Please Lionize Me, I'm A Freak

He watched everybody outside with a meticulous look. Assimilating every little detail on how his peers acted. There were kids who rolled around on the dewy grass and then the other kids who watched the others cautiously and didn't want to get their shoes dirty. He was the only one who wasn't allowed to go out and play soccer. He didn't understand why but his teachers told him that when his parents dumped him at the orphanage, they left no sincere note for him to read when he turned sixteen like most other kids had, all they wrote was "DO NOT LET OUTSIDE" on his old T-shirt when he was four. He felt ashamed to admit it to teachers who asked him why he wasn't outside, he felt like some sort of dog that has rabies and can't play with the others. People asked him all the time "Alex, don't you remember anything?? You were four for god's sake." But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't remember.

He wanted to go out, play dodge ball, have dissensions over tiny little things like whether someone touched the ball or not. It wasn't as if he wasn't popular or anything. People lionized and loved him. But he didn't like being popular, people treated him like a ticking bomb, making sure he has everything he needs, whether he was comfortable enough, if he was hungry or thirsty, if the air conditioner didn't hit him in the face during class, or whether the class was too boring for him. The teachers always tapped him on the shoulder nervously and asking for his homework, insisting that it's fine if he didn't do it or not.

One day, he went into a school library, to make it up for his overly friendly and nervous teacher and deciding to do some extra credit research, even though the teacher had given him a piece of candy for not doing his homework. He flicked to the news paper articles and grabbed the oldest, most yellow news paper that he found hidden all the way at the bottom of the stack. The news paper had a post-it note that said "THROW OUT! A.S.A.P." As soon as he saw the front cover, he froze. Looking straight up at him, with a grim, yet wild expression in the kid's eyes and holding a knife with a jagged back, was himself. Plastered on the newspaper cover.

He yelped and dropped the newspaper. He glanced at the title: "FOUR-YEAR OLD, CONVICTED OF MURDER OF LOCAL BUTCHER." His mouth dropped open and hurriedly ripped out the page so he can read it in his personal dorm. Once he got upstairs, he scanned the paper. Then leaned back on his king-sized bed that no one seemed to have. Apparently, he was given a test so that his memory would completely vanish before he was dropped at the orphanage. Things were falling into place, he wasn't allowed to go outside because teachers were scared he would kill someone with a plastic shovel. No wonder people were always scared of me.
I'm a freak.