April Christensen was crying hidden under the living room table,
watching between the chairs, how her mother was brutally beaten by her father.
At just 8 years old, April had seen too many episodes of violence.
She lived with her parents in a small house in the center of the city.
Her mother worked at a pet store and her father was currently unemployed.
April knew that the man didn’t love them, neither her nor their mother.
He had been unfaithful to his wife, and the girl had suspicions that he continued to do so.
In the afternoons he left home and returned late at night reeking of alcohol. And either he came in
and fell asleep, or he resorted to yelling and beating his wife for whatever reason.
On one occasion, the little girl tried to defend her mother, but all she got was for her father to
drag her by the hair to her room and lock her up, while she kept hearing screams and cries.
On the other hand, at school, April had no friends. She had to endure
daily teasing for a condition on her lip. She had been born with harelip,
and for this reason the children turned away and made fun of her.
April wanted to socialize, make friends, have a happy childhood like any girl her age.
But the reality was different. The children insulted her saying that she was a real monster.
They had repeated it so many times that the little girl came to believe
it. She looked at herself in the mirror and cried when she saw the malformation of her lips,
feeling horrible compared to the other girls in her class.
The only person who showed her great love was her mother, who, despite all her sadness,
made an effort to give her little girl all the best. But even though April loved her mom dearly,
she couldn't help but feel unhappy that she didn't have a friend to play with.
One afternoon, while her mother was still at work, her father came home much earlier than usual.
The man walked past his daughter's room and heard his daughter talking to someone.
Thinking it was his wife, he opened the door, and what he saw blew his mind.
His daughter was playing with a group of very particular girls, they didn't seem human. The
horrified man began yelling at his daughter as she backed away from him. At that moment, the mother
arrived, who, hearing her husband's enraged cries, ran to help April. When she got to the room,
she found her little girl crying and her husband raising a baseball bat and threatening to hit her.
The man shouted asking: "Who are those monsters?", to which the girl answered crying,
while she covered her head with her arms: "They are my friends, dad, my friends!".
The woman didn’t know what monsters her husband was talking about, since she didn’t see anyone
but the two of them. She took the bat from her husband and tried to calm him down,
but he grabbed it from her and hit her on the head.
The mother collapsed to the ground, but she still hadn’t lost consciousness.
However, she had hardly raised her head a little, when the man hit her again,
but this time on the forehead, producing a terrible fracture in her skull
that caused her death on the spot. April couldn't believe her eyes.
Her mother was dead. She ran to the door of the house, screaming, trying to ask for help,
but her father grabbed her by the neck trying to strangle her. Fortunately, thanks to an emergency
call from a neighbor, two police officers entered the house. They took the man in handcuffs and
urgently called an ambulance. Although there was nothing to do to help the little girl's mother.
With her mother dead and her father in jail, April was placed under the guardianship of her maternal
grandmother. The lady, who since then lived very saddened by the tragic death of her daughter,
offered to take care of her granddaughter with great love. She bought her toys, she took her to
the park, she tried to give her everything a girl could want, yet April never smiled.
One night, while the grandmother was embroidering a tablecloth, she heard her granddaughter laughing
out loud in her room. Surprised, she went up to see what it was about, but when she entered the
room she saw that there was nothing and no one. There was just April laughing madly in her bed.
The grandmother asked her what amused her so much, to which the little girl
replied that she was playing with her friends, pointing to a fixed point. The grandmother,
who was very moved to see her smile for the first time, decided to play along, and told
her that her friends were very pretty, and that she would let her continue playing with them.
The grandmother had been tender to see her granddaughter play and laugh happily.
However, this situation repeated more and more frequently and she began to worry. The lady,
not knowing what to do about it, decided to take the little girl to a psychologist.
When they got to the office, Grandma sat down on one of the couches in the waiting room,
and April walked in with the doctor inside.
The psychologist, with a friendly smile, began to ask her questions,
such as how she was doing and if she had any friends at school. Between stammerings, April
told him no. All the girls at her school were very pretty and would never hang out with her.
The doctor, surprised, asked her if she felt ugly. To which she nodded and pointed to her lips.
So the psychologist decided to ask her if she had any friends outside of school,
and if she could tell him about them. The little girl said yes, and that they loved
her very much. Her friends were just like her, monsters, and they didn't think she was horrible.
The doctor frowned when the little girl referred to her friends as monsters.
Throughout his career he had handled many cases with imaginary friends,
but the fact that those friends were monsters was quite unusual.
So, he asked the girl to describe them physically.
"Well, they are the daughters of real monsters" - said April. "One of them is a zombie,
another is a mummy, another vampire, the other is the daughter of a werewolf...".
The psychologist stopped her and asked her if anyone else knew her friends.
April looked down sadly and said that her father had met them, and had gone crazy.
After a few more questions, the doctor escorted the girl to the waiting room
and asked her grandmother to speak alone.
He explained to the lady that April's problem was a complex with her lips.
The girl had a very high imaginative capacity, and although having imaginary friends was not always
bad, in this case it was not allowing her to socialize with other children.
He told her that the look of her lip made her feel insecure towards her peers,
to the point of considering herself a monster. So he recommended a good surgeon, in case she
was considering performing surgery on the little girl and helping her feel more self-confident.
