181 Days of Madeline Jesty

Chapter 71: Legacy vs. Prophecy

I enjoyed the two days of blissful ignorance, but as soon as I was home, the loneliness, the mortality, and the consequences of my curse slowly crept into my system.

I'm running out of time.

Two months had passed by since Amielle and I first touched—the same day I saw Dad in simple clothes, working as a farmer—and a month since I confirmed that touching Amielle was the trigger. The earthy scent lingered in my nostrils as I remembered Dad—his messy mid-length gray hair, the tired folds across his brow, the red patches on his skin, and the quiet ache in his aging eyes.

I miss him. I miss Dad so much.

But beyond that, I knew nothing anymore. It wasn't enough to answer all the questions drowning my mind, leaving me trapped in a sea of uncertainties.

Some devil might be messing with my mind, just as how they decided to put a random curse on me. But something as strange as my father being alive wasn't farfetched—to me, at least. My curse had been with me for a decade, and it was something I just took in as my reality. How bad could hoping he wasn't missing be, right?

I hope I see him again before I pass away.

But before anything else, I had to find Amielle. She was the answer to all my questions.

I continued to look for investigators that would help me find her, but each one of them told me they couldn't entertain requests from minors. But I wasn't giving up.

There has to be one . . .

"Are you seriously looking at telephone numbers instead of reviewers?" Steph asked, looking at the names and telephones numbers I listed on a sheet of paper. "What are those anyway?"

Reviewers? Oh, yeah, I almost forgot.

The whole week, my focus alternated between studying for my school subjects and looking for Amielle. I'd leave school early, ask Troy to bribe someone and get me hot chocolate from Cornelia's, and try to squeeze information out of them. So far, none of the information was useful, except for a former patron noticing that the number of CCTVs had increased.

All this made me forget that the top university in the country would be holding its initial admission tests tomorrow. Yup, tomorrow. I completely forgot that the reason we were spending only a half day and that clubs were canceled today was to give us seniors some time to relax.

Their requirements were no joke. Four or five months ago, not only did we have to send our scores in the nationwide assessment test, but we also had to beg for three recommendation letters, one each from a science, math, and language teacher. We had to submit proof that we had at least three skills or extracurricular achievements that could help "uplift the university's reputation." However, since I didn't have much extracurricular involvement, I remember sending them videos of me singing solo in a Sunday choir (Suzie, a regular churchgoer, helped me ask the church office), sketching a portrait (one of my innate talents), and swimming (which Steph had luckily recorded during our sophomore year club's talent exhibition).

We received results a month after. Passers would get an email stating the date and place of the first exam, and I was one of them. Steph, on the other hand, was waitlisted. Luckily, someone let go of their spot, and Steph was informed she was in.

But that was only the beginning. We still had to take two more exams and, lastly, an interview. From what I knew, more than half of the examinees would be weeded out in the first exam, a fourth of that in the second, and then a third of that in the interview. That means in a thousand applicants, there would only be two hundred and forty who would pass.