Living in Mercer Island until our adulthood, Arabella, Liam, Alex and I often discussed what had made us come together. I said that it had been the fight. Arabella, Liam and Alex said that it had been my dad.
In a good way or bad, I asked them. They replied both. When I saw that answer, I frowned and retorted that it had really begun with Alexander Graham Bell, whose telephone invention had been limited to the hearing culture. That caused Arabella to smile, but we all consulted Lori who said we were all right.
Being Northwestern people, it stumped people that we did not know where our riches came from. When we replied that we were adopted, the inquirers sniffed and went on their way. The adoption is not entirely true. After my father died, I received his fortune, which was a surprise. Our last moments had been bitter.
Jack Hart had been a lawyer whose favorite book had been “To Kill a Mockingbird” and braced himself for the most personal case he had ever had, believing in Atticus Finch’s quote, “every lawyer has one case that hurts him personally.”
That case came when I was thirteen. And it changed my life too.
Mercer Island was one of those small towns in the Northwest—possibly the smallest in the county. It was a foot-sole shaped island and when I looked out from my windows, I would see fog blurring the horizon across Lake Washington, sometimes even concealing it in the fall and winter seasons. But I jokingly called it an overpriced town because of the prices on the houses was about half a million, minimum. My mother would say that people moved fast, that just relaxing was not enough. That statement was bluntly opposed by Jack, who simply just sat down and read Christian books most of the time when he was not in the courtroom.
But for the rest of the population, I never saw them lying across lawns and petting their dogs. They always had to move, as if worried that their lives would go too fast. For me, it goes too slowly, but perhaps people were reassured for the fact that if they kept moving, nothing would hurt them. I counted 23 car and bicycle accidents in the newspapers when it turned into 2007.
But it was a chameleon town. When it turned into winter and it rained, the pavement would be soaked to a slate-gray as rivulets of water went down the island hills. It was mostly hills, so there were several rivulets wherever I saw. In the summer, it was hotter than my mother’s oven, that if you were barefoot, your feet would never heal from the burns you got from the pavement.
My home was heaven.
School was simply hell.
I stood out because of my deafness and my last deaf friend had moved to Alaska, so there was no-one to talk to and rant about my day.
That was when people started teasing me. “Hellos” and conversations weren’t rare, but they weren’t every day. Many people started ignoring me when I said hi. Then again, three-fourths of the student population was in the “in” crowd. I was left in the dust, cursing my decision to not stay at my private school for the deaf in Shoreline. One time, I was called a pervert because someone poked a girl’s butt and blamed it on me.
When I was in eighth-grade, that was when the trial came to us.
Maybe consider changing it to just "foot-shaped" or "footprint-shaped?" *shrug*
