl pursed her lips. "I don't think you're an automatic roller or whatever."

"Of course I am." Beatrix frowned. The costume could use some tweaks but in her own personal opinion, for a non-engineer, her father hadn't done half bad. "That's why I have buttons."

"You know what I think?" Beatrix let out a no and the girl took a step forward, motioning to her yellow boxed costume. "I think you look like a booger."

Beatrix might not have been able to recognize the less than friendly look but she did know that boogers were not something you wanted to look like. She took off her yellow rimmed Trekkie Sunglasses.

"And you know what else?" the girl continued, "No one's ever gonna wanna talk to someone who looks like a booger. No one's ever gonna wanna talk to you."

The girl, who Beatrix learned was named Sally Avril, skipped away like she had done no wrong.

It became apparent later on that Sally was right. Everyone had already known each other in Miss Sunshine's second-grade class whereas Beverly and Beatrix hadn't gone to kindergarten or first grade with them because the both of them hadn't been ready (i.e. turns out aggressively sheltering children may delay the rate at which they get potty-trained) and even though Bev seemed to fit in seamlessly and Beatrix had never had problems making friends in the extracurriculars her parents would sign her up for—no one, not even the other lonely kids, wanted to talk to her in the first grade.

Maybe it was because she'd shown up on the first day dressed up as WALL-E, or maybe the robot voice had something to do with it. It was up for debate but there was a strong probability it was due to the fact that Sally Avril havd quite a fierce authoritarian grip on the first and second graders at Balor Manhattan Elementary—she was like their Jesus—and she convinced all of them that Beatrix Castro was a booger who they should chase after during recess.

Beverly, of course, had tried preventing it. After all, she was Beverly, tough and punk and rebellious, and even as a child, filled with the insatiable urge to prove it. On multiple occasions, she'd threatened Sally Avril and on multiple occasions, she'd come through with those threats.

That had all just made it worse, though. One day, Beatrix wounded up the school nurse's office with the left side of her forehead bleeding after someone had pushed her into a wooden cabinet on Sally's orders. That had been the final incentive that finally made the principal take in a meeting with Beatrix's parents.

"The behavior of those kids is unacceptable, my daughter hasn't done anything to them!"

Even from the hallway of the main office, Beatrix could hear her mother yell, most likely in the principal's face with an accusing finger pointed at him while her husband tried to restrain her from tearing him apart. Sally Avril—also known under the alias of Beatrix's sworn mortal enemy—sat beside her on the same bench in the hall, maintaining a stare that would send Beatrix six feet under if looks could kill.

"According to Sally, Beatrix's sister provoked them." Beatrix recognized the deeper voice to be the principal.

"What can you expect her to do? Watch silently while her twin is terrorized every day?"

"It's not every day."

"Would it have to be for you to take this seriously?"

Beatrix looked over to Sally, hoping to catch any reaction at all, but nothing had changed, actually, the girl only looked angrier.

"I am sick of this. You're allowing this girl and her, what? Her army of five-year-olds to harass my daughter?" Beth ranted, rallying for any sort of response, and cursing maybe once or twice in Tagalog under her breath. "Beatrix has come home in tears since school started, she has a bruise on her forehead today. That is not normal! Girls are supposed to support each other. Why is the one thing students at this school do is tear one another down?"

"Mrs. Castro, you can't expect children to—"

"To what?" Her mother's voice got louder than it already was. "Treat people with kindness?"

"To not recluse from a child who doesn't wear socks and wore a box over her clothes for the entire first week of school."

"I was an automaton rover," Beatrix mumbled, correcting from her place in the hall.

She looked over to Sally Avril and she swore she saw her let out laugh; like the situation was funny.

"With all due respect, may I remind you Beatrix is five years old?" This time it was her father's voice she heard from the hall; deeper, calmer and laced with an Argentinian accent. "She wears what she's happy in."

"Well, this is where happiness got her."

And that was it. That comment pushed her parents over the edge and marked the end of 'ordinary' schooling in Beatrix's life. Sally's parents had been even less of a help than the principal, defending that children will notice unordinary, we can't blame them for it.

Beatrix's father didn't want her going to a school that didn't 'know the importance of a happy child' so in the end so they'd simply decided to convert her to home-school.

Beatrix didn't mind one bit.

Stock photos seemed a lot more appealing to her than real life, anyway. Her mom's robots, her father's dorky habits and love for soccer and her sister's musical happenings might only exist within the walls of her home but the Castro family's undebatable perfection shined unbelievably bright in comparison to Sally Avril and her army of disciples.

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▷ end of prologue: stock photos vs the real world ◁

━━━ JUNE'S NOTE ━━━

Legit no one is gonna catch this unless I say it so,,, all members of the Castro family are based on various autistic icons: Beatrix = Temple Grandin, Beth = Nikola Tesla, Raymond = Lionel Messi, & Bev = Courtney Love

also i find it funny that the first half of the prologue is cute fluff on the castro's seperate special interests and them being my emotional support family uwu and the second is a second-grader literally getting bullied out of the education system eye-

And that's on school boards don't protect autistic kids?