It took me seven years to find myself.

There were flashes at first, half remembered figments of another life, in another country. Memories from another girl. An older girl: an adult. They would hit me when I was learning to read, when I saw something on the telly or as I was taught the names of animals and objects. The meaning of a word, the ending of a story my foster parents were telling me... it would simply form up in my mind. As if I had known it all along and was merely remembering it again, not learning it for the first time.

I graduated quickly from picture books and learning to count to additions and subtractions, from baby talk and scribbles to speaking in full sentences and using crayons to write down my own name –Sylvia Sarramond— in large, round letters.

And even in those early years, when the only thing I had were those blurry flashes of insight, I understood I was different. I just didn't know how different. How large the gulf that separated me from the other boy my age and living under the same roof was. I didn't know how far ahead I was. Not until my foster parents caught me reading 'Bridge to Terabithia' at the tender age of four years old.

I knew then, when I heard the adults talking about me, using words like 'gifted' and 'precocious'. Words that held the keys to new memories, new impossible moments that I couldn't have lived, shouldn't remember. I didn't know if this was really what being 'precocious' meant, but somehow I suspected it wasn't. That there was something more to my oddness, some hidden mystery than even my foster parents weren't privy to.

Things started to change, then. I was moved to a different foster family, for reasons that none of the adults in my life felt necessary to tell me. Perhaps the couple that had taken me at first realized I was too strange, too different from what they'd envisioned a foster child to be. But whatever the reason was, it was a change for the better: my new school gave me some more advanced lessons, and my new foster parents allowed me access to a set of pre-approved young adult books —without pictures!— and overall did their best to encourage my independence and discover my potential.

I enjoyed that. Except for the piano lessons, which sucked. But I enjoyed the rest. It felt good, being the smartest kid in this new home, this new school. Even if I held that dark shadow of suspicion that there was more to the story, that I was somehow cheating my way through life and someday I'd need to pay the price for that.

But neither the teachers at school nor the adults seemed to find anything amiss. Just a promising, gifted orphan girl. My excellent grades seemed to please my foster parents, and I —precocious as I was— milked it for all it was worth. Toys and TV shows and a new backpack, and whatever I wished for as long as I could come up with a way to tie it —even tangentially— to my so-called potential. That was how I got my favourite plushie, Miss Bumbles, because I saw it on a shop's shelf one day in passing, pointed at it, spouted a couple of factoids about bees and looked back at my foster mother with puppy eyes.

And I guess that's where things started taking a turn for the worse, too, even though it took some time for me to realize —talk about being gifted! Because I was sharing that home with two other boys that had already been there a year or so before I arrived —foster kids too, both of them— and that didn't seem to enjoy my special treatment all that much. If at all.

It all started with name-calling: 'nutter' and 'arse-face', and soon escalated to light bullying. Pushing and shoving, mostly, because we were five and they weren't all that bright, truth be told.

It quickly got worse, though.

I was six when it happened. The Americans were launching a rocket, and Elliot wanted to watch it live on the telly. I didn't, and I could tell that my foster parents weren't too enthused about it either. But when I tried to argue for the merits of The Goonies my foster mother told me that we had already watched Doctor Who the evening before, and today it was Elliot's turn. Which, fair point, woman, fair point.

So we were all there in the living room: my foster parents, Elliot, Miles, Miss Bumbles and grumbling me, watching the countdown as the space shuttle waited on the launchpad, a white silhouette against clear blue sky. And then, one of those fore-memories, one of those strange flashes hit me. And I said, not even processing why: "It's going to blow up."

"Now Sylvia," said my foster mother, brow furrowed. "That's not a very nice thing to say, is it?"

I shrugged.

"You wouldn't like someone saying those things about something you enjoy, now would you? So why don't you apologize to Elliot, then?"

I sighed, turned to the kid next to me and mumbled: "Sorry I said bad things about the stupid rocket."

"Sylvia..."

"It's not a rocket!" he replied. "It's a shuttle!"

"Whatever."

"Sylvia-" started my foster father. But then the countdown hit ten and we all shut up, and it went all the way down to zero, and we watched as the shuttle rose into the air atop a column of smoke, all fire and unthinkable power.

And then it blew up.

It took a moment to register, even for me, who by this point was getting used to those moments of insight being always accurate. But I hadn't expected this one to be true, not really. And there were a few seconds of confusion, as we all looked at the screen wondering if this was somehow the normal procedure. Except we all knew it wasn't. And then they all turned to look at me.

That was when I got to collect a new word for my growing list of adjectives, courtesy of Elliot: 'freak'.

