Chapter 2: School is too easy.

When I was fifteen years old I decided that it was time to stop educating myself at home. I wanted to go to school, be a normal person, not sit in front of piles of books all day. Yes, I had fun reading and studying things that I later realised were from higher courses than I was supposed to be. However, every time I went down to the village I heard the gossip about me and my family. Every year that I went out of school, the gossip got worse and I no longer had my uncle to protect me.

I lived alone in my house, had no friends and was the perfect definition of a freak. I was quite clever when it came to medical science, always carried a book under my arm, knew a thousand and one ways of killing with a tree leaf and could list all the poisons in the world in alphabetical order and in order of toxicity. In addition, my great love for novels, both graphic and normal, was not to be missed. Above all, because I loved superheroes, but villains were my weak point. Every book I read about murders, robberies and adventures was a story to avoid making the same mistakes.

I believe that the love I had for villains with a tragic history came from my own past. You might think that a fifteen year old girl can't have much of a past, but you are wrong. My parents died when I was one year old and I had to go through many not very nice foster homes. I was never treated very well in any of them and I always ended up running away. They were nightmares, one after the other, from which one could not wake up. I especially remember one of the last ones. The child they had was very good to me, as was the father, but they were dominated by the mother. That harpy with the sharp claws and the number one fan of needles and Botox. The father helped me to escape from their domain.

There was another foster home, the last one. The one I really ran away from in terror. I still cannot close my eyes without fearing that the same thing that happened there will happen now.

I don't know how or even why I managed to get to my biological parents' house considering that I didn't even know who they were and in what condition I was. But there was my dear uncle, a lonely, good and sincere man, owner of the village pub, to explain to me everything I needed to know. If it wasn't for him, I would still be half dead in the desert or part of the worst of the mafia. I thank God that I look like my mother much more than I would be willing to admit and that her brother loved her as much as he loved me.

It was my uncle who gave me the courage to go to school. I regret that I didn't go when he told me the first time. Maybe he could have seen me graduate, even go to university. However, the bullets would have gone much faster, the cancer would have spread more quickly and I would probably be in the same situation as now, complaining about his absence. I loved him so much, and I still do. He was the father figure I never had: Affectionate, with a big heart, but he was very wretched.

The first day of school, I carried him around in my mind, thinking that he would be very proud of me. I did all the paperwork to get in, without any help from anyone. It was a public school, the only thing I thought I could afford at the time. I still hadn't discovered my parents' large reserve of gold, jewellery and money. It would take a few months, even years.

I entered a very small class, there were about fifteen of us, all the children of the village. Many murmured when they saw me enter after the teacher's order. She reproached them with her eyes, but they did not pay much attention to her. I heard one of them say: "She's the strange girl from the haunted mansion" and another: "I'm sure it was she who killed her parents".

The teacher introduced me in order to spare me the ill-intentioned questions of my classmates. At the end of her little speech of motivation and obligation to the rest of her students to be good to me, they applauded without much enthusiasm. All except two girls, one who applauded as if it was the best thing she had ever heard and the other who didn't flinch and scrutinised me as if I was an alien.

The enthusiastic girl asked me to sit next to her with a gesture touching the chair that was between her and the one who was watching me. Her name was Lydia, she was short, with brown hair and wore glasses. As soon as I sat next to her I knew at that moment that her heart was made of gold. She put on her glasses properly, hugged me and introduced herself. When she saw that her friend was introducing herself nicely, the girl who didn't applaud did the same, but without saying her name. No one in the class knew, they called her as her parents did, which was not her real name so I found out days later. She had long black hair. Her eyes were dark brown, she said they were ugly, but they were not. Above all, because she needs dark eyes and so on for her current work.

After class, the three of us talked for a long time. They were nice and were the only ones who dared to talk to me. The other students watched us from the small football field in the courtyard and whispered to each other that it was normal for the strange new girl to join the geeks in the class. I don't have a privileged ear, that's Lydia, she told me what they were saying.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

After the break, it was time for maths class. Everyone looked at the problems in horror, the three of us did them in two minutes. Lydia looked at me with her big excited eyes, the other girl congratulated me and asked me about my real level of maths. I answered that I had done problems from a book that was in my house. She answered that that book was for the first year of Physics. I couldn't believe it. What was the first year physics book doing in my library if neither of my parents had studied physics? It was the strangest thing, however, I stopped asking as soon as I got my first maths test.

We met to study every afternoon, to solve doubts among ourselves and help each other with the subjects. The parents of both of them accepted me as if I were just another one in the house. I never had the same feeling of acceptance again. We got along so well that we made a group that would lead us far into this world. The time we had left over after doing our homework every day, we used to be together. We played games, designed strange things and watched movies to build even stranger things in the garage of Lydia's best friend's parents. In short, they were the best years of my life.

We were always together, we didn't separate until it was time to go home. We never had other friends, but we were so close, so close that we considered ourselves sisters from different families. We didn't mind spending our weekends alone, and whenever one of us had a problem, the others would come to her rescue in seconds. Every year of high school was like that. The last one, however, slightly changed our friendship.

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