Guess who this is...
She always felt that something was missing. Not like the feeling she gets when she left that rusted paper bag of substituted food for the canteen at home, or when it rains because it's a Thursday and the umbrella is sitting in the hallway. No, it's like she's covering up a vital element that was there…but now isn't. Like she was stripped wallpaper, an embroiled image of pink flowers that arches over the cracks and plastered over the acrylic whiteness.
And she doesn't like it very much. The sensation drips through her and it's just like she's disconnected. Those faces that bob along the pavement are nothing to do with her. They smile and they frown but they can't cover up this big part of her that should exist but just doesn't. and she wants it to be tangible so she can just reach out to it and prove that she's not as crazy as she sometimes feels.
It would be easier to say she's totally alone and never known the comfort of a well-placed hand on her shoulder. But that's a lie. She has parents, good ones who don't beat her or stuff her in a closet under the stairs like those Harry Potter books she's so stupidly keen on describe. And she had friends, warm, glittery, useless friends who comment on her clothing, plait her hair and encourage her to tell secrets she doesn't have.
Except that's another lie. Because she does have secrets, and so does everybody else. She knows that Janey, the one in purple jogging bottoms was the one to spread that rumour about her real natural colour and she knows that the guy in seventh period has the biggest crush on her, like ever. And she knows that her parents forbade her from ever bringing into the house a fictional story about wizards or goblins or anything magical, period. And she remembers the look on her mother's face whenever she sees those toy dragons in the pallid windows of the store, a molten mess of blotchy calcium and paper-thin tears. But that doesn't stop her from spilling chalk-dust into Janey's hair or rejecting 'seventh period' guy's advances. And that doesn't stop her from smuggling those stupid Harry Potter books behind the sofa on an early Saturday morning, just so she can lose herself in the fabrication of something that can't be real. And she's never quite forgiven her mother for throwing away that patchwork quilt of lumpy, stitched scales and beady eyes she won in a raffle fair.
Yes, her parents despise magic while she loves the burn in her mind whenever she dreams of the impossible. And it's strange because it's not like they're really religious or anything and it's not like she meant to make her mother cry when she asked why she couldn't carve a tattoo onto her indifferent skin like all the cool kids did. She wasn't bad; she never talked to strangers or dated anyone who looked like they had tumbled right out of a biker gang, but she did feel left out. And she did disobey the rules.
Just like today as she rummaged through the papers in the attic for a family tree project the school demanded. And even as she rustled through the multi-layered sheets, she still thought that maybe she was as crazy as the neighbours thought she was, to feel so disjointed from everything. And then she saw it. The single sheet of paper, dusty with the love she never knew her parents had, right next to her birth certificate. She froze at the single name, so different from her own and realised that some else had been celebrating the same birthday as her for the last fourteen years:
'Rose.'