My foster parents rationalized it, of course. Thought it was nothing more that a bad taste joke made with exceptionally poor timing. But Elliot and Miles, you would think I had single-handedly destroyed the rocket myself the way they treated me afterwards.

I would soon find my notes from school torn apart, or my grown-up books defaced. And, because something —not one of those fore-memories this time, just a sense of foreboding— told me that if I allowed those attacks to go on unopposed they would only get worse and worse, I of course retaliated.

My life became a constant struggle, then, the foster home a battleground. My lunch would get lost, and Miles would find his backpack covered in chalk dust. My favourite shirt would suddenly sport a chocolate stain, and Elliot's racing car would go missing its front wheels.

Sometimes we would get more physical: subtle kicks and harder shoves when the adults weren't looking. I learned how you could get a bruise from being pushed into a chair; Miles learned exactly how sharp I liked to keep my pencils.

So it was during the worst phase of this conflict —ongoing for almost a year by that point— that I hit the seven year marker, and all hell got loose.

What had been a trickle before then, a steady flow of memories that came whenever I was doing something new —which, to be fair, was pretty much everyday, being a kid and all that— suddenly turned into a deluge the day of my birthday. A stream of images, sounds and smells. Names and experiences and books I had read and places I had visited and skills I had mastered. As if someone had plugged a firefighter's hose straight into my skull, my brain a weary sponge trying to catch every single drop.

It hurt, and it was confusing, and my vision swam. That day I gathered enough strength to stand up and walk out of my bedroom, and put together some rubbish story about having stomach cramps to get out of going to school. But it turned out to be unnecessary: my foster parents took a look at my feverish self and declared I would stay in bed.

So I crawled back under the blankets and collapsed into a heap of limbs, my strength completely drained after the brief conversation. My eyes hurt, so I closed them, but I couldn't escape the cascade of images. My ears sent weird signals to my brain —half remembered words and hallucinated names. I tossed and turned, wishing it would stop, asking for mercy. But it never did, and I just couldn't escape, couldn't close my mind to all that... all that meaning.

Eventually I fell asleep, and by the next morning the river had finally stilled, turned into more of a lake. No more images rushing into my head, just a massive pile of memories to sort through and put together, like the pieces of a jumbo puzzle. And without any input on my part, my brain set to the task of its own volition.

For the next week I barely maintained my basic functions. I breathed and walked and ate food and replied in monosyllabic words, all while my mind went into overdrive. But my foster parents judged it good enough to send me back to school —hey, at least I was alive enough that I could handle going to the toilet— and so it was at Mrs. Grace's class when things finally clicked. When all those fragments came together, stringing themselves almost effortlessly into a coherent narrative.

That of a girl who had been born some years into the future, in a different country. Who had grown up into a teenager, then an adult woman. And then, once she hit her late twenties, nothing. A fade to black. To me.

Reincarnation, maybe. With time travel somehow thrown into the mix for good measure.

It was, to be clear, absolutely bonkers. I must have lost it, during that fever, my brain somehow going nuts from the stress of it. But no matter how I looked at it, the fidelity of my fore-memories, the amount of details from my past life, was too solid to discount as a dream. It felt like I knew things, and I knew that I knew them. And I knew that this was what the adults had mistaken as me being a genius. But I wasn't one, not really. I was just... remembering stuff, rather than learning it.

I did test the new memories, though. In the best way possible: one night I got out of bed at about 1 a.m., when everyone in my foster home was already asleep and walked downstairs to the living room. I turned on the telly and put 'The Shining' into the VHS player, and watched the movie at the lowest volume possible.

It was the perfect test, because it was a movie I knew I had never watched in this new life —hey, we were eleven, so no way our foster parents would've allowed us to watch it!— but that I remembered well enough from the before memories. So I had written down some of the scenes and plot points I could recall into a piece of paper ahead of time, and that way if the movie ended up following that script, I would know the memories were real.

It was also the perfect test because no matter what, I got to watch a forbidden movie. So there was that too.

I ended up skipping ahead, in the end, too wired up to wait for the movie to get on with the exposition, instead looking for those moments described in my by then crumpled paper —my heart beating like crazy in my chest. And sure as hell, all work and no play still made Jack a dull boy, and REDRUM was written on the wall, and the lift still released a full wave of blood all over the lobby when its doors opened.

So it was real, then.

I remember being in shock, after that. The sudden weight of the realization of all I had lost hitting me at once: my family, my brother, my crush, my whole future. My life.

