Seal of Destiny (32 page)

The offending trip site appeared to be the unlucky combination of over-stacked arms, a renegade tree root, and vision-obstructing spectacles … either that or she had just tripped over her own feet, which wouldn’t be the first time.

The bulky frames, which more resembled bat wings, were bent under a heavy textbook with torn brown paper —
Advanced French
disguised as
Advanced German
— but luckily the lenses were spared — an odd reaction for someone with perfect vision. To say the least, these were no ordinary lenses — they were heavy-rimmed, yellow-tinted, rhinestone-bearing spectacles that were an acute source of misery and humiliation dating as far back as Michaela could remember.

The first pair had started out well enough in comparison, but each had grown with overzealous compensation as she aged into her teen years. The latest design, which had only been forced upon her with considerable objections, and was the almighty thorn of contention between herself and Aunt Hazel, sported wing-like protrusions that not only blocked views but often clipped walls, doorways, and occasionally other students as she maneuvered her way through the school halls. It was a barking miracle she could see through the inch-thick, rippling glass at all.

Those horrible bat-like contusions were conspicuous to the highest degree and had attracted far more than her fair share of unwanted attention, exposing her to much ridicule, and turning her into ten times the spectacle she normally was, which wasn’t much, as misbehaving around Aunt Hazel brought severe psychological punishment to the wrongdoer.

Hazel Fidelia, Michaela’s aunt on the maternal side, had the rigid posture of an iceberg — personality included — and had become an extreme recluse after her entire family was killed in a horrible accident nearly twenty years ago. Of her long list of unbendable rules, the number one, rock-solid, mother enchilada, which must never be broken under any circumstances (under threat of excruciating and ambiguous punishments) was this: the bubbly, yellow spectacles were never to come off — except at night when sleeping, of course. Michaela added that last part of the rule without Aunt Hazel’s knowledge.

Punctuality was also a biggie in the vast rulebook of Hazeldom.

Aunt Hazel’s hostility ran along the high-nosed snobbery scales and was generally indicated by the rigid stance of her skeletal frame. She had ashen hair, piled atop a short frame, and exuded the impression of towering impunity; she was not to be questioned. Michaela imaged she must have been a prison warden in a former life. One tap of her pointy shoe was a sure sign of impending volatility, which is what Michaela would earn for her tardiness this day.

After years of acceding to Hazel’s because-I-said-so explanation regarding her eyewear, Michaela assumed there had to be a practical reason for such extreme measures, and as a young girl, finally summoned up the courage to question her aunt about it.

Hazel lowered her article titled
Changing Your Identity
and turned slowly to face Michaela — a rare occurrence in and of itself. She looked down her long, straight nose with intense scrutiny, and as the temperature gauge on her tolerance barometer plummeted to subzero, her lips curved with contempt, causing ice crystals to crust over a young Michaela’s heart.

“It’s because you have a rare
disease
,” Hazel said, emphasizing the last word with a double measure of disdain, “which … ” her teeth cut across each other in cruel, white stacks, “causes your eyes to need extra protection from the light.” Hazel made as if to turn back to her article, then paused with a second thought.

“And if you stop wearing them, you might go blind.”

Even at the ripe old age of seven and one-half, Michaela could see that this uncontested wisdom had a few holes in it, and one day when her spectacles were broken at school during a lethal game of field hockey, Michaela took her chance to question the school nurse about it.

The nurse chided her directly for believing, “such tall tales,” and Michaela’s eyewear was declared to be “no more protective than a drop of honey.”

It was at this stage that the bat-like extensions became the new norm on Michaela’s face. Hidden behind those double-lensed apertures were brilliant green eyes pricked with gold reflections to match her long, unmanageable hair, forever in tangles. A light sprinkling of freckles trailed over her small, dutiful nose and highly etched cheekbones. She had a small frame and looked ordinary enough when de-spectaclized, or so Michaela thought most nights when reviewing her reflection in the bedroom window. This was a time of liberation and reflection, a chance to feel like herself again, if only for a few seconds. It was a ritual of renewal that pressed the reset button of Michaela’s daily life.

