Can Anyone Hear Me?

Prologue

How loud does a voice have to be in order to be heard? What is the exact definition of someone who would be considered a freak? What does it mean to be human? Since before I could remember, these were the thoughts that would go through my head everyday. Imagine being completely mute to the world where no one can hear your voice and you feel trapped in your own silence. The only way that I ever communicated with people was through text messages or writing a note. Many eyes stare at me every time I walk by the hallways and I cannot blame them for that. No matter how loud my heart is screaming to say what I feel, my mind won't make a peep into the void of noise in the world. My name is Christy Hamilton and I have spent my whole life as a foster child, moving from home to home while not settling in completely. I never had a stable family, never had a kiss goodnight, nor have I had Christmas in a place where I could call home. I have prayed to whoever watched us from above, countless times for a chance at a normal life. I hoped that one Christmas, I may lay my head on something that is not made of stone, or eat food that were merely scraps from what was left. Maybe someday, someone will hear me, as quiet as my voice is, and relieve me from this life.
I never knew my parents as my mother died the night I was home from the hospital and my father had gotten a heart attack two years later. What I probably remembered from them is stored too far into my subconscious to where I could recall. So now I spend my life jumping from home to home in an attempt to be a part of a family. So far, it has been nothing but a weekend at a family's house before I was sleeping in the walls of the orphanage once again. Not that I could blame them from sending me back. From the time I was about four years old, strange things would start happening around me-things that would send any reasonable person running the other direction. It all started when I was sitting with my foster family, who I was with for three years, everything was running together smoothly. One night however, I was having this strange nightmare about a baby crying in a crib. It was odd because the baby seemed to be very sweet and innocent to be in a room of something so awful. She was crying in the nursery. That is when I saw flashes of flames erupt from the room to where a woman was in the midst of but she was on ceiling, above the baby's crib. I had never been able to get some decent sleep since my first three nights of the recurring nightmare. It felt so real and I still get images of the flames in the back of my mind. The screaming of the nightmares is the primary reason for my constant return to the orphanage. It was always too much for the foster parents to handle.
Once I had finally graduated high school, I somehow got to escape the horrors of being an orphan and got enrolled in a college to pursue a degree in Biology.
However, because fate loves me so much, it happened that the first night of class that things would begin to happen. Things that would turn any horror film to shame. Little did I know, that very first day of classes would change my perspective of life forever.