I had lost my life. I had died.

I must have emitted some sound, then. Some sort of keening, wailing cry. Because the next thing I remember is my foster father standing in the living room, towering over me as he scolded me for getting out of bed to watch scary movies on my own, and that it served me well if I had nightmares now and couldn't sleep.

I crushed the paper note further, pretended he was right about the reason for my distress, and went back to bed. And sure, I didn't sleep much that night, or the nights after, but not because I was scared.

No, I was grieving.

My own passing, that is. The loss of my old life. The loss of my independence.

And that's when things really took a nosedive. Because now that I could remember being an adult, living on my own and driving a car by myself, many of the daily things I had never paid too much mind to suddenly became unbearably grating. And I started arguing back: about the age restrictions in shows, movies and books, about what I was allowed to wear, about my bedtime and how often I should wash my hair, even about how the food pyramid thing was a complete scam.

And so in the eyes of my foster parents I might have still been precocious and gifted, sure, but now I also displayed challenging behaviour, whatever that meant.

It all came to a head when I was eight and Miles decided to tear off Miss Bumbles' wings. That time things got proper physical, with punches and hair pulling and all the rest; and by the end of it Miles went rolling down the stairs, breaking a tooth in the process. He claimed I had somehow 'glued his legs together', which of course I hadn't, because that was absurd.

I pointed out there was no glue at all on his trousers, but for whatever reason —maybe because they were tired of my so-called stubbornness and the daily fights, or maybe because a layer of unease had always remained wrapped around me after the rocket incident, like a cloud of pestilence hanging over my head— my foster parents took the side of the little devil spawn. And now my behaviour was not only challenging, but also 'violent'.

I was moved out of that foster home soon after that, the powers that be deciding that maybe placing me in a new environment where I was the only kid around would help pacify me. It might have worked, if they hadn't also decided I needed more discipline.

They placed me under the severe watch of Mrs. Coverdale and her husband, and we bounced against each other as hard as humanly possible. No, I don't need to do my homework, I already know how to do fractions thank-you-very-much. No, I don't want to play the bloody piano. No, there's nothing wrong with watching the telly while I brush my teeth, I have been doing it for twenty-five years. No, I don't understand what's 'improper' about an asymmetrical haircut, you fossilized prude.

That lasted for a total of five hellish, abominable months; until one day I was grounded to my room —I wanted to go watch Beetlejuice with a girl at school I found tolerable; Mrs. Coverdale thought the movie was 'completely inappropriate'; I told her she was also completely inappropriate as a foster mother and yet here we were.

I was pacing up and down my room like a caged animal, reliving the discussion in my head time and time again and thinking of all the witty retorts I could have spat back to her, and all the little things I could do to get up her nose, so to speak, when I noticed a burning smell coming out of my bed.

Surprised, I approached it and removed the bedspread only to discover that the bedsheet underneath was on fire. I panicked, tried to remove the bedsheet, and the flames jumped to the curtain and from there up to the off-green wallpaper —which I had told Mrs. Coverdale was a fire hazard waiting to happen. That was when I legged it downstairs, screaming at the top of my lungs.

One visit of the fire brigade later, and I was considered guilty without even a trial: the fire that had devoured much of the second story of the Coverdales' home had started in my bed, after all, right when I was in the room, grounded and angry. And it sure didn't help that I had a history of 'challenging and violent behaviour'.

So no more foster families for me; they sent me to the Residence.

When they first told me they'd be sending me to the Residence, I could almost hear the capitalization in the word. And I knew enough from my fore-memories to intuit that the system was giving up on me, that I had inadvertently crossed some sort of red line and was apparently now considered too much of a hassle.

But in the end, it was the best thing to happen to me. If I had known it, I'd have burnt Mrs. Coverdale's house much sooner —not that I did, but I would have.

The Residence was a large, two-storied house in London —actually, Brentwood, but who's keeping count— that housed somewhere between seven to ten problematic children, along with a staff of three adults led by an older woman the kids there had nicknamed 'the Giraffe', on account of her being all legs and neck.

The staff was... okay-ish? They were better than the Coverdales at least —though that wasn't saying much. But since there were more kids than staff, they didn't have time to watch our every move and I did enjoy a higher degree of independence, funnily enough.

I was placed in a room with another girl two years younger than me named Astrid, who never ventured more than two feet into the corridor outside without dragging her comfort blanket with her. And it only took me a couple of nights there to discover that in at least half the cases, 'problematic' actually meant 'abused'.

