As I was approaching the tender age of eight, being different had become the core of who I was. I had seen for myself how being different got you treated, so as young as I was, I had to learn how to hide my being different.

I would learn it, and I would learn it well.

In the upper maisonette to where Ada Woodcock used to live, there lived two sisters. They were both tiny Italian identical twin women, who spoke only an handful of English words. The one sister had short white hair, who always had a friendly and kind expression on her face. The other sister, had short dark hair and wore a permanent, severe looking scowl on her ageing face.

The local rumours were, that they both were witches. One practiced white magic, the other practiced dark magic. To all the local children, the white-haired sister was the good witch, and the dark-haired sister was the evil witch. From a safe distance, I became fascinated with the almost reclusive Italian twins. It was only ever the white-haired sister who would leave the maisonette during the day to buy food etcetera, and they always had candles burning in their windows at night. That was something I had quickly noticed from where I used to safely watch them in my garden. I had also noticed how people would cross the road, just to walk on the path on the other side if they happened to be walking on the same side as the white-haired sister; fearing her magic, whether it was good or bad.

I knew that I didn't ever want to be their kind of different.

I became defiant to ever being treated that way.

At times, I would feel sorry for them. One time, Jason had accidentally thrown his ball into their garden. He begged for me to get his ball back, and it took me hours to summon up the courage to go anywhere near where they lived. It was only when I saw the white-haired sister walking up her path, did I even dare to ask whether I could get my brothers ball for him. To my surprise, the little Italian sister was very kind and personable, but when she invited me in, coaxing me to come upstairs into her maisonette, did I actually begin to fear her. From the bottom of the stairs, I could smell a mixture of fragrant food and florals. The fascination I had for the pair, had me wondering whether I could actually ascend those steps, just to see for myself whether they really had a witches coven up there or not. But as my one foot lifted onto the bottom step, I saw the dark-haired sister standing at the top of the stairs. Her unwelcome stare down at me, was enough for me to panic and run away. I never attempted to knock on their door ever again and my brother never got his ball back.

After my brief encounter with those two Italian sisters, I was determined to keep who I was, my young thoughts and my young feelings, even more well hidden.

Being different, it can hurt you.

Being quiet makes you unheard.

Being different gets you noticed.

I didn't want to be noticed.

Too much had happened, and I felt that the wrong people kept noticing me for all of the wrong reasons.

So, I had to be clever—even manipulative.

I was eight years old, and already had become so great at pretending.

I would pretend that I was okay.

I would pretend that the bad things hadn't happened.

That I had no questions.

That I was normal.

The quiet and the numbness, they kept everything at bay.

My emotions.

My thoughts.

My mum.

My dad.

It kept them all at bay.

Emotionally, I was becoming more and more independent. Other than my nan and gramp, human bonds for me were becoming more and more frayed. Touch and affection, I found difficult. Caring and loving, I found just as difficult.

At the school, I had made a few solid friends. There, the pretending was particular good. I could laugh, practice silly dance routines in the playground and talk about our lessons with them—but at the end of the day, I knew that they and I couldn't be more different.

There were even times, when I would be resentful of them and their seemingly stable home lives. I would feel jealous of their nice clothes and their sharing of what they had done on the weekends. Pretending to be happy for them, it would often exhaust me.

Being friends with them, kind of just served a purpose to me. It made the school days more bearable. It made the judgemental treatment of me, just a little more easier.

The teacher I had, often liked to humiliate me. She often punished me, by hitting my hand with a ruler. But knowing that I had a few friendly faces in the class, made things easier to cope with.

But there were still times when her disdain for me would simply overwhelm me. One such time was when she had removed a new teddy that my nan had bought for me from the classroom, and put it into a bin. The caretaker had found it for me, he even admitted that he had seen her put it into the bin. In that same spiteful week, my dad had given me some elvers to take into school, so I could maybe do a 'Show and Tell' thing with them. But Mrs Berkeley, she wasn't interested. She just used them to hurt me. It was a super hot day, and dad had told me to make sure that I freshen up their water and don't leave them in the sun. Well, Mrs Berkeley wouldn't let me freshen up their water and she made me put them at the very back of the classroom, exactly where the sun was hotly radiating in. By the end of the day, my elvers were either dead or dying.

I was so upset, but one boy, had looked at me and had sympathetically smiled in my direction. He was a quiet boy, who came from an highly respected Catholic family, but on that day, he went out of his way to offer me a small smile of comfort.

He would become a sweet and quiet friend, and my first ever crush. He would go on to become the reason why I became curious about boys. He would also become the reason why that curiosity would soon lead to my first willing and intimate encounter with another boy.