Prologue-
I was found as a baby by two women that worked at an orphanage. I was wrapped in a bundle and placed on the bench across the street one morning and when the women went to fetch the mail and heard me crying on the bench. When they found me they saw a little frail baby with hair as black as could be and eyes that brown on the outside of the iris and a dark green color almost blending and leaking into the brown from the pupil out in streaks.
They looked at me and saw a small golden locket around my neck with, when opened showed a picture of me with the words 'Terra Nova' below it. When the women took me inside the high mistress of the orphanage told the two that I was to stay with them unless my parents were ever found. As they made room for me and went to get something for me to eat they had to decide what to call me. Remembering that the locket had the phrase 'Terra Nova' under my picture one of the women wanted to have that be my name, but the other said that the name was too unnatural to call a child by. The two compromised by naming me Terrisa Novellia and my birthday was the day the women found me. One of the women, Brenda, was the only one who called me 'Terra'.
In the capable hands of the two kind women I grew fast and soon I was almost of age one. But just a few days shy my birthday I was struck with a terrible illness. No other children were sick and I had a raging fever. When after all of the remedies that my caregivers tried to stop the illness and nothing worked a doctor was called in. With medicine after medicine not working and my illness getting worse the doctor simply told the women that there was nothing that he could do and that he suspected that I wouldn't be able to survive it. All of the workers of the orphanage were saddened and just as they lost hope, my fever broke and color started to come back into my skin.
With the illness almost gone, the women decided to celebrate with my first real full tub bath for since I was so small I was usually bathed in a sink. But when they started to wash my hair, it was if all of the black was just dye and was washing off. The women tried to stop the strange leaking of color from coming off my hair with no success. When my hair was rinsed all of the pure black color was gone leaving a pure white like snow. Puzzled by the sudden change of my hair they called the doctor again who concluded that nothing at all was wrong with me. So the women dismissed the change and continued to raise me along with the other orphans.
As I grew older and was of the age of six I started to see that many of the other children were always looking at me. I just dismissed their looks and would continue to play. I did however always feel somewhat different, like I didn't fit in with the children and that I didn't belong there. I kept having feelings and I always knew when one of the other children were watching me. Just after my ninth birthday some of the kids came up to me asking why my hair was white. They were older than me and I simply told them that I took a bath and the black came out of my hair. Even if I told them the truth, they never believed me and for the years after that I was always ridiculed. The workers tried to stop the children's teasing but after everything I told them that it was alright and to not waste their time.
Years passed and soon it was the month of my sixteenth birthday and with the changing years the orphanage changed as well. The entire place was redone and they now let us have one room with a TV and a phone to use. Then they didn't call it an orphanage but a minor/childcare facility. It was all the same to us. I was laying there with many thoughts going through my head. Every year I around my 'found' birthday I would think about who my real parents could be, what they were like, whether they wanted to keep me. I just wanted to know why I had to live in the orphanage. I felt like for some strange reason that I didn't belong here.