Fingertips

Chapter Five

By: Lil' Inu-Yahsa

Hello. My name is Inu Yasha. I am not giving my last name, because you are not supposed to give that away or else bad people could find you and hurt you. (They taught us this in school.)

I am fifteen years, seven months, and eighteen days old. I love doing math, and I like the color red. Pink is okay too, but that is because it is a shade of pink. I know because in Creativity, we had to do color wheels. We added little bits of white and black paints to all the colors of the rainbow. I did not like using the yellow paint because I don' like the color yellow, but the teacher said I had to. And when I added the white paint to the red, it turned pink.

Kagome comes to visit me at my school on Wednesdays. She stays for approximately two hours. I say approximately because she sometimes stays later because she is my friend and likes to chatter with me. She comes at around two o'clock and stays till four. She is nice, and she smells like strawberries, which I like because they are red and taste good. I like them a lot when they are dipped in sugar. She also smiles a lot.

When I meet with Aliah (I meet her two times a week, on Thursdays and Tuesdays. I like it this way because those days both start with 'T'.) she tells me what different faces mean if I ask. When someone smiles, it means that they are happy, so I think Kagome is happy a lot because she smiles at me a lot.

I saw her crying once though. It was two months and three days ago. She came in and sat next to me. She never does this because I ask her not to. I do not like being near people. She was sniffing, and her eyes were wet, and her face was red. I liked that it was red. I know that crying means someone is sad so I asked her, "Are you okay?"

She looked at me and she smiled because she likes when I ask her things. And she said, "Heh, I … I'm fine." Then she sniffed twice. "It's just I .. I feel sad now because … Oh Inu yasha, you … you wouldn't understand … I was going out with a boy and ... He …" Then she exhaled heavily through her nose. "… I'll be fine … I just don't feel well now …" She looked at the ground and a tear slid down her face. "Inu Yasha?" she asked.

I looked at her and then looked back at the ground because I dislike looking people in the eyes.

"Just this once .. Can I … can you hold my hand? Please? I promise I won't hold it hard … You won't even feel it … please … just this once? Just for a second." She looked at me and her eyebrows pushed together and upwards. And she was frowning, and I also knew this meant she was sad.

And I said, "I don't like people holding my hands." She sobbed twice and went to the bathroom.

She can be confusing sometimes, and I don't like this because when I am confused, I feel like I have to figure it out and I get headaches over it because I can not understand some things. I asked Aliah why Kagome was so complicated and she laughed and told me that Kagome was a girl and that they are different and can be weird sometimes. Then she laughed again and added, "Most of the times, really."

I said, "But Aliah, you're a girl."

And she nodded and said, "I sure am."

Well, she told me she was writing a story and I was in it, so she asked me to write a chapter in it, because she wanted the people who read it to be able to know how I think. But she does a really good job at writing so I think she does not need me to do this because I can not write as well. She says she wants to write books when she gets older. And she told me that she would write one especially for me and that made me feel happy.

My school is free for me. This is because the government pays for it for me because since my parents died, no one could take care of me. Kagome asked me to tell about what happened the night the fire burned my house down, so I will do that now.

I do not really know how to do this though, because I was not in the house when this happened. I was outside. I like being outside because the world is a big place and I like they way it smells. That night, it smelled like fresh grass because it had rained and that made it smell wet too. I was looking at the sky because I like to use my 'Astrologer's Guide' to find constellations in the sky. I found three of them because a lot of them were hard to see because of light pollution.

My mom had gotten home at three forty eight and she came into my room and knocked. I opened the door and said, "Hello."

She said, "Hi Inu Yasha." The she spread her fingers out in a fan shape and held her hand to me. Then I did the same and our fingertips touched. I hate when people touch me. And we do this sometimes because my mother wants to hug me sometimes and I do not like that. So we touch fingers instead, and that means that she loves me and cares about me.

Then she said, "I am going for a nap okay Kiddo?"

And I closed the door so the sounds from my computer game did not disturb her.

