It was a pointlessly sunny day, especially for late autumn. Cassandra was lying on the grass with her feet on the garden bench reading a book. It was her favourite book at the moment. It was about an angel who fell in love with a mortal girl, but people kept trying to separate them. She was bored. As much as she loved her book, Cassandra just couldn't concentrate on the plot. Maybe it was the heat. The sun was blinding and it burned through Cassandra's skin, roasting her. She applied another layer of sun screen. That felt relatively safe. She rubbed her foot against her ankle. The cool skin of her toes was a sensational relief. She was half-way through her book, the girl had just kissed the angel for the first time. He described it as 'the most beautiful kiss of them all'.
The angel had lived for hundreds of years, but the girl had died when she reached the age of seventeen, and got reincarnated. She met the angel every seventeen years; when she was seventeen. It was a lot of 'seventeens', the thought crossed Cassandra's mind briefly, before she moved onto another one. She wondered how we remember things. She knew that when learning something like a language, perhaps, you would say a particular word or phrase over and over again, it would create a pathway in your brain, and to make it stronger, it would have to be coated in Omega 3 oil. That's why people say eating fish makes you smarter. But Cassandra wondered why we remember particular things, like your sixth birthday party, or a friend's wedding, but some things you just can't remember. Cassandra didn't know what the answer was, but it was like the question had always been there, in the back of her mind. Cassandra often thought of fascinating questions, and she often felt she had thought of them before. Before she was born.
For a ten year old, Cassandra was surprisingly mature and intelligent. Her ash-blonde hair was shoulder-length and she still had thin, curly, fly-away hairs around the edge of her face. She was awfully pale, with translucent patches of colour on her cheeks and big green eyes. As pretty as she was, she was a bag of bones and always looked slightly ill. So when Cassandra was ill, it took everyone a while to notice.
Cassandra gave up and put her book down, the weather and concentrating on small print was giving her a headache. She closed her eyes and stared into a void. She wondered what the point of everything was. She didn't believe in Heaven or Hell or the afterlife or reincarnation. It all seemed too hopeful. But that's all that kept people going. Hope. Cassandra noticed things like that.
There didn't seem much point to anything. And although that sounds like suicidal talk, Cassandra wouldn't dream of dying or killing herself. She needed to know how things ended, and she had no guarantee she would be able to continue watching from 'above' or wherever you go when your soul runs away. Or gets pulled away. There is so much beauty in the world, Cassandra could see it. She would always see it, she had to. Cassandra was the person who kept people going. Who kept them fighting.
Even though she was only ten.
Cassandra loved reading. She could escape, imagine, pretend. That's what Cassandra needed to do. It was all that kept her sane. Aside from spending time with her best friend, her cousin and actually her only friend, Alexandra.
Cassandra couldn't work out what made some people likeable and popular, and what made others so completely the opposite. She was one of the 'others'. Everyone in her class despised her. She tried to work it out. It was a question she thought of before she was born.
If Mr Phillips the English teacher pointed out the word 'freak' in the dictionary, the best example he could give would be Cassandra. Apparently. She didn't understand why she looked the way she did. She didn't think she was especially ugly, perhaps it was the odd colour of her skin, or the faded green in her iris making her look like a ghost.
It occurred to Cassandra that there was a chance ghosts were angels, and angels were supposed to be beautiful.
They really are thick aren't they? Cassandra thought of everyone in her class and wondered how they could ever be so ignorant. It seemed nearly impossible to Cassandra, but she thought of random, interesting, unanswered questions. Philosophical, psychological questions that plagued Cassandra's mind, since before she was born.