The grandmother left the consultation with a head full of doubts,
and hurt that her granddaughter had such a big problem of acceptance with herself. As
the girl's birthday was approaching, she took part of her savings and proposed to her a lip operation
so that she would stop feeling that way. The girl gladly accepted, she was very happy and
loved the gift proposal. But suddenly, her smile faded into a sad expression that showed anguish.
The grandmother soon realized this and asked what was wrong.
To which the little girl replied, trying to avoid crying:
"It's because if I stop being a monster, my friends won't want to play with me anymore."
Grandma gently stroked her hair and told her that she was no monster, and if she lost those friends,
there were always new friends to make. Soon the big day arrived, April's birthday.
Finally the girl had decided to perform the surgery, so that afternoon they went
to the clinic. April was very scared. She clenched her little hands nervously.
The operation had gone perfectly and her lips, although still bruised, were beautifully shaped.
That night, her grandmother thought that from that moment on, things would go much better in her
granddaughter's life. At last she would be able to increase her self-esteem and not feel monstrous.
April was in bed, but she couldn't fall asleep. She was distraught. She finally looked the way
she had always wanted to look, but she thought that meant giving up her friends, who had helped
her so much. Then, she didn't think about it anymore and determinedly got up from the bed and
searched in the kitchen until she found scissors. A deafening scream echoed throughout the house.
Grandma woke up and went out into the hall to see what was happening. Screams were heard, followed
by moans, then cries and insane laughter. She turned on the lights and saw blood on the carpet.
As she went on, the drops got bigger and bigger, until they reached April's room.
But the room was empty. A great fear ran through the body of the lady, when she heard
the mocking laughter of her granddaughter in the bathroom. The door was ajar and the light was on.
She carefully looked out and saw the girl from behind looking at herself in the mirror.
Around her feet were pools of blood. Suddenly, the little girl turned to the old woman.
Her entire mouth was disfigured. She had cut her lips repeatedly, creating several splits in them.
She had also cut both sides of her mouth, one much more than the other. Blood from her
wounds dripped from her face onto her pajamas. Instead of screaming, Grandma froze and gasped.
She recoiled in shock as April offered her the bloody scissors as if she wanted to return them.
After that terrible night, things were never the same again.
Since she deformed her mouth, her grandmother looked at her like she was crazy.
Years passed, and the old woman died when the young girl had reached the age of majority.
Although the deformation of her lip was much worse than before, people never made fun of her
again. Now everyone feared her. They knew that if they bothered her, she would beat them to death.
She had become extremely aggressive. Even though she was an adult,
she still talked to herself and always carried a mysterious notebook with her.
In it, she wrote about her monstrous friends, described them in detail,
their personalities, the activities they did together… And the more years passed, she had
more friends. Wherever she lived, the neighbors always complained that she invited a lot of people
and that she was very noisy, but the curious thing is that she was always alone.
One night on her way home she ran into a couple of drunken men.
Seeing her pass, one of them began to whistle at her, but when she turned around and they saw her
disfigured face,they immediately fell silent. April continued on her way until one of them
threw an empty beer can at her, hitting her in the head, as he yelled, "Get out of here, monster!".
The man threw a second can that didn’t hit her and the young woman stood still for a
few seconds. The assailant had the third can in his hand when April slowly turned
around. Her furious gaze was creepy and her psychopathic smile resembled that of a demon.
The two drunk boys ran in the opposite direction, but she was faster and violently lunged at one of
them, the one with the can in his hand. She began to beat and scratch his face furiously.
The friend tried to move April away by putting his hand on her face to move her away,
but she bit him with such force that she ripped off a couple of his fingers,
causing him to move away scared. Totally alone, the man who had the can
was the victim of a brutal beating. However the boy's screams were heard, and a couple of police
officers rushed to his rescue. They handcuffed April, and called an ambulance for the man.
April spent a few days in jail, but seeing her aggressive attitudes, and how dangerous she was,
they requested her internment in a psychiatric center.
Every day, the young woman required the workers to go to her apartment to pick up the notebook
where she wrote about her friends. But no one complied with her request.
April remained hospitalized for 5 long months, which for her were an ordeal;
until one morning, she was found dead, but without any injuries.
The mystery of her death caused a stir in the center, they asked the inmates
and workers several questions, but no one could explain how she had died.
The young woman's notebook was found by the new tenants of the apartment where she was rented.
Exactly for a girl. The little girl was about to doodle on it when her father saw her and snatched
it out of her hands. The man began to leaf through the diary and saw that it had a lot of text
written on it. So he read it cover to cover. He was a worker for the Mattel company,
and that gloomy notebook had given him a great idea. He thought that those friends that the
author described would star in a story. A funny story in which they act like ordinary teenagers.
When he presented the idea, his manager was delighted with the proposal. Mattel artists took
it upon themselves to give the monsters a look that would be pleasing and appealing to audiences.
And years later, the new and successful line was sold all over the world.
Monster High, with a sad and dark origin that consumers ignore, became a hit with children.
However, when you see these dolls remember that they are April's friends. And if they
ever look at you or even smile at you, it's because they also want to be your friends.