My Own Four Cents [2016]

Chapter 1: A Horror Movie

Hi guys! I'm Harry Potter Nerd. This is Maria Valasquez's story. I made up every single one of these characters, so if it happens to share a name with someone you know, I promise you I had no idea. Please comment if you like it, because I get a big kick out of it. Enjoy! :) :) :) This chapter is dedicated to my friend GardianV, who introduced me to Wattpad! Thank you for helping me share my stories! And thank you to my awesome readers! Without you, I would have no reason to write!

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My life is like a movie being watched on someone else's computer... and they're wearing the headphones. Everything is silent. It's been silent for my entire life. I have never heard anything since I was born.

I was thrown into my life against my will, a girl with no family and no hearing. I feel like I live in a horror movie.

My name is Maria Valasquez, and it drives me crazy that I can't make a difference. I long to make a difference, to myself, to deaf people, to the world. There are millions of things that happen to me and the world, and it's like a horror movie (a silent horror movie)-- I see everything happening around me, but I can't do anything about it. I just watch it happen, as much as I would like to scream and stop the movie so I don't have to watch something so awful, but it's life, not a movie. I just have to cope with it.

When people look at me they see a sort of short, thin thirteen year old girl. Almost fourteen. She has black hair that goes down to her shoulders and blue eyes. She usually wears a sweater or T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. She always has a shiny gold locket shaped like a heart around her neck. There are two stupid, useless things sticking out of the sides of her head: my ears. Absolutely useless.

I can't speak; I can't even hear the sounds I make. So I usually try not to make noise, because I don't know what I'm saying. It just makes people look at me weirdly. Instead of speaking, I use sign language. Unfortunately, only a few people can speak sign language, so a lot of times I have to write things down instead.

In the thirteen years I've been alive, I've been able to use my other senses to make up for being deaf. I can see. I can smell and taste, and I can feel. But I don't know what birds or trucks sound like. I've never heard someone whistling or singing or clapping their hands. I've never heard thunder. I don't know what loud or soft means. I don't know what music sounds like. I don't know what a fire alarm sounds like, although that blinking light that means it's going off gives me nightmares.

I can read and write. I learned to read when I was three. I went to a private school for the deaf starting when I was four, and learned to speak sign language. Then I could communicate with almost everybody-- with my hands or with a pad of paper or a whiteboard. I can communicate fairly well without being able to speak. I can read letters and emails. I can keep myself safe. I can run pretty fast. I can smell smoke. I can feel heat and see flames or other emergency stuff. I know I keep coming back onto the topic of fire-- it has a very big meaning in my life.

The most horrible scene in the horror movie of my life happened when I was seven.

I have no family. I once had a family. There was one day, the worst day, that changed that. And even though that day was six years ago, it still haunts me to this day.

I remember the date: it was 5:00 in the afternoon on Friday, March 13, six years ago. I was walking home from the cab that took me to and from my school, a private school specifically for kids who were deaf. I lived on 19 Elm Street in Northborough, Massachusetts. I saw something that looked like steam coming from the top of the street, where my house was located. I also smelled a peculiar odor in the air. It smelled like the time my parents, my sister and I went camping and we roasted marshmallows over a campfire. I remembered I kept dropping the marshmallows into the fire and crying, then getting over it and watching them burn up and bubble like crazy. I realized the smell was smoke. I sped up. I rounded the corner, and saw the worst horror movie scene yet.