I ended up falling asleep where I was and when I woke up I could smell smoke. I walked back home and felt jittery. My heart was beating fast and my head felt like it was running in circles in my head. When I got to my house, my house wasn't there. Instead, there were police men, fire fighters, fire trucks, and where my house used to be, there was a giant fireplace. Or at least it looked like one. Except the fire wasn't in a fireplace, and there was not wood in it, there was my house. I watched for a while, but I do not know how long because I did not check my watch because I could not move. I did not breath until I realized I had stopped and my eyes and mouth both looked like this:

O

A policeman came behind me and asked me to leave and I said, "No."

He said, "What are you doing here?"

And I said, "This is my home."

And he said, "Oh shit …"

Then he walked away.

So I went up to another policeman and asked him, "Where's my mum and my dad?"

And he said, "How the hell should I know?"

So I asked him, "Are they inside the house or out of it?"

And his eyes got wide like mine had been and he said, "Fuck! You live here?"

And I said, "Yes."

And he said, "Oh God … Look, kid, we're working on it okay? Don't worry, we can save them." He ushered me away from the house and I sat across the street and watched my house break. (This sounds like a metaphor but that's really what happened. It collapsed and fell apart.) Then my memory kind of went blank and I can not really remember much. I remember a window on flames falling from the house and the grass below it caught fire.

The policeman lied. They did not save my mother. They did not save my father.

Then I went and I lived in a home for a while. It had a lot of other kids and I hated it because it smelled like dirty people and the air was hot and thick. Then I went to live with these people in America called 'Thompson'. They are fine I suppose. I do not talk to them a lot because Mr Thompson and Mrs. Thompson fight a lot and they yell really loudly at each other sometimes. And I hate when people make loud noises because it gives me headaches, which is a reason I like my school, because no one there screams all the time.

I also do not like the Thompson's because they have a baby and the baby cries a lot because they sometimes yell so loudly that they don't feed it for a while and it gets hungry. So I feed it. I like the baby, but it yells too loudly, so I don't like it that much. And once Mr Thompson grabbed my arm really hardly so I pushed him away and he hurt his arm.

The lady who is my social worker says she is trying to find a new place for me to live but that means that I might have to move away from where I live and then I will not be able to see Aliah and Kagome, and I won't be able to go to my school and I won't be able to take Advanced Mathematics, which is a course that I started taking this year. I like it because there is only three other people in that class and you have to be very smart to get in.

When I moved here, I went through a lot of tests and the doctors found out I had autism which is why I hate being touched, and why I can't understand why people are angry or sad at me. But I also have Savants syndrome and that is why I am really good at math.

There are two kinds of Savants syndrome. One is where if someone has mental retardation, they have some skill that they can do like normal people can. These people are nicknamed 'Idiot Savants.' Then there are the 'genius Savants' which are people like me. This is when someone has a skill that is superior to some who does not have autism or another form of a mental handicap. And this makes me happy, because this makes me better at math than all the people who called me stupid when I was a little boy.

I looked online and there are lots of ways someone can be a Savant. Some people are good at art or music or maths or memory or have extraordinary senses. I have a really good memory. This is done simply, because remembering things is easy. I just have to record them properly in my head. And then my mind works like a video tape and I can just re wind to what I want to remember. It's easy.

Kagome said she wanted to write books when she got older and she asked me what I wanted to do. But I do not know at the time. Now I know I either want to be a scientist or an astronaut. Being an astronaut sounds like the perfect job. Because you would have to be able to be far away from home for a very long time, and I don't have a home because it burned in a fire. You would have to be able to concentrate really hard and work, and I can concentrate hard if I want to.

I could also be a mathematician. I would do anything that involved math. This is because math is simple and easy. There is always one correct answer and all you have to do is know how to get the answer and its no problem. Math is not like people are.

People are confusing and strange, and one face can mean twenty different things depending on a million little unimportant factors you are supposed to know. If someone frowns they could be hungry, sad, in pain, depressed, frustrated, confused, upset, disappointed or constipated. But it's impossible to know because you have to figure out if they've eaten at all, if they had a good or bad day, if they know anyone that has died, if they have eaten anything that has upset their tummies, or if they are lost. But math is not like that. Two plus two will always equal four, and nine divided by three will always be three. And that is why I like it.

Author's Notes

Well, there is your insight to Inu Yasha's mind. This story is only got about two chapters left in it. Of course, that would be including a short epilogue so the actual story is only going to be about two chapters more.