Prologue
Prologue
Children could be cruel.
“You’re so pathetic!”
“Get away from me!”
“No one said you could come here!”
Children were supposed to be innocent, but few recognized how innocence could still lead to cruelty. Inflicting pain on others didn’t always begin with conscious malice.
“Go home!”
“I can smell your stink from over here!”
Some forms of misery were only known to those who had been dragged through the mud—a sadness that comes with the experience of being soiled. Those who didn’t know the feeling could be vicious, as they couldn’t understand the pain of the wounded.
“No one wants to be friends with a loser like you!”
Those who were protected by the exemption of childhood had no responsibility for their words. Was it a sin to not know pain? Could one vilify a child, who knew not what he did?
“What’s wrong with her? Is she completely stupid?”
“Don’t look at me like that, ugly!”
But worthy of blame or not, young cruelty still led to pain. The girl on the ground curled up and whimpered.
“What’s wrong?”
Almost instinctively, she kept her eyes low as she glanced up.
“What’s your name?”
She stared, quivering. Her name was known throughout town and closely associated with her shame— an outcast child, born to a vagrant woman after an affair with a town youth. She didn’t want to speak it.
“Do you have any friends?”
It was too much of a bother to even shake her head.
“You don’t?” he asked, his expression a peculiar combination of a smile and a pout. It was hard to guess what he thought of the girl, who gave him neither affirmation nor denial. “To tell you the truth, I don’t have any friends, either. I just moved here and…”
The boy’s sad smile moved her. She tried to respond, but only managed to croak.
Whenever she said anything, someone snapped about the stench of her breath; and whenever she formed an opinion into a sentence, she was labeled impudent. So she’d given up using words. She said nothing more than the bare minimum of what was necessary.
“My health’s pretty bad, y’know? So I can’t run, and nobody wants to play with the kid who can’t run.”
He held out a hand to her. The girl blinked and looked at it in surprise.
“Will you play with me?” he asked timidly.
The girl didn’t move. The boy’s hand was small and frail, but the girl didn’t see that. To be offered something she had dreamed of for so long… she thought that tiny hand could cup the world.