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.