An ugly 7-year-old with special powers avenges herself against the family who has kept her hidden
First Chapter
Monty sat cool and composed beside me in the waiting room leafing through an issue of “Newsweek”, unperturbed by the two uniformed men stationed at either side of the entrance to the doctor’s office. Their eyes targeted me at frequent intervals—every ten seconds, I calculated—and I had an uneasy feeling that their presence was connected to my being there, that they were waiting for my session with the doctor to be over before snatching me and carting me away. I pictured myself behind bars in a small, bare room without a window. Inmates in other cells would jeer and taunt me. They were girls from the street whose language I did not fully understand. I wondered why, without knowing me, they didn’t like me. I looked down at my hands clasped in my lap and longed for the solitude of the peach room I occupied on the second floor balcony at One-Forty-One Park Square. Read more…
Now that I’m sixteen, I’m sorting out my life and separating the important stuff from the crap. My second mother used to say that if you tripped back through the years you’d realize that a lot of catastrophes that frazzled the grey stuff between your ears weren’t as bad as you remembered. And some that you got blamed for weren’t your fault. She had this idea that you couldnʼt solve new problems if you havenʼt faced old ones still hanging around. That doesnʼt compute for me. If I added my past problems to the ones Iʼve got now, Iʼd be in a strait jacket. But if sheʼs right about old ones hanging on, that could explain the senseless things I still do today. So Iʼve decided to confront my troubles, examine them one by one, then dump them one by one. Who needs them hanging on? What I did last year, even a couple of months ago, is history. I was another person then. Itʼs time I looked at myself today without getting rattled at the things my earlier self did. Read more…
