CHAPTER TWO

"I don't understand. Why do you have to leave?" A tear trails slowly down Sarah's small face, her permanent smile falling away. We're in a barn on Sarah's farm. Outside, the snow is falling lazily from the sky, drifting in the soft wind. I wrap my arms around my small, five-year-old body as a gust of wind blows in through the open doors, but I can't really feel it: all the shivering is for show.

"My mother says that's it's too cold for me to stay here; she doesn't want me playing in the snow," I lie. Mum told me that I couldn't tell Sarah about my disease.

"But we can wear jumpers," Sarah says softly, looking down at her bright pink joggers.

"Jumper's don't work on me," I whisper, and then I slip my small hand into Sarah's. Both our hands are ice cold.

Sarah doesn't hear me. "I'll miss you."

A tear rolls down my cheek, my young heart breaking apart. "I'll miss you too."

In the morning, the sound of my pounding heart wakes me from my dream-filled sleep. I've been having dreams of Sarah – my childhood friend – for a while now. Most of them contain memories of my last day with her, others are completely made-up. Either way, I can't shake the feeling that their recent appearance means something – that each dream is trying to tell me something important.

I shiver when I feel the morning air on my skin and reach for my blanket, which has somehow fallen off my bed in the middle of the night. Halfway through reaching for the covers, I freeze and slowly glance at the window to my right.

A light breeze drifts in through the open window, sending the white curtains into a mild frenzy, fluttering and dancing in front of my eyes. The moment the wind reaches my arms, I know something isn't right.

It's unlike anything I have ever felt before: this strange sensation that makes me want to fold in on myself and find warmth. Goose bumps rise on my arms and I feel frozen in the clutches of the freezing wind. Its icy fingers seem to reach out and grip me, holding me firm until I swear the cold has burned into my skin. It feels sort of like a cold fire; like it's too cold to just be cold.

And then it's gone. The goose bumps disappear and the icy sensation vanishes as if it was never there. The breeze blows again, but all I feel is a slight trickle of cool air – the same as always. The last time I felt the cold, I was too young to remember it. But my body has remembered enough for me to know that what I just felt was, in fact, the cold. Warning bells ring in my mind, but I quiet them immediately. It could be nothing.

Choosing to forget about the incident, I hop off my bed and slip into a blue and grey skirt, which is part of the uniform of the school I attend. When I first moved to Australia, I found it strange to wear something other than casual clothing, but after attending several different schools across the country, I've gotten used to it. I've been wearing this particular uniform for the past five months, and in one month's time, I'll be selling it and moving to America. Six months is my deadline. If I stay too long after that, the whole area will become uninhabitable, which means water will freeze in the pipes, plants will wilt and shrivel, the wildlife will have to migrate or freeze, and people will start dying from the cold. If I stay too long after six months, the effects grow irreversible.

Quickly, before my train of thought can take me any further, I cease all thoughts on the topic. I grab my white short-sleeved school shirt and do up the buttons before quickly slipping my hair into a ponytail, my hands shaking the whole while. I don't touch the school jumper that hangs in my closest, gathering dust. It's useless to me.

With reluctance, I pad across my room and head downstairs. Every morning is a struggle to get out of bed, to get motivated to attend school. As far as I'm concerned, it's a waste of time – an excuse to make my life harder. Usually when I start at a new school, I rarely learn anything because I spend too much time trying to ignore the stares – the ones that say freak and psycho – and the snickered side-comments that no one thinks I hear. Not to mention, the teachers tend to steer clear of me, rarely answering my questions or checking my homework.

It was especially bad at this school.

Our first cold day was labelled a coincidence. We were going into autumn – it was expected that things would get colder – plus global warming has made the world go crazy. So a fifteen degree day towards the end of February? Pure coincidence.

But then the cold days started coming more frequently. Summer was cut short, Autumn was cut out entirely, and winter came early. It's no coincidence and everyone knows it. It's me. It always has been. And I know for a fact that they want me gone. Everyone knows the stories of the people in other countries who have gotten hypothermia and died. I have experienced them first hand. And as hard as I try not to go over my time-limit or do anything that could affect others, sometimes things just happen, and then suddenly there's a boy dead at a bus stop, or an old woman frozen inside her car.

Everyone mostly avoids me now. They try to stay as far away as they can because they're scared. Back when it was warm and sunny, my disease was just a rumour – sometimes a form of entertainment for those who had nothing better to do. But now those rumours have proven true and people are genuinely afraid of me. "What else can she do?" I hear them murmuring sometimes. And underneath all the whispers is the same message: don't piss her off, don't get in her way. As if I'll turn them into ice statues if they do something to personally offend me. They must think I'm some kind of demonised super-villain with magical powers, for Christ's sake.

The truth is, I'm just an ordinary teenage girl with a disease she has no control over. Minus the unexplained side effects, I could probably blend into society, but the side effects are what keep me alive. Take them away and I could play normal, sure, but I'd die within a couple of days.

I'm still shaking when I get downstairs, my thoughts proving to be more than I can handle at seven in the morning. Taking a deep breath, I step into the dining room and see my dad sitting casually in his chair, sipping at a mug of coffee. And although it's subtle, when he sees me, he goes rigid for a second, like my presence is frightening. Then he gets past it, adjusting his posture and carefully placing his mug on the table.

My mum looks up briefly from her muesli, not paying me any real attention. She swallows. "I made you breakfast. It's on the bench."

I shake my head. "It's okay, I'm not hungry."

She sighs, but otherwise remains silent as I grab a cup from the cupboard and pour myself a glass of orange juice. "You know, you'll have to eat eventually," she says as I take a seat at the table. "Skipping breakfast isn't going to slow it down."

