Gone In A Flash

An Ordinary Kid

An Ordinary Kid

When Ruby was thirteen and three quarters, she was standing in her bedroom with a slowly rotting apple in one hand and a penknife in the other, and the apple had been sliced cleanly in two. Although she had cut her finger on the sharp blade, she barely seemed to notice the blood trickling down the back of her hand and down onto the carpet. Instead, her attention was focused on the small folded piece of paper that had been inexplicably tucked into the open space in the core of the apple.

She reached out with the hand holding the penknife, and with hand that were shaking much less than they should have been, unfolded the paper.

On it, there were printed two tiny letters, and they were the letters that would change everything. Ruby had never really understood the phrase 'your blood running cold' before, but as she processed the letters that were there in front of her, she could have sworn that her blood momentarily turned to solid ice.

L.B., said the message at the centre of the rotting apple, and that was the moment that everything shifted.

Ruby knew about the Butterfly Effect, of course, like any intelligent, well-read girl would – the concept of small causes having large, often unpredictable effects – but if you had asked her at that exact point in time what it had to do with her current situation, she wouldn't have had an answer for you. More likely, she wouldn't have had a single clue what you were talking about.

But whatever Ruby did or didn't know, something had changed that day. Maybe it was because of something beyond her control, or maybe it was due to something as simple as the blood currently trickling down her hand, but from that moment on; things would not go quite as she – or anybody else – would have expected.

There would be no trip to the Prism Vault, no conspiracy over the Mars Mushrooms, and maybe these and so many other things had never even existed in the first place.

Ruby, of course, had no knowledge of the change that had just happened, but a thought suddenly occurred to her, singular and clear.

Nothing's going to be the same ever again, she thought – and although there was no way that she could have known it, she was absolutely right.