Ohhhkay...Yet another shot-in-the-dark story for me. Didn't expect it, did ya? This is my first attempt at a Common People story. TCP is an original concept by Kielle (as far as I know).
TCP: Running After Me
[Exerpt from the Bestseller 'The World to a Person' by acclaimed author Adelle Dorrers]
No one would believe me when I told them--but then again, I can't blame them.
I used to live in a small town in Washington state. I didn't even really live in the town. I lived on a small farm a mile or two outside of the two.
It was my mom and dad, seven siblings, three cousins, two aunts, one uncle, and a partrage in pear tree. We raised our own food for the most part. The men hunted. The women gardened. We went to town on Sundays for church. We were religious. We were outcast in the town. Our mother schooled us kids. It had been like this for four generations counting mine.
Guess what ruined it for me?
I bet you won't guess.
Not because I was a mutant.
Because I *wasn't*.
Doesn't that make you wonder? It still confuses people to this day how that sort of thing happens.
You hear stories all the time when you go to shelters and allyways and talk to the teens that inhabit them. Most of them have been kicked out of their home by an intollerant, misunderstanding parent who thinks mutants are evil. They aren't. I was raised by them; granted they kicked me out on my butt when I turned 17 and still hadn't become 'one of them'. Non-mutants do that when they find out their child is a mutant.
That's why we were the town outcasts. People saw Sabine's unatural red-blue hair or George's scaly skin and never spoke to us. Not that I can blame them--the poor people were uneducated and didn't understand. I think that it is probably still that way. I haven't gone back to find out. I still wait for that letter in the mail form someone in the town saying, "I never thought in a million years you'd be a published author, let alone an world-renouned one!"
To this day, I still consider myself a mutant, simply because I was raised to be one, by them, and among them. I was raised to have a thick skin so that the hateful words and actions would bounce off and I could keep going. I lived to be hated--even though now it seems I'm loved.
Iorny is a strange thing. I have a good and rich life, friends and a carrer, but I want to be an mutant. Not so much so that my family with accept me, but because I still believe that is what my life is supposed to be. To live hate, feared and opressed. That's how I'm supposed to be.
Let me tell you a story.
It was my seventeenth birthday. It was May. The weather was lovely and my cousin, Carolyn, called me outside. I was tired from being up late and talking to one of my sisters--which one I can't recall. I drug myself out of bed and put my shoes. My mother, father, aunts, uncle, and three cousins (all boys and years my senior) were standing in a line. There was a duffel bag in front of them and my mother couldn't look at me.
"Adelle," my father said in his usual commmading voice, "Its high time you get going."
"Going, daddy?" I asked. I rubbed my eyes and walked forward a bit more to them. My father nodded.
My aunt Lisbeth spoke next. "You aren't one of us. You need to leave."
"One of you? What are you talking about?" I was fully awake now, and I knew exactly what they meant. I wanted to hear them say it though, and I was still clinging to the hope that they would be meaning something else.
"You aren't special like us, Adelle," said George, my cousin. "That means you don't belong here. We've got everything packed up for you. Enough money to last you for a week. Things of that sort." George was always in charge of the situation; I have go give him that. He was one of my favoite cousins, scales and all.
I appealed to them, knowing that it was useless. "But, you can't do this!"
"Make this no harder than it is, Adelle," Lisbeth said. "Get along now."
They had to be kidding. I took the duffelbag from my other aunt, who was at the end of the line of the line my family had formed. I glanced back to the house. My siblings were in the windows looking out. I half-waved at them. Sabine waved at me. She was the youngest of my sisters. She was the one with the red-blue hair.
I walked down the dirt road, expecting them to come running for me and apologizing. I walked through the town we lived outside of expecting the same thing. I slept in a ditch that night expecting them still. (Sometimes now when I'm walking down the street in Seattle I expect them to come running for me. I have yet to see that.)
I made it to a mid-sized town called Port Angeles on the coast a few days later, hungary and dirty and cold. I made it Seattle on a bus. I ended up in St. Michael's Shelter and was sort of 'rented out' to a few families until I turned eighteen.
I started making money as a waitress and I got an apartment. On nights and weekends I wrote my first book, Inside Ellensburg. It was published by the first publisher I sent it to. It was accliamed and was almost a bestseller. It was a stupid fiction novel about a girl named Gwyn and her childhood in a small town. I don't know what all the fuss is about over it.
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Finis
