Blaeyde Flynn has always considered herself a black sheep, an outcast among so many people, with an abrasive personality that tends to annoy people and rub them the wrong way with her hyperactive tendencies. She is more than thrilled when she gets a...
Blaeyde stared intently at the ceiling of her room, deep in thought. The ship had been flying on course for two days seven hours and twenty minutes, but who would be counting? Blaeyde lay on her back, feeling the softness of the bed beneath her. She scanned her room and looked at the pictures she had hung on the wall as soon as she had unpacked.
The pictures were all of wide green pastures, with rolling hills and grassy meadows that were all dotted with sheep, and in every painting all the sheep were white except for one black sheep in each picture that seemed to pop off the canvas as if it didn't belong. Blaeyde had painted one of these paintings each year since she was in Kindergarten and had heard a story the teacher told about a black sheep that was different from the rest of the flock.
Ever since then, she had been fascinated with black sheep. They were almost a comforting interest to her, and each of the paintings was better than the one before it. All the pictures were hung at a slight angle, and Blaeyde liked them that way because it made them interesting. Blaeyde always wore a black sheep decal somewhere on her person, even though the Iron Sparrow Fleet dress code did not allow for pins or decals other than medals or those assigned.
She would deliberately break the dress code just for the comfort of wearing the black sheep. Other than the pictures and her wardrobe of clothes, a first aid kit, some warm blankets, and other necessary personal items, Blaeyde didn't own much. She kept with her just enough to survive on her own while still being able to live out of her suitcase.
The reason for her minimalism is that her father would send her out of the house for long nights and made her sleep outside, and over time through trial and error she knew what she needed in her survival case. When her father sent her out, she would spend the night in a secret treehouse she had built in the woods that she had managed to make all on her own. She would go there every time he kicked her out until that horrible day when she was thirteen and her father followed her to the secret treehouse and he had it torn down.
She wouldn't have lived through the next night he had forced her out if she did not have her survival suitcase. Sometimes she even wondered if her father was trying to kill her all of those times she was sent outside at night like an extremely naughty dog. One thing she did know for certain was that he did not want her and he did not love her. As she lay there deep in thought, thoughts of her mother crossed her mind. Her mother was a shy and quiet woman who didn't talk much and mostly seemed to back her father in his abuse of her.
Blaeyde's mother always looked at Blaeyde with a look of regret, sadness, and fear. While her mother treated her better than her father, feeding her and clothing her and sheltering her for sixteen years of her life, she would often send her to her room for days at a time or she would send her off to long camps over the summer, as if she did not want her around.
Blaeyde remembered coming home early from camp one year when she was ten years old because of bad weather and she came to her front door, and her family was in the middle of throwing a party. When she walked inside, hoping to join in on the festivities, her father yelled at her to go to her room, saying, "Get out of here! I don't want the guests to see you!" Come to think of it, Blaeyde had always felt that her parents tried to hide her from the world as if she was born some sort of mistake. What did they know about her that she didn't?
Suddenly there was a knock at the door, interrupting her train of thought. She sat up from her bed and walked up to the door and opened it to see none other than Sterling Sharp. "What have you come to insult me about this time?" Blaeyde mused. Sterling looked like she had something to say but she just did not want to say it.
"Well? Cat got your tongue?" Blaeyde asked playfully.
Sterling exhaled loudly and said, "Lieutenant...Glacier was wondering if you would like to join us for lunch."
She said it as if she was hoping and praying that Blaeyde would turn down the offer, and Blaeyde could tell that Sterling was standing there without any desire to associate with her whatsoever.
"You know what? I think I would love to have lunch with you guys, but I have some stuff I was busy thinking over, and so I am going to pass this time. Next time maybe?" Blaeyde said, before slamming the door on the doctor's face and collapsing onto her bed. What began as just a small moan turned into a steady sobbing and then a flow of tears as Blaeyde thought over her life.
She knew that Sterling was long gone, but secretly she hoped that the other girl only knew what she had been through before she had judged her so harshly. But she was glad that at the same time that nobody saw her crying like this. It was too much. She did all she could to just stuff down and plow through pain and rejection, but a time like this when she was in a ship floating through the depths of space, she began to question all she had thought was true in her life. Blaeyde opened the window in her room and watched the thousands of stars and hundreds of galaxies fly by like chaff in the wind or the seeds of a dandelion being blown away into the breeze to wander forevermore through the sky. She stared into the passing cosmos, feeling so small, and she wondered if on the hundreds of thousands of planets passing by if there was one where a young girl was looking up at the vastness of space feeling as lost, forlorn, and alone as her.
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