I
I suppose I was always a loner.
I liked simple things: the lull of the tides; the feel of sand between my toes; looking for pretty shells and other treasures from the bottom of the ocean. I wasn't competitive; I wanted for everything to be fair. I wasn't sparkly or glossy; I was too shy. I could lay on the dunes for hours watching clouds form and re-form or the pelicans dive for fish and, sometimes, see whales send spray into the air. My mother called me a day-dreamer, except she spat it out, because I was often late or completely absent for my chores.
More often than not, my brother had to come find me. Shad was only three years older than me, but I worshipped him. He never scolded me or tried to humiliate me, like other older brothers in the village; I felt sorry for those girls. Before and after he began working on the fishing barges, he played with me on the dunes or hunted for sea lions with me, he even pretended to be a mermaid with me once. When dead things washed ashore and I stopped to examine them with sticks and my fingers, he didn't stop me; he taught me about the skeletal systems and showed me the way a fish could breathe underwater.
Shad protected my oddities and I was never teased like other children. Maybe because the awful bullies in the village knew they would have Shad to answer to. No one was ever mean to me; they just never spoke to me, so I never had a chance to prove my mettle. I didn't even know if I had mettle. He spoiled me a bit, to be honest because, you see, Shad was sort of like my father. When I was only a few months old, our father drowned in a storm on the barges with the fathers of three other families. One of those fathers, a widower, left an orphaned boy behind.
This boy, Finnick Odair, was my brother's best friend.