Which wasn't to say they didn't act out, or that I never clashed with them. They did, and I did. But this was not another Elliot-and-Miles' situation. Because while they quickly realized I was a freak, somehow that was tempered by the knowledge that we were all freaks, in the end. That all of us under that roof were either too different, or too broken for the normal system. That most of us would never be adopted or go back to foster families. And that gave us a sort of camaraderie.

So I settled, and started to consider my future. The more I thought about it, the more I realized being reborn was sort of a blessing, truth be told. I had filled a page of my personal notebook with words like 'Facebook', 'Apple' and 'coin', and if my plans came to fruition I knew I'd be able to enjoy a life I had only been able to dream about, back in my fore-memories.

But I still missed it, my old life, my old family. So a few weeks ahead of my eleventh birthday I skittered at night into the Giraffe's office —a room downstairs wrapped in filing cabinets and that contained a desk perennially covered in sheets of paper and small booklets, with one of those old beige computers on its corner— and walked up to the phone receiver there.

Then, I dialled in a number, one I still remembered from my adult memories. I had wanted to do this ever since that seventh birthday, but I'd had to wait. They would've only moved into the house I remembered after my birth.

The tone ringed once, twice, three times; and I was already losing hope when I heard noise at the other end of the line.

"Allo?" asked a raspy woman voice, as if she'd just woken up from her sleep. Which was probably the case.

I had planned words, things I wanted to say. But the moment I heard her voice, they all flew out of my mind. I just stood there, almost gasping for air.

"Allo? Qu'est-ce?" she asked, her patience thinning.

"C'est... c'est Sophie." My own words came almost as a whisper. I just wanted to keep her talking, to keep hearing her voice.

"Sophie? Quelle Sophie?" Her voice was younger than I remembered.

'Your daughter', I wanted to say. But I didn't, because I could hear the growing suspicion in her tone. And I could hear the cry of a baby, somewhere in the background. A baby that could be no other than me. Old me.

Oh, fuck this.

"Désolée!" I blurted out. "Mauvais numéro!" and I promptly crashed the receiver back in place with more force than strictly necessary, ending the call.

So I had been replaced.

Not really, I guessed. It was simply... my former self was still there, living her life, unaware of what had happened. It wasn't her fault I had been... what? Sent back in time? Reborn into a different body, one that looked completely different to my old one? Whatever.

And yet it still felt as if I'd been replaced and forgotten about; couldn't help it. As if I was a copy. The discard. Now I was on my own.

"Sylvia?"

I almost jumped in the air at the sudden voice, turning to see the silhouette of Astrid watching me from the office's open door. She had her blanket draped over her head and shoulders like one of those old-fashioned grandmas.

"Shit!" I whispered, pressing my hand against my chest to still my heart. "What are you doing outside the room, you bloody chipmunk?"

She narrowed her eyes. "What are you doing here? The Giraffe is going to ground you for months!"

"Shh! Keep it down! And how is she going to know, uh? Are you going to tell?"

She shrugged. "Maybe?"

I crossed my arms, unimpressed. "If you do, I'll tell everyone who it was that dropped the Gameboy and broke it. Mutually assured destruction, ever heard of that?"

"But you know that was an accident!"

"Shh! Do you think Charles is going to care? No, he'll be all 'you broke it, you pay for it'."

"That's stupid," she mumbled, entering fully into the room. "I can't pay anything if we don't have any money, can I? What were you doing here?"

"Nothing... just making a phone call."

"A phone call? To who?" Then she paused for a moment, as if she was putting two and two together, and added with a trembling voice: "To your parents?"

I sighed. Astrid's parents had died a few years ago in an unspecified accident —she hadn't told any of us, and I didn't dare ask her— the blanket the only reminder she kept from her previous life. The topic of parents with her was like taking a stroll across a landmine field, you never knew when an off-hand remark would trigger a full-on panic attack. The first time it happened with me in the room, for a moment I thought I had inadvertently broke the girl or something.

"Yes, but it didn't amount to anything," I said, waving my hand. "Just wanted to give it a try, I suppose. Come on, let's go back to-"

But it was too late. The light from the corridor outside came on and we heard ominous steps approaching. Astrid moved quickly, taking refuge in the gap behind the office's door. I, however, wasn't so lucky. I was standing right in the middle of the room, and would need to walk around the desk itself to hide behind it. So instead, I just flattened myself against the row of filing cabinets and hoped whoever it was would just walk by the door and not see my silhouette if they didn't look too closely.

But of course, the Giraffe then entered the office and switched on the lights. And there I was, standing like an idiot, my back to the cabinets, staring straight at her.

