I suppose my story starts at
home, just like anybody’s. It probably even starts the same way that I suppose
most people in my position start out.
I was adopted at the age of 6 by
my lovely, long-suffering mother Rachel. When I came to her, I had very little
memory about the life I had led before that day – and even now, I can’t summon
any more than the faintest recollection of cherry blossoms in the spring. They
had told my mother that the only thing known about me was my name was Sapphira.
Not sure what possessed whoever gave birth to me to call me that. Brunette,
brown eyes… I’d have been better named “Amber”.
What else would be important to
know about my past? Well, I’m the eldest of five children. I’m the only one
who’s adopted, too. Check another complex off the list of “things that
contribute to the deviance of adopted children”, along with “unknown past” and
“single mother”.
There’s another thing for you to
know: messing with an adopted kid’s family is asking for nasty karma. Or at
least, messing with this adopted
kid’s family.
I had a relatively normal
childhood from the time I came to Moripiko Island. I loved exploring the
forests around the tenement building I grew up in, I watched my mother tend to
the rooftop garden, hung our laundry out on the lines in the warm island air.
There really wasn’t anything that screamed “FUTURE DEVIANT CHILD”.
I suppose the first time I knew
something was going wrong was right after I started high school. The second I
stepped foot in that school and felt the crush of people moving around me,
without a single one ever really seeing me, something woke from deep inside of
me. Something dark and dangerous, and something that I never want to feel again
as long as I live.
It was the first time that my
mother and I have ever seriously fought. I must’ve seemed like a two-faced
she-demon: swinging back and forth between the daughter who would tirelessly
clean our unit, and then skipping school, causing holy hell when forced to
class and staying out until all hours of the night.
It wasn’t all bad during my
teenage years, though. My senior year, I met this guy named Artie McCann. He
was sweet – the kind of guy that people chew up and spit back out in high
school. In fact, that was how I met him in the first place: he was serving
detention for swiping the Calculus tests off the teacher’s desk for one of the
cheerleaders. Now there’s a deviant
breed if I’ve ever seen one. After I heard that story, I guess I sort of took
him under my wing and things just sort of evolved from there.
The day we graduated, Artie and I
went out to one of the little gardens that the council has been putting up.
It’s a nice, quiet place – it doesn’t get me riled up the way some of the
community parks do. I suppose I should’ve seen this particular discussion
coming: Artie had been dropping hints for the last week or so.
But again, something began to
rise in my chest and threatened to choke me. Why was I so afraid to start a
life with this boy that I’d been dating for years? He was safe, he was ready to
begin adulthood with two feet firmly on the ground. This was supposed to be
everything that I’ve ever dreamt of having. So why the desire to pull away?
It only took me a few seconds to
realize what it was that I wanted to do after graduation – what I think I
might’ve wanted to do for years.
“It’s okay,” I remember him telling me with that heartbreaking
little smile on his face. “I get it. I’ll
be waiting for you.”
And then that dark little voice
in my conscience as I tried to memorize the way his skin felt against mine. “Bless your soul, you’ve got your head in
the clouds.” There he went again, believing and trusting in the best in
people – even when he’d seen them break promises and walk away without so much
as a tear. As if he was really going to be waiting for me when I got back.
I was off to find out what lay in
my hidden past, no matter the cost.
I knew from the second I stepped
off that plane in Shang Simla, and caught the first whisper of cherry blossoms
in the air, that I had come to the right place.
When I went to check in with the
Simlandian embassy’s base camp, I heard somebody gasp as I passed them. Of
course, what else would you expect me to do?
He struck me as a guard of some
sort, the way he stood so tall and proud at the pathway, dressed in long silks
despite the heat. I thought maybe I had stumbled upon the royal family’s
courtyard or something, and that was why he was watching me so carefully.
So, like the good Simlandian that
I am, I marched right up to him and demanded the truth. Well, sort of. It was a
little more timid than that. Actually, I barely managed to stutter and stammer
out my story. When he didn’t reply for a few seconds, I had this horrifying
realization that he might not even speak Simlish. And then he answered, in a
deep voice,
I can tell you what you seek. I ask only that you aid me with a task.”
Who the hell falls for that,
anyway? “Aid me with a task” should
be synonymous with “Let me rope you into
some horrendous, life-threatening escapade in hopes that I might actually tell
you something you want to know.”
Anyway, that’s how I came to find
myself now hundreds of feet underground, peering around dark corners and down
dimly-lit corridors, half-expecting a zombie to burst out of the stones. And
let me just tell you, I also don’t deal well with the dark. It’s another one of
those “psycho-Sapphira” triggers.
And then there was FIRE.
Honest-to-God FIRE. This was not what
I signed up for when I got on the plane in Moripiko Island. I was figuring on
spending a month or so in Shang Simla, see the sights, maybe hit up some town
records, find out my biological family died in some freak tourist trap accident…
Instead, I’m stuck underground for days, chasing some stupid hunk of rock down
pitch-black corridors with creepy sounds and fire… all for some deep-throat dude in a red silk shirt who says he
“has answers”.
Did I mention the fire?
Okay, so it was a pretty
nice-looking rock. I thought diamonds were more of an Al-Simharan thing, but
hey – whatever gets me my answers, right?
Whatever gets me my answers. That
was almost as stupid a decision as the decision to come out to Shang Simla in
the first place. After all, Mr. Deep-Throat-Guard (or Ho Jun Kim) is apparently
quite happily married. He is also a useless source of information.
Seriously, I went through all of
this for two measly sentences: “Your
parents passed through here many, many years ago in the times of my father.
They were outsiders.”
UGH. I could’ve found that out
without the secret midnight meetings and the underground tunnels of fire.
I was in Shang Simla for the
better part of a year. I did the tourist thing. I started studying martial arts
in effort to try and channel some of this anger and darkness out of me. I tried
to coax more information out of Ho Jun. But I finally had to cut my losses and
go back to Moripiko Island when I couldn’t even stand to look at him without
feeling the need to vomit.
Initially, I thought that I might
move back in with my mother. After all, Elissa and Jap have reached those
horrendous teenage years, and Evan and Kalea are just at the age where they’re
getting into everything. My mother’s not exactly at the top of her game anymore,
and she could probably use some extra hands. But it didn’t take me long to
realize that staying with my family wasn’t going to work out. Apparently, I
took a little bit of Shang Simla back to Moripiko Island with me.
I still haven’t run into Artie,
and part of me is hoping that I don’t for a very long while. After all, I left
him hanging for close to a year, and I have nothing to show for this quest
except a big belly. The trip didn’t work for quenching that need to know,
either. Something tells me that another trip to Shang Simla will be in my
future – this time prepared to ask the questions.
Who were my parents? Why does a
tourist-laden village remember them? What exactly happened 13 years ago?
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