I don’t know if he remembers the day we met. To me, it is unforgettable; the cold face of the wall beneath my fingers as I slipped in through the door, clutching the stuffed toy cat to my chest and my feet softly tapping on the wooden floor. My heart beat fervently, matched only by the cat’s plaintive mews. Its cotton tail swatted my stomach, beaded eyes hidden behind my arm as though it, too, was aware of the apprehension heavy in the air. Except for my shoes, the cat, and the constant ticking of the clock, there was only silence to greet my entrance. They wouldn’t meet my eyes, the other children, frozen in the midst of whatever game it was they had been playing before. My stare wandered to each of them in turn, the three girls and four boys, and they all seemed to shudder, as though the weight of my eyes was a torture they could not bear to face. A new school, a new situation, but it was the same old reaction.
Someone brushed past me, shoving me none too gently into the wall. I didn’t say anything, simply stared down at my feet. It was the protesting squeal of the cat had the boy turning - I could see his abused trainers spinning in my direction - an apology quickly spilling from his lips. When he apologised my head shot up in confusion. He couldn’t mean me, surely? I grazed his pointed, youthful face, from the chaotic tangle of mousy brown hair, passed his starting emerald eyes and the slightly hooked tip of his nose, to slightly parted lips of a cherub. The collective gasp that shuddered through the room made me remember myself, and I ducked my head once more, pressing myself more forcefully back into the wall. What would he saw, now that he had seen them? I didn’t care to know; I’d heard everything before.
But all he said was, “cool,” and grabbed the crook of my elbow, dragging me into the centre of the classroom. My feet stumbled beneath me, the mews of the cat more pronounced than my feeble attempts at “no” and “stop”. You can’t stop him when he gets something on his mind. Rather like a bull, he’ll drive on, regardless, until he has accomplished his goal. Or he is dead. The seven children struggled, still, to avert their eyes, until he cleared his throat. “Everyone, this is…” he turned to me, smiling gently as he coaxed my name from my lips. I had to repeat it twice before he heard the murmur. “Elizabeth Wells. Elizabeth – can I call you Lizzie?” My face screwed up in distaste. “I didn’t think you looked like a Lizzie.” Though he was no older than me, he spoke with all the seriousness of someone older. “And you aren’t a Beth either.” He tilted his head absently to one side. It was on the tip of my tongue to say that ‘Elizabeth’ was fine, when he snapped his fingers and the desire to speak retreated. “I know, we’ll call you Wells.” He turned to me, a wide smile on his face as he accepted me.
And that was how I fell in love with Samson.

Mrs Evans was a portly woman, barely taller than us, the nine eleven year olds scattered through the class room. I recall her as little more than that since she was our tutor for such short period of time. I know that she had a finger that was a little crooked, a withered husk of skin and bone, that would scratch uselessly across the black board as she wrote and there were times when she would stare mindlessly across the room, her eyes unblinking and puckered mouth a gape. Samson once found this black and white photograph of her back before she lost her power. There was nothing but a name connecting Mrs Evans, the teacher, to the elegant and graceful Lady Swift in the photo and, to this day, I do not know what happened to her.
What I remember her most for was that second day, when Keela, the stuffed cat, perked up on my desk and eyed her with all the intent of a dog, staring after a leg of ham. Or a cat watching a bird. Mrs Evans made a sound rather like a chicken, the papers in her hands on ‘The Art of Control’ slipping from her fingers to the floor. Just as Keela prepared to launch itself at her, I grabbed the cat around the middle and – what I can only described as sucked – the life back into myself. Keela immediately flopped boneless in my hands, and I settled the limp, stuffed cat on the desk, its beady eyes turned back to me in a look of accusation.
There is a certain time when silence becomes noise, so heavy has it fallen. If I had released this power in another classroom, in another school, this is the silence, the torment and the mortification that I would have been faced with. I know what it is like to be shunned because of a defect that you have revealed; even if I did not have the ability to animate objects, my eyes are two distinctively different colours, one piercing blue, and the other emerald green. For as long as I can remember, people have taken one glance at me, and retreated. This is only more evidenced by my twin sister, Delilah, who is identical to me in every way, except for her beautiful blue eyes, and the fact that, unlike me, she is without power. I know, deep down inside them, my parents love me, but there is no doubt in my mind that they, and everyone around us, love Delilah more than they will ever love me.
But I wouldn’t have met Samson, if I had been normal.