That night, after finding the watch, as every other night when Michaela switched off the lights, two green blurs rippled across the window as she slipped into bed and curled up to a rag of dark-blue silk with faded, gold threading, that once passed for a blanket: the only gift her parents had left her. A chunk was missing from one corner.

Every so often, unbeknownst to Michaela, two tiny green blurs would blink back at her from off in the darkness.

In her early teens, Michaela begrudgingly continued to wear the kamikaze lenses out of fear of getting caught, and on the one occasion she
did
daringly slide the unruly specs from her face, paranoia lurked and multiplied, and every person she met became a potential spy for Aunt Hazel. It was the longest ten minutes of Michaela’s life and remained a hushed secret in her miniature stockpile of seditious moments.

In retrospect, however, Michaela began to wonder if the true reason behind the social-killing monstrosities might have something to do with her
other
secret.

On the first day of the eighth grade, Michaela made an alarming discovery. The bell between classes had just rung. She pulled out her schedule and squinted through the bubbly lenses to see what was next on the agenda: German.

Podge, who was the bullying bane of her grade school existence, approached in the hallway, flanked by his trademark gang of troublemakers. He was tall, freckly and heavy-set with bleached bangs against black hair. He gave off the impression of an overstuffed skunk with permanent sweat stains on his chest and pits. Michaela sighed and prepared for the worst, lamenting that he had survived the summer without falling off the planet or dying of a serious case of smelliness.

“Ahoy, Wings,” he taunted with his usual unimaginative greeting, “Those things are so big, you could light them on fire and jump hoops through them!”

His gang broke into laughter.

Michaela rolled her eyes. It’s not as if they could see her anyway.

“You should join the circus!” Another boy from the gang chimed in, as another began a rousing chorus of
When I See an Elephant Fly.
They all started flapping their hands next to their faces as the singing escalated.

Other students stopped to observe, many of them laughing, many of them frozen. Most of them, apart from the regular hecklers, only joined in to keep from getting on Podge’s bad side. Michaela got a few apologetic looks before people dashed into other hallways and classrooms.

At long last Michaela finally managed to make it to class, disheveled, but feeling lucky to have avoided ramming into any lockers or students along the way. She took a seat at the back of the class. There she could hide in the blissful void of unacknowledged existence while mapping out a Podge-free path for future use. Sometimes, the breaks between classes seemed longer than the rest of the day combined.

When the teacher got up and introduced herself, Michaela assumed she would be speaking English for at least the first few minutes, but her assumption was wrong:

“Bonjour. Je m’appelle Madame Bouvier. Comment allez vous?”

Michaela jerked up in her seat, fully alert. This wasn’t German at all — everyone knew “bonjour” was French. There must have been an error on her schedule. As she fumbled to recheck her room assignment, the teacher continued speaking, drawing Michaela’s attention: she understood every word, and even more astonishingly, began responding in her head. There were times during the lesson when it felt so natural, Michaela lost track of which language they were speaking.

A small thrill warmed her from the inside out. It was the first time she had ever encountered anything that might be linked to her past, and French class became Michaela’s guarded little secret. She even went so far as to learn a few German verbs for Aunt Hazel’s benefit. The language she was learning in school was much less elaborate than the Esperanto version in her head, and Michaela greatly enjoyed adding to it, rearranging it, filling it with the formal parts she innately knew were missing.

Aunt Hazel had a strong aversion to discussing Michaela’s origins, particularly her family, so this new discovery awakened a fresh vigor in Michaela’s efforts toward her studies, in the hopes of finding more clues from her past. According to what little she could glean from Aunt Hazel, her parents had died in a hiking accident. Michaela was nearly three years old before coming to stay with her aunt, and very few memories existed before that time, just a few vague scenes that flashed in the wee hours of the morning before succumbing to consciousness: a mossy pond in a courtyard of stone and an ethereal voice that whispered a form of her name.

