One
I’ve never settled anywhere before. I’ve never been anywhere for longer than six or so months. I’ve never been on first name terms with the neighbours, I’ve never been able to say that I have a friend who I’ve known all my life, and I’ve never been quite comfortable in my surroundings. Something is always different, something always changes. I’ve never had the same area code, or the same number, the only thing that has stayed the same - is my name. Just my first name; Daisy. I’ve had more different surnames than Liz Taylor. Just sometimes it would be nice to have a place I can properly call home.
The first thing you should know about me is that I’m an orphan. Which already makes me two things; number one - I’m the butt of everyone’s jokes. Number two - I’m always the one people feel sorry for. The order of those two can sometimes change. Strangers often coo and aww whenever I’m around, they think I can’t hear them. And technically, the average person can’t, but I can. I hear every single word of their whispers as if they were shouting it through a megaphone.
“There goes that Daisy (insert current surname here) she’s an orphan, her parents died when she was little. Poor thing.”
I don’t always believe them, I can’t help but think that my real parents are out there somewhere, alive and breathing. Call it intuition, or call it the desperate want for something you can never have. I can’t say this to anyone, as if people don’t think I’m crazy enough. So I carry on, its something I’ve learnt to do over the years. I’ve been in and out of foster homes, I’ve had more foster parents than… you get the picture. But I’m not looking for sympathy, far from it. It’s just a relief for me to be able to be so brutally honest, with no repercussions. I’ve learnt another thing also, I’ve learnt that sometimes there are things you just have to keep to yourself. If you want to stay somewhere long enough, you have to learn how to adapt to your surroundings. Not everyone is always so forgiving of your own circumstances.
Social workers said I was what you would call ‘a problem child’. I was boisterous, I played a little too rough with the other kids. I had always been a bit of a tomboy, now I was getting older I had only just began to take an interest in hair and nails and what have you. But going back to kindergarten, was where I didn’t know how to handle myself. I just wasn’t aware of my strength, that’s all. I never actually meant to hurt anybody, but when some of the children went home with scrapes and bruises, the parents started to complain. I was a fast runner too, sometimes unbelievably fast that I would run so far I would disappear off the track field and almost burst through the back yards of the adjacent houses lining the furthest edge. I would stop when I realised that I couldn’t recognize what was around me, I would usually find a place to curl up and cry. I couldn’t understand what was happening to me, I was far too young, and I didn’t know the way back.
Sometimes unexplainable things happened. In my room at one foster home I spent three months at before they deemed me ‘too difficult to handle’, I would move a bunk bed from one side of the room to the other, sometimes without even making a sound. I didn’t always notice I was doing it, I would only have to lean or bump into it sometimes and it would move. Somehow I could always smell when dinner was just about ready downstairs in the main kitchen, and I would arrive way down before all the other kids, before the carers had even rung the dinner bell. Those events were nothing compared to the day that I realised just how different I was.
I was fourteen years old, it was early Spring 2006 and I was walking home from school. This was when I had recently been fostered by a nice family called the Johnsons. Mrs. Johnson was a thickset black woman with a Caribbean accent, she was firm and wouldn’t take any crap from the other kids she fostered. There were six of us in total, fostered children that was. Her own children had grown up and moved out, they didn’t visit much. Some said she compensated by taking in kids that didn’t have parents to look after them. I remember watching her seem to grow older and more tired each day, wisps of grey would start to appear through her afro hair, and lines would sit in the corners of her eyes. But she was as sharp as a needle, never missed a trick. So the six of us were all pretty well behaved.
I had just crossed the road by the church that sat at the end of our road, we lived in an almost all white neighbourhood, but Mrs. Johnson was a well respected member of the community, she didn’t believe in segregation seeing as between the six children she had there were all different races I was the only white kid she had fostered. When I reached the pavement I remember thinking that my bag seemed a little lighter than usual, I hoped I hadn’t left my History journal at school as we had an essay to write by tomorrow and my hard faced teacher - Miss. Pickens - was not very forgiving. So I stopped on the edge of the sidewalk and began to sift through the contents of my bag.
The usual - pens, pencils, a few scrap pieces of paper, a half eaten sandwich and an untouched apple. But no history book, oh peanuts. I really didn’t want to walk all the way back to school, but I really didn’t want a week of detention the next day, I turned on my heel back into the road, and then things began to happen very fast.
I physically couldn’t move, I had one foot in the road and the other on the pavement, both were stuck absolutely frozen to the spot, as if I had stepped into wet cement that had dried within an instant. I had this feeling, this awful, sickly gut feeling right at the pit of my stomach. It swirled uncomfortably until it passed through every inch of my body, it felt horrible, it felt like danger. Suddenly I had absolutely no intention of going back to school. As I was staring dumb founded at my immobile feet, then I heard it.
A screech of breaks, a crash.
A s c r e a m.
Silence.
Lying in the road was a young boy of about twelve, I hadn’t even noticed him behind me. I recognized his freckled face from school, I didn’t know him by name, but I had seen him around. A gust of wind - which I later realized was the car that had hit him speeding off - blasted the beautiful blond hair, revealing watery blue eyes still open. This sudden movement made it look like there was still life in the dumb body. But there was not a lot of life, there was so much blood. The sickly feeling in my stomach grew worse, but I had a sudden urge to dart over. To check to see if he was still breathing, I forgot myself then. In that moment I forgot myself completely, I leant by the side of him and I put two fingers on his neck, like I’d seen them do in Movies. Two fingers was all it took.
He blinked a few times, and then sat right up. Coughing and spluttering, droplets of blood shot out of his coughs. I put an arm around him, allowing him to rest against it. Another touch. A wound on the back of his head began slowly to correct itself, leaving only congealed blood in its place. It was like watching an injury rewind back to the perfectly untouched skin it once was. The skin was flawless, glowing even, much better than it ever was before. He began to scrabble around, attempting to stand up. Slowly, but surely the four foot boy slowly rose up. He stood like nothing had ever happened, he even smiled at me. His face as clear as day, no hurt, no pain. Dimples forming in the apples of his cheeks. The sickly feeling in my stomach had completely disappeared, just like the boy’s injuries.
“You saved my--”
“--Shhh, its fine kid. Don’t mention it, now run along home. And watch the road next time!” I cut him off abruptly.
In that moment I remembered myself, I dusted him down and sent him on his way. What I didn’t realize were the twenty or so gaping faces standing behind me. Neighbours, friends, all gathered a few feet on the sidewalk. I didn’t know how long they’d been standing there, I never heard anyone arrive. A sea of silent faces, all frozen just staring at me. Stunned, perplexed, almost scared. Then the whispers began, even as I continued on my way down the road. Completely ignoring the audience, I heard every single one.
Did you see that? Got up like nothing had ever happened… I saw it, I saw it with my own eyes! He was hit by a black car, going way too fast, I wish I’d memorized the number plate! Then it drove off leaving him there, in a pool of his own blood, but now… Just doesn’t make sense, what was she doing? What did she do to him? Who is she… I know her, that’s one of the Johnsons' foster kids, the one with no parents…
Tears fell now. Not because of the whispers, people are often ignorant like that and I‘m used too it. It must be true what the kids used to say to me at school. Maybe I was a freak. I didn’t even want to think about what had just happened, but surely I would be in for it when I got home. Mrs. Johnson’s phone must have been ringing off the hook, everyone wanted to share the news of the unexplainable, inexplicable miracle that had just happened outside. The dry pool of blood the only evidence that any harm was actually caused. They never did catch the hit and run driver, I wished hard that someday I would catch him myself, that was when the trouble started.
