"You're special."
Every child hears that statement multiple times through their growth. It is a reassurance of worth, and a sign that you stand out. Your differences make you something greater. But it's a lie. Special is a candy-coated word for "freak". Parents lie to their children to make them feel better… mine lied to protect me.
Up until the summer of my sophomore year, I wasn't anything important. I was "special". I was the jinx. Rumors and disaster flanked me everywhere I went, in every town, in every school.
Academia Boarding Institute on the Upper East Side of Manhattan was no exception from my proceeding reputation. I suppose the only good part about having a bad reputation is that the right people stay away from you: then your world gets smaller and more manageable. When I'd started in September, immediately I could tell who I could talk to, and who I could not. The ladder category was significantly larger than the first. I managed to stay quiet: for once, I didn't have one of my infamous accidents. Those accidents usually consisted of "stolen property" that manages to appear in my possession without my doing, breaking scholarly artifacts and other events of the sort. The accidents always resulted in expulsion.
I really, really tried that year. I stayed small and unnoticed: I was just another girl in the uniform skirt and blouse, weaving her way through the halls. My plainness had never bothered me, because it helped me fit in. My face was unadorned, a normal nose and pale lips, a square jaw framed by curling brown hair that fell to my shoulders and my entire face and body peppered with freckles like someone had upturned a salt shaker full of them on me. My only feature that ever caught people's attention in the slightest was my eyes. They drifted in an unearthly void between green and blue, drawing people's eyes to me and holding them there. My solution was to keep my eyes to the floor and not be a bother. The dominant part of me wanted to hold my head higher. The funny thing was, it wouldn't look out of the ordinary if I did. Maybe it was because of my reputation, but people did respect me. They didn't like me, they weren't friendly to me, but I wasn't bullied by my peers. I was just distanced. But that helped me, I think. At Academia, I was ignored. That didn't make me a target to someone's cruel jokes. I managed to stay there, to avoid conflict and stay unnoticed. After a few months, I'd even made friends with Bayliss McCoy, a tall, gawky, awkward sophomore with glasses thicker that a two-by-four. He was just as eager to get out of high school as I was, and we quickly fell in together. He had a perpetual crush on Hadley Groffmore, the tall, perky, dark-haired girl who made the school uniform sexy. It was sad, really, because Bayliss really, really couldn't shake his crush. But if he was infatuated with Hadley, it meant there wasn't any room for a romantic relationship between me and him, and that was fine by me. So my sophomore year, I ducked around corners and hid in the library at lunchtime. I saved Bayliss from trouble and the occasional bully with a hard look from my ethereal eyes. I thought that maybe just maybe if I could get through a year at the same school, my father, Jim Worthings, would stop looking at me like I couldn't be helped.
My dad was the owner of a couple ranches in upstate New York. With help from some of his friends out there, he was able to manage them. I was shipped off to the city, where I couldn't trip over anything too important. Along with his ranches, my father ran a small but stable trinket shop, tucked away in the smaller-than-a-mustard-sea town of Victoree. Of course, it wasn't called a "trinket shop" to all. It was more of a little gift shop, but a classy one. He sold mostly stained-glass boxes and glass-blown ornaments. Little stuff that was really popular with young couples looking for wedding favors for their small-town wedding. He said that he met my mother in that shop. She walked in one day, all business, looking extremely out of place in the middle of New York, simply to look for something "elegant" to get for her friend for her wedding (Who goes all the way to Victoree to get a wedding gift?! Honestly.) He'd shown her a variety of things, but she'd left empty handed. The next day, she came back, again looking for a little gift. He'd shown her all different types of things, then she'd left angry. The third day, she came back again, apologizing for her temper, and asking to "make it up to him."
Well, you can only guess what happened from there…
My parents were married, in a sense. After three weeks, they just did a little Vegas-style wedding on one of my dad's ranches. And after three days, my mother disappeared. Completely, utterly, definitely gone. She didn't take a car or leave a note. My father called the police, thinking she was kidnapped. Nine months later (oh nine months, how classic) she came back with… me. She hadn't been kidnapped (mom-napped?) she'd left. She'd hidden away. Away from my father. She put me in my father's arms, kissed him softly on the forehead and vanished forever. I can only assume she caught a train, or took a car somewhere, but my dad didn't give any more elaboration further than she vanished. I was left with my father…
I'm not bitter. I'm sort of glad my mother didn't stick around- not that I didn't want a mother, it's just that from what I've heard of her, she must have been bi-polar or something of the sort. I don't think I would have done well growing up around that. But sometimes I did wonder: where is she now? She wasn't dead- my father said that much. But I just wanted to meet her- just once. Just to see…
Little did I know at the time that I was going to find out exactly who my mother was- and I would wish I never found out.
My name is Tori Worthings and this is the only story that I have worth telling.