Kayla.

Every so often a high-pitched tune played solo in her head, one she could never quite catch. At first it was comforting, but it always left her feeling empty and vulnerable. Michaela sometimes found herself humming that tune, but the moment she became aware of it, the tune would vanish from her head.

These days, the lonely ticking of the gold pocket-watch that she now carried everywhere had become a talisman of sorts. The miniature painting in the cover was finely detailed. The woman had light-blue eyes and dark ringlets around her oval face. Her expression was soft and warming, as if observed by the one she loved. Michaela was drawn to it, staring at it for long periods of time, feeling somehow filled by it.

A few weeks after coming across the watch, Michaela awoke to a loud slam. Her bedroom door crashed into the wall and Aunt Hazel flipped on the lights.

“What is all this racket? Who is here?”

“N … no one,” Michaela croaked, shielding her eyes from the sudden brightness. Her pajamas and forehead were damp, and she was pretty sure she had awoken from a nightmare. Now she was having one in real life, too.

Aunt Hazel swiftly searched the room, ripping open the closet doors, flipping back the curtains, checking the lock on the window, pulling out drawers, and peering under the bed.

“I know very well that someone else was here. I’m sure the whole neighborhood could hear!”

Which was doubtful as they lived at least a mile from the nearest neighbor and the property was surrounded by giant trees and fencing, installed by the crazy, paranoid recluse who was her aunt!

“And what lang — you are supposed to be learning German!”

Aunt Hazel’s voice took on a dangerous, unstable tone, daggers shot from her narrowed eyes.

“Who is this Conrad?” she spat, her hands pinned to her bony hips waiting for an answer. “Some boy from school I presume.”

Aunt Hazel’s voice trembled and Michaela saw that she
needed
that to be the truth as she clutched the cross that hung around her neck. Her aunt was not religious, but she clung to it, desperately, as she resurveyed the room.

“Conrad?” Confusion lit Michaela’s bright, green eyes.

“Oh, do not try that innocent act with me. When I find … ” but Aunt Hazel did not elaborate on how she planned to deal with this imagined intruder.

Hazel re-searched the room, this time pulling clothes from the closet, tearing things out from under the bed, and emptying drawers onto the carpeting.

A dull thud hit the carpet and the gold pocket-watch popped open.

Aunt Hazel jerked to a halt, her eyes ablaze as she stared at it. The small portrait seemed to fill the whole room. Hazel’s translucent face drained to a pale lilac and the veins in her neck strained against her skin. Her voice shook with a dangerous, wild edge.

“Where did you get this?” Her teeth cut across in shearing scrapes. In a violent fit, she raced across the room and whip-slapped Michaela, hard.

“Where?” she shrieked, but didn’t wait for a reply. She had finally looked her charge directly in the face. She grabbed the bat wings from the nightstand and jammed them onto Michaela’s ears.

“These do not come off!” Her voice amped up several thousand decibels and now resembled the mating screeches of eels. She stood in the doorway, her chest heaving, the watch dangling from her clutches. After she regained some of her rigid composure, her icy voice cut the air.

“Ever.”

Michaela’s cheek tingled where a reddening handprint surfaced. She sat on the bed in a slight daze. Aunt Hazel had inadvertently given her some valuable information, and it sank into her with a light feeling of perfect rightness. Familiarity rang in the very essence of that name.

Conrad.

She whispered it until it became a part of her and then fell into a happy slumber, spectacles askew.

Peace, however, does not last forever, and Aunt Hazel’s wrath was swift and relentless. Were it not for the refuge of renewed inner warmth on the arctic island of Hazel-gone-nuts, the next few weeks of Michaela’s life would have been unendurable.