I froze, waiting for the inevitable scolding, but then something odd happened: her eyes just roved across the whole room, not once stopping on me —despite my totally conspicuous presence. It was as if she had developed a blind spot that just happened to completely cover me. Or maybe she'd been a T-Rex all along and could only see movement. Or perhaps I had turned into a human chameleon or something. But I didn't dare even moving my head to look at my own skin, just in case the T-Rex hypothesis turned out to be the correct one.

Leaning out behind the door, Astrid's expression seemed one of surprise, her eyes wide open as she looked at me.

Then, the Giraffe turned, switched off the lights, and walked out of the office, closing the door in her wake.

I waited two, five seconds, then released the breath I'd been holding and stepped away from the wall of furniture. Immediately, I heard Astrid's sharp intake.

"Sylvia?! What... was that?!"

"Shh!"

"You were there! And then I looked away for a moment and when I looked back you just... weren't?"

I turned to look back at my hiding spot. A trick of the light, perhaps? Maybe a shadow or something I'd failed to notice.

"Just lucky, I guess," I said, shrugging. "Come on, let's go back now."

I cracked the door open, took a glance at the dark and calm corridor outside, and turned to signal Astrid to follow me. She did, but not before giving me a suspicious look from under her blanket. She didn't say a word again as we returned to our shared room and went back to sleep.

The next few days she was still acting a bit cold towards me, not saying much and giving me significant glances now and then, quickly averting her eyes when I looked back at her and rose my eyebrows. But soon enough things seemed to go back to normal, the near miss at the office seemingly forgotten. And a few weeks later it was already summer, school was over, and life at the Residence became much more sedate.

Not to say we spent all day just lazing about. The staff liked to keep us active and focused, so there was housework aplenty: cooking —which was okay, but I never enjoyed it— and moping floors, and even weeding the tiny garden behind the house —which I definitely hated. And perhaps if it'd been Mrs. Coverdale ordering me to get dirt under my fingernails I'd have rebelled against it, but at least the Residence's staff framed it in terms of shared responsibility rather than pure discipline, and allowed us to switch chores among each other if we so wished.

Aside to that, they also kept us busy with activities: trips to nearby parks and museums, to the zoo and what not. It was after one of those outings —to the movies; the two oldest kids were allowed to watch 'Terminator 2', but the rest of us were unjustly forced into 'The Rocketeer' instead which... ugh!— that I was called to the Giraffe's office.

I approached with certain trepidation. During my stay at the Residence I'd learnt that nothing good ever came out of being summoned to the office, so I wondered which of my recent relatively minor transgression was behind this call. I had nicked a bag of gummy bears at the cinema, after all, but I was confident nobody saw me, and security cameras weren't a commonplace thing yet in 1991. So I doubted that was the reason.

I heard voices talking inside as I approached the door, so I stopped to listen before knocking.

"-and very precocious, yes-," that was the Giraffe. "-could even say gifted. Although her behaviour-"

For a moment, I feared I knew what this was about: a new foster family. After all, the staff was always going on about stays at the Residence being temporary, and that once whatever issue a kid had had been fixed, they'd be placed back into the foster system. In practice, few issues were so simple that they could be fixed at all. But I knew I was calmer as of lately than I'd been in my foster years, and there had been no more fires or violent incidents, so perhaps they'd judged me well behaved enough.

And that would be terrible, because I preferred it here, staff and all. Being among a larger group paradoxically granted me more freedom at the Residence that I had enjoyed at foster homes. That was the main reason I felt better, and the stupid Giraffe was about to ruin it all again for me.

So I gritted my teeth and barged straight into the office, not even bothering to knock on the door; determined to put a stop to whatever plot they were weaving in there for my future. If she was selling that I had mellowed out... well, they were in for a surprise.

The Giraffe paused the moment I entered, reacting with a thunderous look at the interruption; but she recovered quickly, smiled and signalled with her hand at the old man sitting on the chair in front of the desk.

"Sylvia; we were just talking about you," she said. "This gentleman is the Headmaster of a very prestigious boarding school, in which you have been accepted for the upcoming year."

A boarding school? That gave me pause. The gentleman in question was old, so much so that I would have figured him to already be a pensioner. He sported a dense and long white beard, half moon glasses, and wore a brown corduroy suit that would have looked old-fashioned even in the fifties.

"Ah, yes," he said, his voice gentle and deceptively deep. He gave me a friendly smile. "Miss Sarramond, it's good to meet you at last. My name is Albus Dumbledore."