Happily Killing

My past

My parents told me about all of this when I was 10 years old. I had just been allowed to go to my room, after a whole day of studying, when they called me back to the living room where they were drinking tea. 'Please sit down, darling, we want to talk to you about something.'

They both looked pretty serious, which is strange considering the fact that I've barely seen them serious my whole life. In fact, I think the only time they've been serious with me was when granny died, even though I can't remember that much of her since I was 5 years old when it happened. I completely zoned out thinking about this when my father spoke again. 'We have to tell you something serious' he said to me. I felt myself growing nervous of what was coming next. 'It's nothing bad, darling.' My mother reassured me 'It's just that you can't do some things, other kids might be able to do. But at the same time you can also do things, they can't. And...'

'What your mother is trying to say,' my father interrupted 'is that you've got a gift. Just like the rest of our family.'  My mother glared at my father. 'I was just getting there. Anyway, it all comes down to this: when you read a book, you will get sucked into it and might not be able to get out anymore. So you have to promise us, that you will never, ever, read anything, okay?' While saying all of this she kept looking me in the eye, her facial expression serious. I tried to look just as serious, nodding my head and whispering: 'I promise.'

A few days later they got me into school, claiming they wanted to give me a normal youth like every kid has, but not before making sure I know I had to act as if I was reading instead of actually reading something. At first it was weird. I had never been used to being around so many people of my age and now I suddenly had to sit in a classroom with 28 of them. Everything was also different at school than it was at home. It was way more organized, but at the same time more chaotic than at home. Everybody knew each other, except for me, so as a result I had to sit in my own during every break. Until one day, when a sweet looking girl with ponytails in her hair and a baby blue dress on walked up to the bench I was sitting. 'Hi,' she giggled, 'I'm Miranda. Do you want to see my bracelets? I just got them for my birthday.' I remember that I was to afraid to spill anything about my secret, so instead I just shrugged and mumbled a yes. From that day on Miranda and I had always spent our lunchbreaks together, playing handclap games, jumping ropes or just joking.

At school everything went fine, my grades were good and even after a few months I'd managed not to read one single word, don't ask me how I did that, but I did. I somehow always found excuses to why I wasn't able to read out loud. One day I had a sore throat and the other day I wasn't paying attention to where we were with reading the text. Thinking back at it, I think my teacher must've been really annoyed with me after a while or maybe he was just worried about me, that also might be the reason why he wanted to talk to my parents one day. I wasn't allowed to be there and I'm still wondering what they could've probably discussed since after that day, my teacher never chose me to right anymore. This caused pretty big annoyance out of the rest of the class, since no one ever wants to read out loud, but oh well... Not my problem, right?

And like this, months came and went again, I had my birthday, got more friends and enjoyed life constantly, everything was fine. But that all changed that one day when I made a mistake. And now, 10 years later, I'm still living in the consequences of that mistake.