AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Unfortunately, it got stretched out to over a hundred pages. Even though when she is good, she is very, very good. Speaking to the soul of the young malcontent, decades before even Albert Camus thought to do the same with The Stranger.
Camus was a lot less cliché, painting a clear and scintillating portrait of a man who genuinely didn’t care about society anymore. Though MacLean could be largely forgiven for her cliché on the grounds that it wasn’t cliché at the time she was writing. She was one of the trailblazers who started it, which is something in itself. I never thought that Edward Bulwer-Layton, the first brave soul to use ‘it was a dark and stormy night’ got enough credit. Especially after Snoopy turned it into a meme before there was even an internet.
I should let it go. Obsessing over things never really helped anyone. Even the people who harnessed their obsessions. Fine for them but I had yet to find a hill that I was willing to die on. Until Rachel.
There was obviously something very wrong. Who bursts into tears at the sight of someone who never hurt them? Granted I was in her apartment at the time but was also doing my very best to explain my presence. In calmest and logical terms. I even had visual aids!
To be fair, I should have known there was something different about her, possibly in the way there’s something different about me, when I saw the burns. Especially the cross.
Not that I was one to judge with my tattoos and the not insubstantial pentacle scarred into my back. The main difference, so far as I could tell, was that my markings were all completely found lethargy and I didn’t regret a single one of them. In my, admittedly limited experience, regret was genially for those who cared what other people thought, and we never did.
I didn’t know what it was, but I got the feeling that Rachel’s marks had been forced on her. Something to do with the location and the slight waviness of the lines. Like she had been struggling at the time.
Shit, she was at most eighteen and just barely legal to get such alterations and the ones she had looked older than that. The healing was far too deep. Meaning she had been even younger when it was done. In no position to legally consent even if she wanted to, which somehow, I doubted. Particularly with what the Bible had to say about marks upon the flesh. One of the primary reasons for tattoos, branding and scarring among the members of the Temple. Tell us not to do something and it is pretty much guaranteed that we will.
I just couldn’t let it go. Particularly if there was potential child abuse going on. We got a lot of shit about all the SRA crap. Even though there had yet to be a single verified case of it happening anywhere, ever. Which was a hell of a lot more than could be said for the Catholic Church, despite their best efforts. Slapping on my sleuth cap, in the metaphorical, got out my laptop and held my breath for some deep diving.
There tends to be an assumption that because I didn’t grow up in the middle class my childhood must have somehow been deprived. We didn’t have everything. That was for damn sure. As well as to be expected with five kids in the house and my dad working construction.
It got a bit better when my brother, and then I, got big enough to work as well. Putting more money in the family pot. It was part of why I almost thought of Amelia more as my daughter than my sister.
While we didn’t have everything we still had enough and certainly what we needed. Which my parents always considered counted computers. They were almost always hand-me-downs, straddling the line of what the companies swore up and down was ‘obsolescence,’ but we had them.
I didn’t have skills in a whole lot of areas, which I would be the first to tell you. The one thing I always seemed to be wonderful at was research. Which was how I got the grades to let me get into a top university. Money was a different matter, but we managed to work it out.
Rachel wasn’t an exceedingly rare name so it was going to take some doing to track her down. For all its drawbacks, and there were many, one thing Facebook had going for it was a streamlined search process. I looked for Rachels in our state, assuming we were children of the same soul. There were still over a thousand. To narrow things down a bit I added the university as a factor, getting the number of results down to and even forty. Much more manageable.
