The Genetic Code

Chapter 8

The time ticks by much faster than I want it to, slipping away like sand through my fingers. Somehow, whatever lies behind that door across the room has the power to send my life crumbling and flying away like dust. But I observe silently as people enter and exit, one after another, seemingly unchanged by the black magic beyond that doorway that is able to pry into your insides, anatomize your DNA and pinpoint a glitch in you that corrupts your entire system; a speck within your body that spreads like a virus, turning your blood cloudy, pumping this contaminated blood through your veins so that your entire body is overrun by this disease of mortal flaw.

Before I know it, I'm the only one left sitting in this cold room. Kera is taking a while in there, though. She's probably inside making a fuss about not damaging her skin when they stick in the needle to take her blood sample.

All of a sudden the door across the room is thrown open. A blond girl bursts out of the testing room, face drained of blood, eyes wide and darting. This flustered girl isn't the same one who spits insults like air or trips other students in the hallways just for fun. She looks like a petrified little kid who's seen a monster in the dark. Those green eyes that never wavered as she dumped a bowl of food over another girl's head now appear filled with fear.

Kera looks over to me.

"What're you looking at?" she speaks breathlessly, before making a beeline for the exit. I watch on with curiosity as she all but flings herself out of the room, leaving the door to shut loudly with a thud.

I have no time to process the strange string of events before Julia stumbles clumsily out of the test room, catching herself quickly. She flicks her head toward the exit door which Kera had just stormed through.

"Ah, that girl, really..." Julia props her arm on the doorframe, looking troubled. But the expression is expertly erased off her face, replaced by a screen of nonchalance.

She gestures me into the testing room, and it suddenly dawns on me that my act drops here. Before I enter the testing room, I have to shed the fake skin I have been wearing for the past eleven years and expose the raw, tarnished truth beneath. There are no more chances for well-crafted excuses and intricately spun backstories.

I can't keep up the lies anymore, I'm sorry... I can't keep my promise.

Eleven years ago, in a small rundown back room of Hope Orphanage, I made this promise. I still remember it so vividly — My last day there.

***

I remember how the snow fell gently outside, covering the entire grounds with a layer of white, concealing the dirt beneath. It felt particularly cold that afternoon, like a separate winter in my heart storming with the cold outside. It had been exactly one year since I was put in Hope Orphanage, and something about that fact penetrated my heart with biting frost. I couldn't remember anything before the orphanage, not even my parents, but I knew something very bad must have happened to them if I was put in here.

I made a small prayer in my heart for two fallen angels, and the one they forgot to take with them.

The orphanage was pleasant enough, I got a warm bed and hot meals, but I knew the way some of the older kids stared at me and whispered, and how the other children who knew what I was seemed to gravitate away from me, as if I was some virus they didn't want to catch. Overtime I grew to become fine with it, I felt rejuvenated in the isolation.

But that nice couple that approached me that day probably didn't realize that being cast out by the others meant I had something wrong with me. They were kind and affectionate, and the warmth in their words, how they called me pretty and pure while stroking my hair, seemed to melt away some of the frost in my heart. We spent the whole morning frolicking in the snow, and for the first time I could remember, real waves of happiness flooded my heart and eyes.