The Finder

Love the cover, love the story, so exciting. Read the beginning in previous posts and then wait...

part 5 of the finder

But I used to dream of having a friend, someone I could trust and talk to. I pinned my hopes on the academy, there I would be normal. Others would understand, I would have lots of friends.

 

Mind you, I was not lonely, not in the physical sense, because although the children did not like me I still got lots of invitations to people’s house and parties and sleep overs. Inevitably I ended up with the adults asking me to find something for them, ‘as you are here.’ I started to walk out when this happened and find my way home, which was considered rude and unthoughtful and the children thought it was a bit weird. They would have been scared to walk through the streets at night. But I am a finder, I could find a safe way home. But they didn’t know. Nor did my parents. I upset them, they were happy when I was a popular girl. So I stayed at the other children’s homes and found lost objects, and my parents were happy. The children would pretend to play with me so that their parents were happy.

We did a lot of that, as children, keeping our parents happy. Should have been the other way round to my mind.

 

 I think the whole town sighed with relief when my tenth birthday arrived and my academy days were about to begin. The adults could tell people that they knew me, a finder, and that I had stayed in their home and helped them find something to say than you as they had been kind to me. The children could say that they were friends with a finder, it would give them some rubbed off status in life, as long as I was not there to prove them wrong.

 

It is the only birthday party I remember having. And what a party it was. The music was loud enough to be heard all over town. The entertainer was funny, I don’t remember what he did but he must have been funny because people around me were laughing, I think he entertained the adults more than the children.

There were balloons fixed all over the roof of the house, just in case someone passing by wanted to wish me luck. There was so much food piled onto the tables, cakes of all shapes and colours to gorge on, and a huge pile of presents. I didn’t eat anything and I don’t remember what the present were. Probably clothes for the academy.

Everyone I knew in the neighbourhood, and many I didn’t, came to wish me a good experience at the academy. I had so many good luck hand slaps that I could not bend my fingers they were so swollen and red. No-one noticed. They were all so happy for me.

To make sure that I would remember them, when I was a qualified finder, business cards and telephone numbers were pressed furtively into my raw, sticky hands. I don’t remember what I did with them, they were probably thrown in the burner with the rest of the party debris.

I remember feeling very lonely in this sea of well-wishers. I could not wait to leave.

 

Please understand, I loved my home, and I would miss the familiarity. My parents had inherited it or I guess we would have been living in a down under apartment as we never had much money. We had a double sloped roof on the surface, one side was made from windows and light gatherers, and the other side was covered in solar tiles. They were such fun to slide down, as long as you didn’t get caught! The space around our roof and others in the street was filled with plants, trees – although not close enough to create shade on the roofs – grass and flowers. It was cared for by the town and everyone treated it with care and respect. If you damaged the land you would be in big trouble and you could lose your home. But as people were always so busy it was mostly the children who used the space. Sometimes in the summer there would be parties and once we even had people sitting on our roof and singing to the stars. You should have seen my parents, they did not know what to do, in the end they did nothing, there was no harm done. At school we had learnt that in the past people had their own private piece of land that they had to take care of, I believe they did not do this very well. How could anyone have thought they owned land? This concept was beyond me. There was a special solar gathering roofed area at the end of the street for hover cars. They were recharged overnight, we did not own one, as they were too expensive for factory workers.

We had two levels in our home, the top one was a kitchen, a small table to eat at, and a comfy sofa for watching the screen wall and playing games – if you could pay. This space had natural light and I loved it. The next level had two bedrooms, a washroom, a toilet, and store room. Each room had solar tubes that brought in light from the sun in the daytime and stored light when it was dark. My room was very small, there was space for my high up bed, under which was a cupboard for my clothes, that was it. The store room did not have much in it and was also my punishment room, my parents knew how much I loved being outside and in the natural light. I knew the storage room and all the creatures that dwelt it its damp and dingy confines quite well. That was one part of my home I would not miss. I said goodbye to each room in turn, I was not sure when I would be back to stay.

It was going to be strange and incredibly wonderful to live somewhere with natural light in every room.

 

My parents could not afford to send me to the academy on the air-train so they left me and my small case at the town travel-share office, said goodbye and hurried to their work. It was quite some time before someone said they were going in the direction of the city and had space for me. They did not go all the way, but dropped me at anther town’s travel share. It was a long, tiring and at times scary three day journey. I was a little dishevelled by the time I got to the city as I had slept in my clothes on travel-share office benches in strange towns. I was also very hungry, I had eaten most of the packed food on the first day. I did not know it would take so long to get to the city. The air-train had been so fast.

I no longer had any fat reserves on my body so I was feeling a little lightheaded and slightly disorientated as I walked slowly up the hill towards the academy. I thought I was prepared for the sight of the old building, but it stopped me moving, it was awe inspiring, set high up in the city, with its huge rooms and spacious balconies overlooking the ordinary people. I always felt that the building was a little smug with its placing and chosen occupants. It was terribly grand and slightly overpowering for a mere ten year old. I had to force my feet to move and concentrate on taking one step at a time.

This tall, blue stone, tower adorned, gargoyle infested building was going to be my home for the next six years. I never believed how quickly it would become normal to look out of a window, to walk through the elaborately carved arched gateways and wander through around inner courtyards littered with fantastic sculptures.

part 4 The Finder- comments please

This is the 4th snippet from The finder
there will be another- then you will have to wait as I will be writing like crazy and not taking time to edit.