Samson looked across the room at me, beneath the fringe of his hair, a lopsided smile on his face. My head ducked immediately. I could still feel the weight of his gaze, however, even though I could not see it. Mrs Evans nodded to herself, slowly bending to retrieve the papers she’d dropped, and continued handing them out, eyes fixed on Keela as she made her way around my desk. When she returned to the board, something sailed across the room towards me, tapping my arm before sliding down onto the table. My first note. I opened it suspiciously, waiting for the expected drop, when it would say something malicious, or had been, in fact, meant for someone else.
Samson’s writing was a messy, illegible scrawl, and it took me a while to understand what the note said. When I did, my heart stuttered awake inside my chest, warmth flooding my face. That’s cool. Wanna hang after school?
I turned my head, meeting his gaze with my damaged one. There was only determination in his eyes, a glint of familiarity, a shimmer of desire. You will never find someone as undeterrable as Samson. I wanted to say okay, I wanted to believe that this was the truth, that he thought I was ‘cool’ or whatever, and that, out of the entire class, this boy had chosen me. I nodded.
I saw him mouth ‘awesome’ and felt my lips twitch with the unfamiliar desire to smile. It was the beginning of the end. But we didn’t know that then.

Delilah was home ahead of me. I could tell because her favourite album was blaring loudly out through the bedroom window, greeting me like an over excited puppy. The sound alone was enough to make the turmoil inside me want to battle out, until I would hit something, anything, simply to unleash the agony the emotional struggle as caused. My wardrobe hid the majority of these frequent bursts of violence, and I was grateful for my parents’ ignorance. Since Samson, that need had fallen, but not then.
My feet hit the stairs two at a time, carrying me up them quickly. It had been three weeks since that first day of school, three weeks since I had made my first friend, and I was nervous over the new turn he had proposed. It was one thing for me to watch movies on his sofa, to meet him and his other friends at the cinema, or bowling alley, or even to simply sit on some wall somewhere, and make fun of the teachers, or make up stories for the people rushing past. He was good at the game I had invented, to occupy my time while the other children ignored me. He spoke with such conviction I could almost believe what he was saying, that the woman with her red, clicking high heels, was the international spy he proclaimed, or that man, whose hair was nearly blowing off in the wind, was a goblin in disguise, searching for another delicious child to eat. Then he would send a gust of his power towards the man, and pull off his toupee, making it dance in the air above his head.
Samson had gotten it into his head that he wanted to see my house. The house of a Normal. Coming from a family of Fey, many of the students in our class had considered him to be a ‘pure blood’, someone whose blood had not been diluted by Normals. It made him stronger, faster, and his telekinetic powers more bountiful than theirs. There were two types of Fey; those like Samson, who came from a family with generation after generation of Fey was one, and the other was genetic mutation. Like me. There was no history of Fey in my family and, indeed, neither my mum nor dad, portrayed any evidence of power, so I was an anomaly. A mutation.
I had tried convincing him that my house was no different to his. A lie, certainly, for I had not seen the glamour and the wealth of his family in my own home, and will never expect to. And I was certain we had no hidden rooms, filled with weapons, maps and god only knew what chemicals-that-you-couldn’t-even-touch-with-50cm-thick-rubber-gloves.
The knock on the door was sharp and impatient, rattling the house. I rushed back to the stairs before my sister had the chance to, hating that she was here, and that he would see, probably, how damaged I really was. I didn’t want to share him, and I didn’t want to lose him to her, like I had lost everything else already. My sister, my twin, stopped me, placing a hand on my arm. The heart shaped face, framed with pale, almost white, hair, and the perfect, perfect eyes. “If that’s Shayla, can you tell her I don’t wanna be friends anymore? She’s a stuck up cow, and you can tell her that too.”
Unlikely to be Shayla, I thought but didn’t have the courage to say. I nodded at her, and she let me go, slamming the door at my retreating back. I could make out his figure through the blurry glass, raising his fist to pound on the door again. I slammed into the door and threw it open. His scowl morphed quickly into a smile. “I thought I was gunna have to blow the door of its hinges.”
I cringed. “I’m glad you decided against it.”
“Wells, I didn’t say that…”
“You couldn’t do it anyway.” The words fell from my lips before I could stop them. I didn’t have the emotion right yet, and the tease sounded colder than I intended. Samson smiled at the effort anyway.
