Part one: we were born this way, different, in a world that wasn't ready for us. It wasn't noticeable at first, but as we grew older, the stronger it became. With strength, comes isolation.
In Chicago, a small boy covered his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. He didn't want to hear it, their anger. The constant attack on his senses. He wished they'd be quiet, he didn't want them to fight.
Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he buried his small face into his blankets, praying to god for their screaming to cease.
Across the home, his parents read. They sat in silence, letting their two toddlers sleep without disturbance despite their irritation with one another.
In Maryland, a small girl was awake in her crib. She sucked on her blanket, watching the mobile twist above. She reached above for the stars, and then stood, grabbing one. Her fat, baby hand tugged lightly on the star, and the entire mobile fell from the ceiling, where it had been bolted in.
She screamed and cried, her parents entered and fretted over her, believing the thing to have fallen by way of faulty assemblage.
Jazmine watched her father struggle to carry the book case from the moving van. He pulled at it, leaned it, and tugged the resultant wood upwards in an attempt to lift it. After a few tries he was sweating and panting, having only moved the furniture a few inches.
The young girl, merely nine years old, furrowed her brows in confusion. She was unable to understand where the trouble lay. She could move it no problem, that she knew, and she was just a child.
To help, however, would confuse her parents. They were hard workers, and never paid much attention to her. She was never put in sports and in school only boys were picked for physical activities. She learned that being strong was wrong, it was bad.
She was defective.
Across the street, a young boy blasted music through his earbuds, drowning out the voices of the silent suburbs. Listening to those voices, he knew, only led to misery. Responding to them, led to worse.
His family considered him a recluse, a strange child who, because of his parents deaths - double suicide - was distrusting of others. In a way, they were correct, but they wouldn't ever have the whole story.
How Huey when old enough to speak revealed all of his parents opinions and secrets to one another, how without meaning to in his innocent recital of their thoughts led them both to give up on life together. To abandon them. It was his fault Riley and him were alone. And he'd never tell.
The walls that blocked the others from hearing every thought weren't present for him, and his ears must've been made wrong.
He was defective.