DIFFERENT (Different Series Book 1) (2 page)

‘It’s okay, Alf, it’s just me.’ I tried to hide the panic in my voice.

I shouldn’t have done that. I’d told myself that I wasn’t going to do anything like that again. I was meant to be starting a new life, one where I was normal. Why had I done that, why had I gone and ruined things?

Eventually Alf calmed down enough for me to walk him home, although he made sure to keep as much distance between us as the lead would allow him to. It was then that I looked over at the entrance to the park, and I saw him, an ash blonde haired boy a year or two older than me. He was looking straight at me, and he didn’t alter his gaze when my eyes met his. Had he seen me move Alf? Had he filmed it? Should I go and confront him, or would that make things worse?

I felt my heart pounding in my chest with such intensity that I thought it might burst out and land in front of me. I knew that this wouldn’t happen to a normal person, but I wasn’t normal. I was different, and what if this boy had seen me? I had to say something to him, I had to know if he’d seen what I did.

As I neared him, debating what I should do, the boy turned around and left the park. I pulled on Alf’s lead and jogged towards the entrance. Quiet roads, houses, and a street lamp that seemed somehow brighter than the others were all that greeted me. The boy, whoever he had been, had gone.

Chapter Two

The next morning at breakfast, Alf was still acting weird around me. He didn’t sit under the table by Louisa and me in the hope that we’d drop some of our maple syrup pancakes, but instead he remained in his dog basket, which was on the far side of the room.

              ‘That’s not like Alf, maybe I should take him to the vets,’ Gloria said, as she lingered around the kitchen table, ready to take our plates once we had finished.

              ‘Maybe I just tired him out walking him. I’m sure he’ll be fine,’ I replied, instantly regretting the fact I’d basically blamed myself for Alf’s behaviour in my own sentence.

              ‘It’s not like Alf, he loves pancakes,’ Louisa said as she cut off a piece of pancake and held it out. ‘Come on boy, come and get it.’

              Alf studied it, and for a moment I thought he was going to get up and come over to take it from her, but instead he stayed in his basket and lowered his gaze.

              I shouldn’t have done what I did last night; I shouldn’t have scared Alf. I finally had the perfect family with parents who were responsible and who cared and who lived in a nice house in a pleasant neighbourhood. I should never have risked it; I should have just acted normal. Why couldn’t I just be normal? It was as if I were programmed to always ruin everything.

              ‘I’m sure he’ll be just fine,’ Gloria smiled. ‘Do you both want a lift to school?’

              ‘That’d be great, Mum,’ Louisa said as she pushed her chair back and grabbed her bright pink rucksack that was by the kitchen door.

              ‘Thanks,’ I said, before eating the last mouthful of my pancake and then standing up.

              Gloria put her navy, quilted jacket on, and then she jangled her car keys as we followed her out to her silver Mercedes. As cars went it was pretty awesome. It even had leather seats. I sat in the back and daydreamed as Louisa chatted away excitedly to Gloria.

              Things would be okay because I wasn’t going to do anything odd ever again. I was going to fit in. I was going to be normal. As for Alf, well, I really hoped that he’d be okay with me eventually. I only did what I did because I didn’t want to lose him; that was all.

              I was holding onto my perfect new family by my fingernails, and I didn’t want to ever lose my grip.

***

Oakwood Secondary School was a large, red-bricked building on the outskirts of town. There was always litter cluttering the large concrete playground, and the bicycle racks were rusty, yet the corridors always smelt of disinfection, just like the tattoo parlour that Max had forced me into back when I’d lived in London.

              Still, as schools went, this one was okay.

              Gloria dropped us off by the black iron gates, and we both said ‘bye’ to her before walking up the driveway.

              Louisa was surprisingly quiet for her, choosing to hum to herself as we walked. I wanted her to talk; I wanted her to distract me from my thoughts.

              As we walked up the steps and into school, Louisa hugged me before she went off towards her locker. I made my way through the crowds of students and then had to wait five minutes for Veronica Stevens, who had the locker above mine, to sort her textbooks into her expensive-looking over-the-shoulder bag. She gave me a smug look as I stood there sighing at her. The bell rang, and I was the only one left still sorting their books out.

              I could have caused her to drop her books, or to catch her finger in her locker. I could have caused her books to burst into flames in her hands. I didn’t do any of these things, though, instead just letting her carry on, just letting her think that she was better than me and that she was in control.

              I slung my bag over my shoulder and walked quickly up the corridor. There was an eerie silence to it, like the calm after the stampede. I hesitated in front of classroom 31, and I took a deep breath before opening the door and stepping into the classroom.

              ‘Nice of you to join us, Miss Gough,’ Mr. Walker snarled at me.

              ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled out before heading over to my seat by the window, one row from the back of the room.

              Veronica and her friend Rose giggled at me as I passed them, as if my being late for roll call was the funniest thing ever to happen at Oakwood. Ignoring them, I placed my bag on my desk and sat down next to Leo.

              ‘About time,’ he whispered to me, a grin on his freckled face.

              I shook my head, smirking as Mr. Walker rambled on about something.

              Leo got a lot of grief off people, mainly because of his name and the fact that his mum had named him after his star sign. He also had carrot coloured hair, which he shaved to a grade two or three and was bristly on touch. He was also pretty short, being a couple of feet smaller than me, and I was in no way tall. I was drawn to Leo instantly because there was something about him that didn’t quite fit in, just like me.

              The more I got to know him, though, the more I realised that he was pretty normal, he just didn’t realise it. He was funny, which was why Megan Thornton had invited him to the last school dance. He was kinda cute in an unconventional way, and the teasing never seemed to bother him. He seemed content in his own skin, which seemed to rub off onto me when I was around him.  Most importantly, he was a good friend, which I definitely wasn’t used to having.