“Who’re you talkin’ to Lizzie?” The voice that sounded like mine, but wasn’t, floated down the stairs. I didn’t need to turn to know that she was there, staring down at us from the top of the landing. “You didn’t tell me you had a friend.”
Samson glared over my head, his face breaking into that easy smile he always seemed to have. A pain sprouted in my chest; I couldn’t find the words to speak. I heard her feet pitter down the steps. Samson moved around me to greet. “I’m Samson,” he said, “Wells’s best friend.” I blinked at the introductory. I hadn’t thought we were anything more than friends. The pain eased slightly, a glow of happiness filling the hole it left behind. You wouldn’t leave your best friend, would you?
“Delilah, Wells’s sister.”
“Are you like…?”
“No. I’m Normal...”
I turned away from them, closing off the conversation, the how-do-ya-do’s, still certain the allure of Delilah would leave me stranded once again. The glass of the door was cold against my forehead.
“Hey, Wells, aren’t you coming to watch?” I glanced over my shoulder. He held up the DVDs he’d brought with him. Delilah was no-where to be seen. “I don’t know how to work a Normal DVD player.” I rolled my eyes at him and led him into the living room, steering him around the glass cabinet, where the small glass elephant from my Fey Assessment trumpeted at my appearance, running out from behind the pristine, china plate set.
“Delilah’s not watching?” He sent me a strange look as I crossed to the television. “Nevermind, stupid question.” We settled on the sofa, me at one end and Samson at the other, and spent the rest of the evening shouting narrations and exclamations at the television, as though they would affect the outcome of the character’s idiocy.

After Samson left, Delilah met me on the landing. “So, Samson, huh?” her smile was wicked, deadly, a mere shadow of the smile that would draw boys in like a fly to honey in the later years to come. “I think I’d like to know your best friend, Wells.”
It wasn’t Samson and Delilah yet, wouldn’t be that for years to come. But, to me, it already felt like I was being pushed out, like it was already Samson and Delilah. And Wells.

The first thing I remember of that day is avoiding the mirror. The crack that ran down its surface, turning my shadow into a thousand separate reflections, was a result of catching my own eyes in its surface after turning back into my room to escape The Kiss. Samson and Delilah’s first kiss. It had always hurt when Samson paraded his latest girlfriend before me for my approval, as the best friend. There was nothing I detested more than those moments I would have to look upon these girls, knowing I could never be what they were, could never have what they had. But that was nothing in comparison to watching my sister and my best friend be together. The day my heart broke, I shattered that mirror, and my blood fell like ruby tears upon the carpet.
I had known Samson for six years. Four as his best friend, two as his girlfriend’s twin sister. I had loved him through all of it.
Keela wound itself around my legs. One of its eyes was loose, knocked aside by the years. A relative I don’t remember had given the cat to me as a child, and it was the first thing I recall animating, back before I knew to hide the talent away. The feel of prickling heat intensifies as you drag up that reservoir of something other inside of you, something that makes you different and powerful. Something that the Normals fear. And they are right to fear us. I scowled down at Keela, but bend to scoop it into my arms, allowing it to rub its face against my cheek with a soft purr. The things I animate always have a devotion to me, as all creations have for their creator. That is not to say that I am some kind of divine being; I am too faultless to be divine.
Suddenly, Keela’s claws burrowed into shoulder. I dropped the cat with a curse, tripping over it as I stumbled forward, into the door. “Stupid thing!” I yelped, rubbing the gorges in my skin. “What the hell did you do that for?” The cat curls its tail around its body, beaded eyes glanced down. It was in that moment that I heard them, a bubble of noises, a harmony of giggles that had my face blazing red and my chest feeling suddenly very tight, torturously so. My fists curled at my sides, and I looked down at the scars there, the silver marks left behind after I’d shattered the mirror. I couldn’t go out there. Not when I still felt so raw, when simply seeing them was enough to tear my heart apart. I was selfish; I didn’t want to have to share the only love I ever had. And yet, I took another step towards the door. My selfishness knew no bounds; I wanted to see him regardless of the physical pain, regardless of his complete devotion to the other one. To Delilah.
Keela mewed from its perch on the window sill, stopping me in mid step. With the longest of hesitations, of bated breaths, I walked towards it, scooping up my jacket as I passed. Keela rubbed its body against the window frame. I unlatched it slowly, soundlessly, before slipping through it, feeling no regret for vanishing into the morning without a word to anyone. When they needed me, if they needed me, they knew how to contact me. That was why I had a phone, after all.