As soon as we got home I ran to the washroom and stood in front of the mirror. I wanted to check out this ‘normal’ girl. I studied the girl staring back at me. Her hands were clenched into fists, I relaxed them and then had to shake out the pins and needles from my long fingers with their short, smoothed nails. My parents had insisted that I stopped biting them before we went to the academy, they had dipped my hands in something that tasted disgusting. They thought a finder needed nice looking hands. Strange really as it’s not my hands that do the finding. Did I want to bite them again? I held them up by my face and wiggled them. No, they looked so nice now, they were normal hands. I grinned and looked into the eyes of my reflection.

My eyes. Everybody knows that a finder had bright blue eyes, mine were anything but bright blue. But at the academy they had explained to my parents that the colour change would happen after I was ten. The magical number 10. My eyes were the exact same colour as my parents, I checked them every day and adjusted the colour if I needed to. I must have only been three, I think, when my eyes changed. I looked in the mirror one night before bedtime and saw a whirling tunnel of colours, quite mesmerising. I didn’t understand why they had changed, but I quite liked them. I experimented with finding one shade of colour and bringing it forward, then another. I chose a deep purple shade, it matched the teddies on my nightgown. When my parents came to say goodnight I opened my eyes wide so they would see my beautiful eyes. There was a look of horror reflected back at me, so I blinked and quickly found my old colour. They looked anxious and peered deeply into my eyes before smiling and kissing my head goodnight. I heard them muttering about a problem with the solar filters and reflected colour. From then on I only played with my eye colour when I was alone.

Back to the ‘normal’ girl in the mirror. She had pretty hands and ordinary eyes, what next? I studied my hair. Curly and dark, I pulled some curls closer to examine them in detail. There was a mixture of brown and a darker red-tinged brown hairs, nothing unusual. My curls were always kept short, nothing below my chin as they were hard to brush, knots were always a problem for my parents, especially since I liked to experience the natural world up close. I just loved to roll in the crispy colourful leaves of autumn and then lie on my back and stare into the vast expanse of sky, but my parents were not so keen on my nature festooned head! But today it was clean and tidy as we had been on our special trip.

The rest of me was a bit on the chubby side, well I did get paid in cakes, biscuits and sugars, but as I liked to run, dance and jump whenever I could my body had not suffered too much. In fact when I lifted up my dress to look at my legs I was surprised to see that they were not chubby at all, they looked strong and normal, from all angles. They looked quite slim when I stood on my toes. Nothing remarkable about them, I had five toes in the right place, my feet were not too long or too short. They were not too wide or thin. They were just right for me. They looked normal.

I looked back at the girl in the mirror and gave her a thumbs up. She would do. She could go to school with the other children and not look any different.

 

I started school with all the local children my age, including my no-longer best friend from next door. I looked normal, but the children at school treated me with an edge of uncertainty. Looks were not everything. I think they believed I could find out all their secrets, that I could read their deepest desires and fears. I could have if I had wanted to, but I didn’t. I had decided to only find lost objects, and so I convinced the world and almost convinced myself that I was a simple, one speciality, lost object finder.

But I had more problems than this, I had a very curious mind and was a quick learner. Still have and still am, except for when it comes to the affairs of the heart, apparently. I thrive on new knowledge and get top grades seemingly without any effort. You would think this was a good thing right? But the teachers told my parents that I was disruptive and disrespectful. I asked questions and was rarely satisfied with the answers I was given, a little argumentative I suppose. When I was tired sometimes a wall would crumble and I would know something I hadn’t yet been told. I did not always see the warning looks of puzzlement coupled with a little fear pass between the adults. I would be sent out of the room to think or told to visit the top teacher. Just because I was tired and my knowledge was greater than theirs. I am not sure the other children would have noticed this peculiar trait of mine if the adults had not reacted.

All of this, and the fact that I was a finder, meant that the other children didn’t like me. I didn’t care, I found everything they said and did a little silly and simple.

There was one girl, Farah or Clara, I don’t remember her name. She was the prettiest girl in the class, she wore the best clothes and never had a speck of dirt on her. She pretended to be my friend for a while. I could have liked her, she smiled and chatted and was always happy, on the outside, but her smiles never quite reached her eyes. I guess I felt a little sorry for her and I held back my frustration at her silly talk and play and tried to understand. In the end she invited me to her home. She lived with her mother in an apartment, but she was lucky it was the top apartment so she had natural light and could see the sky. Those below had piped solar reflectors, they were very good, but not the same as real light. Her daddy lived somewhere else and every time he broke a promise of a visit or a holiday he would send her something pretty, her mother wouldn’t let her wear the jewellery he sent and made her keep it in a locked casket. Farah, or Clara, showed me her treasures, and then burst into tears and begged me to help her find the ones that were missing. She didn’t know how she could have lost them as she never took them out of her room. I sat for a while and asked her to describe the pieces that were missing, I didn’t need her words, just the pictures in her mind. Immediately I found a trail and she followed me out of the apartment and into the town. She couldn’t understand why I stopped outside the jewellery shop, but when she looked in the window she went very pale and began to shake with the effort of not crying. She pushed me away and ran home. I followed to make sure she got back ok. She never spoke or even looked at me again. I didn’t quite understand what I had done wrong.