Broken Child | ✓

Chapter Three

Broken. Sick. Infectious. Insane. The insults Cecilia heard every day didn't get any less painful the more she heard them. They were nothing new—they'd been said around Cecilia since kindergarten—but they stung. Oh yes, they stung. and they stung bad.

Technically, insulting was against the rules, but then again, wasn't it against the rules everywhere? And yet the rules didn't seem to stop people from hurling insults at Cecilia and pulling their children away whenever she passed. She was a broken child. That was why her mother had pushed her out. That was why she was never included.

With the amount of "information" people knew about broken children, it surprised Cecilia that there weren't more, but in all the years she'd been one, Cecilia had never come across another. And it wouldn't be hard to tell if she did. She would be able to see the color, after alt—everyone would be able to. What they didn't know, though, was that a lot of things had color. "Unbroken" people just couldn't see them.

"Broken child," someone hissed, jumping away as Cecilia accidentally bumped into them. Gray tears threatened to pour out of Cecilia's eyes, but she held them in. She would not give people the satisfaction to know that they had "broken" the broken child. She couldn't.

As Cecilia passed the crowds, she wondered, once more, if her mother was in one of them. And if so, did she stare at Cecilia with love and pity? Or with hatred and fear? Did she try to defend her secret daughter, or did she insult her, just like everyone else? Oh, how Cecilia longed to know.

Cecilia was just nearing the school when she saw something in the distance. There was a flash of something—color! The word popped into Cecilia's head, like it had before, but Cecilia knew it wasn't color. Color was red, not...well, not whatever thing the flash had been like. But then she remembered the leaf that morning and the strange occurrence the night before...Cecilia hesitated for a minute, then started in the direction of the flash.

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Cecilia's feet were beginning to ache and she had no idea what time it was, but she knew she had to keep going. She'd probably already been marked absent at the school, but she doubted people would be worried—after all, why would they be? She was the broken child.

Cecilia had never wandered this far before. She'd never been beyond the boundaries; she'd never gone to where the buildings and people disappeared and all that was left was gray. Lots and lots of gray. And...color. But the color was like nothing Cecilia had seen before. It wasn't red. Rather, it was red mixed with something else.

The strange look of her surroundings confused Cecilia more than anything else in the past had—more than finding out she was a broken child had—but something inside of her told her to keep walking; told her that she would find something important. And so she did.