              Mr. Walker eventually stopped talking, and as various students left the classroom to get to their first lesson, Leo and I stayed where we were. Our first lesson was geography with Mr. Walker,
sigh
.

              I pulled the textbook I needed out of my bag and arranged my pens in a line on my desk.

              Leo reached over and grabbed a pen, messing up my perfect line and causing me to give him an unimpressed look.

              ‘I’m outta ink,’ he grinned.

              ‘You owe me a lot of pens, a stationary shop, in fact,’ I said in reply as I readjusted the line.

              ‘Yeah, yeah, you know you’ll let me off.’

              ‘Might do,’ I smiled.

              I found myself glancing out of the window, and that was when my attention fell on the figure standing out on the playing field that the classroom overlooked. Although they were at a distance, I could make out from their build that they looked male, and they had the hood on their grey hoodie pulled up. Was it Max? Had he found me?

              I turned my head away from the window, feeling confused. Maybe it was someone else and I was just being paranoid.  If it was Max, then how did he know where to find me?

              All it would have taken was to look out of the window and fix my gaze on him, and then I could have shown him exactly what I was capable of. I could have lifted him high off the ground and forced him to burst through the glass and to land onto my desk. I could have stopped anyone else in the room getting close to us as I looked him in the eye and asked him what he was doing. The problem was that Max already knew exactly what I was capable of. Was he here because he wanted revenge? Or worse, did he want to finish what he’d started back on the night of the fire?

              ‘Celeste, what ya thinking about?’ Leo interrupted my thoughts.

              ‘Huh? Oh, nothing,’ I mumbled out.

              ‘You’re so going to end up in detention. First you’re late, and now you’re daydreaming,’ he grinned.

              ‘I can assure you that Mr. Walker will have my full attention, once the class officially starts. Erosion and the equator are my calling,’ I replied, trying my best not to sound worried.

              I didn’t want to hurt or scare anyone. I just wanted to be normal, and normal people weren’t capable of doing what I could. There was a continuous niggling feeling in my stomach, knowing that I could do things that others couldn’t but that I was powerless right now to do so unless I wanted to lose my new life. I knew that I couldn’t give in to the niggling feeling this time, like I had done before with the fire and Alf. This time I couldn’t mess things up. Besides, it might not have even been Max. Surely even he wouldn’t have been dumb enough to mess with me again.

              ‘Glad to hear it,’ Leo said.

              ‘After all, geography class is my calling,’ I smiled.

              ‘Hey, you get to sit by me, so it should be.’

              I rolled my eyes and chuckled before Mr. Walker went over and checked that the classroom door was shut, as he always did. Then he stood in front of his cluttered mahogany desk, coughed to clear his throat, and then started rambling on about the huge mountain in the Lake District that he’d climbed at the weekend.

              I couldn’t help but find myself glancing out of the window. The figure that’d been standing there had gone.

Chapter Three

As soon as I’d been dropped off at the Kingstons’ house and seen them greet me with exaggerated smiles and hugs, I’d known that they were just like the others. They lived in a fairly nice end terraced property, they drove a presentable car, and they had respectable jobs, but to them I was just a project, one that brought in extra money and which made them feel better about themselves.

              It might have been bearable if it hadn’t been for him, for Max.

              Usually it took at least a few days for my foster family to realise that I was different, but Max knew straightaway.

              ‘I know you’re hiding something,’ he’d whispered to me as we passed in the hallway. ‘And I’m going to find out exactly what it is.’

                 His face usually looked blank, expressionless, unless he was feeding off someone else’s misery, in which case he looked smug. His eyes were a dark shade of brown so that they sometimes appeared black. There was a small scar by the side of his right eye that I didn’t know how he’d got, and he nearly always wore that worn out navy hoodie.

              Max Kingston may have looked like any other normal seventeen-year-old, but I knew that he was anything but normal. He didn’t have the powers to do what I could, but powers weren’t always needed. People could be far more vicious without them.

***

When I was seven, my care home took us all on a day out to Blackpool. It was a place full of arcades and fish and chip shops, and I remember noticing how, although it appeared rundown, it still seemed very much alive.

              We’d all been allowed to choose something from the shop, and I’d picked a bar of strawberry flavoured rock. Sitting on the beach, I’d taken my shoes off so that I could feel the sand beneath my toes as I bit into the rock. All the way through its centre was the word ‘Blackpool,’ written out in black letters.

              ‘It should say weird,’ Annette, a girl with her blonde hair tied in pigtails had sniggered.

              I’d thought about that day lots over the years, not sure at times why it had seemed so significant. Although I looked normal on the outside, maybe on the inside the word ‘different’ ran through me like a stick of rock.

***

I’d managed to trade jobs with Louisa. She took Alf for his daily walk, and I emptied the bins. It totally sucked, but I didn’t have much choice, seeing as Alf was still being tense around me. At least I couldn’t get into too much trouble taking the rubbish out, right? All I’d had to do was ramble out some tale about needing more time to do my homework , not that Louisa had taken much persuading. I mean, come on, dog walking or lugging out the rubbish, there was no contest really.

              If I stayed in my room, then I wouldn’t do anything stupid. I wouldn’t jeopardise my new life. If I stayed in my room, then Max wouldn’t find me.

              The problem was that I couldn’t just stay in my room all the time. I had to leave the house eventually. I had to go to school; I had to live.

***

              I sat on the squeaky blue plastic chair by the wonky-legged table in the lunch hall. I was picking at the plateful of cheesy chips in front of me as Leo took a huge bite into his beef burger and then wiped his mouth onto the back of his black school jumper.

              ‘Ew,’ I grinned, as I forked a chip and put it into my mouth.

              ‘What!’ he exclaimed, as he continued to eat.