Pg. 11

And so this is how it started.

When I was eleven, Aaron moved back to town. I'd only been there for two years, but they were the years that he'd been away.

Everyone welcomed him warmly, and I knew why immediately. He had these giant green eyes that would stare at you, focus on you, ignore everything else while you were talking. Or ignore you completely.

He had power, it came from him in waves, off the top of his head, from his eyes, his hands. You could feel it when you sat next to him. And it might not have been any real kind of magic, but you could tell when he was thinking (his body hummed) or angry (his body vibrated) or happy (his body purred).

Everyone always tried to make him happy.

After a few days, he really started to notice me. It wasn't love, we were only children. But we'd hold hands, we'd talk, and he'd whisper stories to me when we were alone, which was as often as he could make it.

But the very beginning?

"Who are you?" He asked.

I told him. "My name is Cynara. It's stupid." It wasn't just stupid, of course. It showed my parents to be who they really are: Strange, different, far too liberal, not following the same Books as everyone else. It showed me to be who I really was: A child with a strange name, strange ways.

"Cyn," he laughed. "Perfect. My mother will hate you, Cyn, and your name will make her angry. You should come home with me at once." His frankness and strange forms of honesty always scared me, more at the beginning and the end than in the middle. But that's when things were complicated, as they always are, at the beginnings and the endings of them.

So everyone noticed that he chose me to be his friend, and people who had never paid me attention before started listening. People who'd been cruel to me before were jealous, but kinder. People who'd been... Friendly, friendlike, anything but friends, were scared.

No one would ever explain these changes to me, but eventually I realized, I saw, I understood.

I didn't go home with him that day, I went to my home instead. In fact, it was months before I finally agreed to go home with him.

In that time, we would wander around the yard between classes, holding hands, whispering, joining in other games. But he always singled me out, and I felt really special. The easiest way to lead people astray is to make them feel special, I see that now.

When I finally went home with him, his mother didn't hate me. She did hate my name and offered to have me baptized.

"But I've been baptized, when I was a baby." I told her.

"You can't have been. 'Cyn' is not a real name." She informed me with a sweet, sweet smile on her face. She was a cartoon mother, with chocolate cookies and milk at the door every afternoon when her many children got home. She always had extra for the strays they brought back with them, too.

"Oh, but it is, it's my name." Things are so simple when you're 11. It was my name. Never mind that it didn't feature in the Book, that didn't matter. How was I to know my parents had decided to keep me a pagan forever, regardless of my beliefs and pursuits in faith?

His mother just looked at me, still smiling, but clearly not enjoying the turn this conversation had taken. She had obviously decided that I would be overjoyed to be re-baptized with a more suitable name, one she had chosen.

I wasn't.

But she let me play with him anyway, she kept serving me cookies. She would invite me over for dinner, and allow me to sleep over in his sisters' room if I wanted to. I rarely did, but there were times when I needed it and she never questioned me outright about why.

She never called me Cynara, either. She changed my name, something good and Bookish, something she could understand. She chose Chrissa, which was close, but not quite. It was still pagan sounding, but in reality meant "anointed," and this was good enough for her.