Chapter 1: Early Days, Old Ways

Ever since I was a young boy, I was surrounded by mystery. Secrets, long lost secrets, dwelled, lingered in the place I had known as my house. I always wondered the nature of those secrets, the reason of their existence, and often I was told to shut up, forget and move on. Not that I listened to that advice, though.

I can still remember when I was eleven years old, the age when you were still too young to be considered a teen, but too old to be seen as a kid. When receiving visits, something that my parents does more often than not, some friends of my mother looked at me and said how grown-up I looked every day. But my mother, it seemed, always looked at me as if I still were a baby, always telling me not to intrude in conversations, not to touch anything that may break. Needless to say that those phrases annoyed me, even if I didn't say anything.

"Oh, Monica, you should let him be" my mother's friends would say "He's a big guy now, although he still looks like a little boy" they would add, and smile at me, something that, in my mother, would be very rare.

I remember what my response to that would be: I would smile, with my lips tightly pursed, and walk away from the living room, to let my mother alone with the visits.

To me, it seemed as if I were nothing but a burden to her. If that were the case, why did she adopt me, in the first place? What
reason, what sentiment took her to go to Lakewood Foster Care, look at me and say "We'll take him", 7 years ago? What was in my blond hair and blue eyes that attached her to me so much? I didn't know the answer back then, but now I know that I resembled someone she had lost. But I always felt I was nothing more than a copy, of some other person she had loved and lost, she didn't care about the real me. And that was a huge let-down to me.

But that didn't stop me from trying to gain her attention.

One day, when my mother was doing the laundry, I tried to talk to her. I walked into the laundry room, and stood by her side.

"Mother?" I said, as my hand clutched my mother's blue dress.

As she looked at me, I could see in her eyes the anger mixed with annoyance, a feeling she often displayed when I got around her. Now, when I think about it, I can not remember the last time she ever looked at me with some love in her eyes, or when she held me lovingly into her arms, when I was only a 4-year-old child. But now, it seemed as if I were invisible.

"What now, Adrian? Don't you see I'm doing the laundry" she asked, with a cold glare into her brown eyes.

I often wondered what could I have done to annoy her so much. I didn't know yet, but it must have been something serious for her to ignore me, to the point of stop celebrating my birthdays. Some years ago, my birthday always came with gifts, a party in the pool, cake and a piñata, or whatever Gabriella, my mother's friend from New Mexico, called it. Now I didn't have any of that. Not since I became 11, and she cancelled my birthday party.

"It's just another day, Adrian. You're still 10" she said "But you'd be glad to stay so young, you're so special that no-one else can
stay like that forever" she added mercifully, when she saw the sad expression in my face.

I never knew why she wanted to keep me locked in my 10-year-old body, for what it seemed to be like ages. I'll bet that if Cybertronics invented a hammer to keep me short, she'd buy it and try it out, so I'd stay small and locked in my room. But I knew, or
at least suspected, there was something about that.

As I walked away from the woman I've known as my mother, I let out a low sigh. I felt so alone in that house. Why couldn't my mother have any other children, so I'd have someone else to play with, instead of Martin's old toys? His toy cars and helicopters, and even the brand-new X-Box I had gotten from my dad Henry, couldn't make up for what I really wanted: a friend, someone to talk to. Martin, at the age of 24, didn't have much time to dedicate to me, and it wasn't like I asked him to. And everybody at my school knew of Dad's busy schedule at Cybertronics, the company where he works, and has worked for the last 20 years.

In my school, I was considered some kind of outsider. I used to be very shy around people I didn't know, and making friends was not an easy thing to me. Not because I was rude or anything, but because I never found the right words to say when being around strange people. Sometimes, I got to hear kids saying "Look at the little freak!", but I just stared at them and moved on. I often received some invitations to kids' parties, PTA meetings and such, but my mother wouldn't even look at them, so I always threw them in the garbage, or hid them under the cushions in my seat on the school bus.

When I remember my mother, I always see her cleaning up the house, keeping it spotless. She seemed to be obsessed with the house's appearance, and always looked for seeing the wooden floors shining, to the point to see her reflection on it. Martin, on the other hand, would use those wooden mirrors for a very different purpose, when any of his girlfriends came home, wearing a skirt.

One of the strangest things my mom did, though, was cleaning an empty room, keeping it closed, like a sanctuary. The sewing room, that had been empty for as long as I could remember. Or so I thought. Whenever I caught her opening that room, she would close it immediately, denying me to see what was inside.

When I asked my father about my mother's strange doings, he would always give me a sad, serious look, and said "ask your mom", being those words a code for "top secret". Then he would keep his eyes glued to the computer screen, finishing whatever project Dr. Hobby asked him to do, or in any cyber-conference that he may have. Sure, he knew a lot of computers and Math, and he always helped me out with my Sciences and math homework, but that was all I could tell from our strange dad-son relationship.

And this, as you can see, has been most of my life in 11 years, or 10, as my mother wanted me to think.

My name is Adrian David Swinton, and I thought my life would never change, that I would always walk blindly into the dark.

But sooner or later, the curtain of darkness that covered my eyes would fade away to let me see the light.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: That's all for chapter 1. As you can see, I added a prologue, and new title to the chapters. I also added a small detail of Adrian's life before he was adopted (which will also be shown in the second chapter).

The style I'm trying is a bit more personal, and I could say it has a slightly dark edge to it. Remember, I'm new at this, so if you see
something wrong or that could be added, I'm eager to receive suggestions.

LITERARY EASTER EGGS:

"The Lakeside Foster Care House" -- The foster care where Adrian lived since he was a baby until adopted by the Swintons. I took the name of it, inspired in the "Lakewood House" (also a foster care house), featured in V.C. Andrews's novel "Runaways". The novel's not that good, but I liked the name of the foster house.

Martin's Polished Floor Trick -- Got it from an episode in the American TV Show "My Wife and Kids" (which I love to death!), where Junior (the son) tries to steal a glance of his uncle's girlfriend's underwear using a pocket mirror placed in the tip of his shoe. I mixed that with a phrase I heard in "The Nanny" (another great TV show!) that said "These floors are so clean I could see your
underwear in it!", when Brighton (the son) saw Fran and Maggie entering the house. Since Martin is an impish boy, I could imagine him doing that once in a while :D

FOR NEXT CHAPTER...

After a brief encounter with Martin's girlfriend, Adrian starts exploring the house. Getting out of his small haven, he'll discover that, in the place he's known as his house, there's more than that can be seen through the eyes...

Coming soon: "A Little Invasion"