Daisy and Destiny

Chapter 3

Surprising myself by the second, I get up, grab a hall pass by the door, and walk out.

I saw the girl sitting against my locker on her phone.

She looked up at me with her eyes a bit wide.

"Come sit down," she says. Ok, so she speaks English. I've never heard her talk before. And she has no accent.

I probably look like an idiot standing there, so I sit down next to her.

I take out my write board I use to talk and write:

"What are you doing?"

She reads it and says, "I'm researching people..."

Her voice trails off. She's hiding something.

I write in huge letters:

"What?!"

She sighs, guilty.

"I'm researching people like you."

I'm confused. People like me? Does she mean people who can't talk? What is she researching?

"I'm confused," I write down.

"I'm trying to figure out what made you not able to talk. I want... to help cure it. I don't know.... I guess I wanna hear your voice."

"I was born with it," I wrote down.

"Born with what?"

"Born being mute," I wrote. I don't use that word a lot. Mute.

I see her searching her phone and reading.

I cover her screen with my hand. She looks at me.

I begin to write.

"Listen, there's one cure. But it's so hard to find that no one's ever been able to find it. Or at least that's what my parents told me. There's no hope for me."

"If there's a cure," she says. "Then I'm going to find it if it's the last thing I do."

Why would she want to do that? What's so special about me that she needs to do that. Why do I interest her so much?

"Ok, so to be honest... I might know the reason that you're not able to talk. There's something I need to show you," she says. "But not here. Not now. After school in the girl's bathroom."

I nod.

As soon as I do, the teacher comes out and sees us. I look at the clock. We've been out here for 20 minutes!

The teacher looks us straight in the eye and says:

"Detention."