Ignorance (BEING REWRITTEN. SEE 'THE REVOLT')

Chapter Four

I’m sitting in my room with some clothes lain out on my bed; five tops, one dark red, two black, one white, one grey; two pairs of trousers, my school ones and some jeans I found at the bottom of my wardrobe; one jumper; one pair of shoes which I’ll wear; and some underwear and socks. I feel as if my whole life is splayed out across these plain sheets. I hear light footsteps and I shove the clothes onto the floor and kick them under my bed just before Elara comes in. “Hey,” I say to her and she opens the door, her slight frame swaying as she walked.

“Hey Luca,” She smiles, I notice a gap in between her teeth where she’s obviously lost one. “ I lost my first tooth.” She says, grinning proudly at me. I smile back and pull her into a tight hug,

“That means you’re getting old, before you know it your hair will be all grey and you’ll be all wrinkly.” I kiss her forehead gently and sit cross-legged on the cold, hard floor of my small room. She sits opposite me and starts fiddling with her blonde hair, it’s the same colour I had when I was her age. 

“When did you lose your first tooth?” She asks me,

“I must have been about six,” I grin at her, “Now look how old I am,” I laugh, distorting my face to give myself creases in my forehead.

“You look like Dad when you do that.” She giggles and rocks backwards and forwards slightly as she does so.

“Oh come one, I don’t look that old.” This makes her laugh and I smile back, it soundly hits me what I’m leaving behind. All this for a group of strangers that I’ve known for a few hours. Somehow it still feels right. “Hey,” I shuffle forwards slightly and hunch over so our noses are level. “Have I ever told you the story about the boy who liked books too much?” She shakes her head from side to side. “I think you’ll like it, come on.” I get up and lift her up, she’s still small enough for me to lift. I set her down on my bed and sit down opposite her. 

“What’s the boy’s name?” she asks, she looks so happy, she’s the happiest person I know. I sometimes wonder whether that’s because she see’s the good in everything or if it’s just because she is too young to see the bad.

“Timmy,” I say after pausing slightly to think. She seems to approve so I carry on. “Now Timmy, he’s not very old, but he’s very tall. He has messy hair that he hates and his teeth are all crooked. He spends all of his time in his room reading books that he finds in shops down the backstreets of the city where he lives. You see, most books are banned there and he really likes books so he’ll do anything to get his hands on them. So one day, he’s reading this book and he realises that there’s all this stuff he doesn’t know. This makes him feel a bit sad but also kind of happy because there’s all this stuff out there that he can learn, the only problem is that this stuff is hard to find.

“He starts going for walks everyday, looking for new things to find out about, to fill his head all the way up. Then, suddenly, he notices things that he didn’t notice before. There’s people out there, loads of people, who think like him, act like him, want to know things like him. He meets some of these people are they turn out to be really cool and they ask him if he wants to come and live with them in this secret hideout they have right in the centre of the city but no one knows about it. The problem is, Timmy has a little sister called Maya who he loves a lot. He loves her more than anyone else in the world but he knows that he has to go.”

“But why does he have to go?”

“Because he has to save the world.” I say with an incredibly forced smile than anyone about the age of eight could tell wasn’t real but luckily, Elara is too young to tell the difference between real and fake emotion.