Astralis

Episode One

Amelia peeked around the corner and tucked her hair behind her ear with a shaking hand, then twirled the strand around her finger over and over. A bit of a nervous compulsion that, toying with her own hair. She could admit it. Rebecca had certainly pointed it out to her enough times. Her grass green eyes darted along the corridor, searching for one face in particular.

She saw who she was looking for as he turned the corner at the far side of the hallway, surrounded by his usual group of fellow miscreants, and she slammed her back against the wall. Joshua Bartlett, her nemesis. He loved to pick on her, and she hated him with all the passion she was capable of at eleven years old. She stared at the ceiling as she waited for him to pass, murmuring a string of hopeful pleas that he wouldn't see her. It was an open-ended petition because she didn't really believe in God, no matter how much Rebecca and Todd, her foster parents, tried to instill their faith in her. She supposed it had become something of a habit.

Nothing in the last year had given her any reason to believe in a higher power. It had just sucked. Not that she wasn't grateful for her foster parents. They were good people, she knew. But the only people she got along with at school were a couple of her teachers. Otherwise she was an outcast. When she wasn't being ignored she was teased, tripped, pranked, laughed at. Even some of the other teachers were mean to her. They weren't even her teachers, because she only had three. But it was as if they sensed her 'otherness' and wanted to disassociate themselves from it whenever the chance arose.

She was an orphan, and she couldn't remember anything that had happened to her beyond the last year. Anything that had happened to her before Rebecca and Todd. She couldn't remember where she'd been before they took her in. But she knew enough to never talk about that. It would just be another thing people found strange about her. Something else to be cruel about.

Though she could read and write, passed all her tests with ease and was far ahead of the rest of her class, she couldn't remember anything at all about who she was. She knew it wasn't normal, alarming even. But she didn't want to end up in some hospital, being studied, so she kept it a secret. She watched T.V., she knew what happened to 'weird' people. So sometimes, when pushed, she made up stories about her past.

She excelled in all her subjects at the tiny private school she attended, she was well fed, sheltered and cared for, so she tried to be appreciative. As a rule, she avoided thinking too much on why she couldn't remember anything about her past. She liked T.V. a lot, so she just focused on that most of the time.

It was bad enough that she had...outbursts, as the teachers called them. She couldn't remember those either, when they happened. Everything would be going along just fine, then the next thing she knew, she would be in the clinic or principal's office.

Usually, they called Rebecca and when she got home she received a kind but stern lecture about good behavior, godly behavior. How she didn't want to get a bad reputation at school as a trouble maker. But she didn't even know why it happened, or...what happened during these 'outbursts' so it's not like she could control it. Luckily that didn't happen too often.

Joshua passed by her without looking in her direction. Amelia waited until he was out of sight before she scurried off to her class. Only one week of school left, and then she could enjoy the whole summer to herself. She smiled and gave a little skip as she entered the classroom.