It, meaning my disease.

"I know, I just don't feel like eating." Don't feel like fuelling a body that has killed and will kill others.

She shakes her head before changing the topic. "It's going to be ten degrees today, make sure you wear something warm."

I roll my eyes. "Mum, come on. You know I don't feel the cold, stop trying to make me wear jumpers – it doesn't help."

"Nor does skipping breakfast. You either eat or you put on something warm. Just because you don't feel the cold, doesn't mean you won't catch the flu."

I groan. "In all the fifteen years you've known me, have you ever once seen me get sick?"

"You used to get colds all the time when you were young."

"That doesn't count," I say, careful to keep the irritation form leaking into my voice.

"Why not?" Her persistence is giving me a headache. I hate it when we have lengthy conversations – we always end up arguing.

"Because, it doesn't! The last time I got sick was thirteen years ago and back then, I wasn't even diseased."

My words echo throughout the room, sending the house into silence. My mum doesn't like it when I use the word disease. It's a reminder that I'm not normal, that our lives have been turned upside-down because of something that happened to me when I was four years of age.

"Yes, well, I still want you to put on a jacket."

I sigh. "Fine. But there's no guarantee that I'll wear it the whole day."

She nods and I run upstairs to grab my dusty jumper and continue preparing for school.

I leave the house not long after. Usually I would wait until 8:30 to leave, but this morning, I can't stand to stay any longer. I feel as though the walls are inching closer and closer together, squeezing the air out of the house and away from my lungs. And instead of air, I'm breathing in something thick – a sickness of sorts that gets stuck in my throat on the way down.

"I'll see you later," I say casually, as if I'm not suffocating within my own home. I sling my backpack over one shoulder and pull open the door.

"Have a good day," my father says, his eyes still on his newspaper. I don't know where my mother is and the worst part is, I'm not sure I care. I shut the door.

Once outside, I immediately tug off my jumper and stuff it into my bag. Sure, I'll be warmer with it on, plus it'll help me blend in, but I like feeling cold and going jumper-less is as close as I'll ever get. Thanks to my disease, I can feel cool but not cold – can feel warm but not hot – and it's frustrating. I feel like I'm living a half-life – one where I'm half-alive but also half-dead. And besides all my dulled senses, it feels like there's something missing – like there's something I'm missing, as if I have a hole in me that needs to be filled. The feeling is unshakable.

As I walk down the narrow pathway, I let the question fade from my mind, enjoying instead the feeling of the cool breeze skating across my exposed skin.

Before this morning, I had never really felt the cold. I hadn't experienced it since I was four, and even then, I lived in a place where 'cold' was ten degrees. Not exactly freezing. But I've always understood the concept. I know what it means to be cold, I can recognise the word 'icy', even though I've never felt actual ice, and I can grasp the notion of 'freezing', despite not having freezed. It's like there's a secret compartment inside me that holds all my definitions of cold. And if I think hard enough, I can access these definitions and remember what they feel like from childhood.

But after years of having dulled senses, my memories of the cold have faded, like all things do with time. And so this morning, when the cold came back to me in a rush, it almost felt like a foreign experience – like something I couldn't label. It had been that long.

So why did it happen? And more importantly – how?

Shaking off my thoughts for the third time this morning, I let out a breath and focus on moving my feet. Brown leaves tumble over the cracked pavement, the only sign that it's not actually winter, but early Autumn. The leaves crunch beneath my feet as I walk down the quiet street. An occasional car whooshes past me and I notice some people in their front garden having a quiet chat. They don't notice me as I pass by.

Suddenly, there's a disturbance in the air around me and I stop walking. I know what's happening before it even begins. The particles are twisting and swirling around my body, invisible to everyone except me. I watch as they dance across my shoulders and down my arms, as if mocking my inability to do anything to stop it.

And then they find my chest and my world explodes in blinding white heat.

I squeeze my eyes shut as the burning sensation sweeps throughout my body. The fire lashes at my skin and at my heart, twisting, pulling and wrenching until I swear my organs will burst. Heat courses through my veins, making every inch of my body hot to the touch. My breathing is coming fast and my heart seems to be beating out of my chest. I feel my legs wobbles and lean on a white, ivy covered wall in order to keep upright.

The heat attack – as the doctors call it – usually only lasts for 30 seconds to a minute, but it always feels like an hour; an hour in which every movement, every heartbeat, every agonizing second sends another torrent of fire racing throughout my body. Sometimes the heat is too much and I scream, but usually I just bite my lip and hold it in. Screaming attracts way too much attention.

As my heat attack fades, I realise I'm sweating. My palms feel sticky, my forehead is slick with moisture and my shirt clings to my back. My heart steadies in my chest and I breathe out, watching my breath curl upwards in a wisp of white smoke, reaching for the grey cloudy sky. It's only once my single breath leaves my sight that the heat finally vanishes and I collapse to the floor in relief.

I breathe in and out, every breath becoming less and less noticeable in the cold air. My head is pounding, but my pulse is slowing and the sweat is slowly drying out. I don't know how long I sit there, focusing on nothing but my breathing, but eventually I drag myself back to reality and get to my feet.

My body is cold again. My breath is invisible and my skin, no doubt, is cold to the touch. The wind blows but I feel nothing but cool air. The temperature most likely dropped by a fraction of a degree but I have no way of knowing.

I was lucky this morning. On many occasions, my daily heat attack has come during school, and worse: during class. It's days like these, when it comes early in the morning, that I can go through my day is if I'm normal. Otherwise, I spend the whole day waiting and waiting, dreading the moment when the heat will fill my veins.

But as much as I dread it, I know that it's necessary. The first time I saw a doctor, I was told that I had an internal body temperature of -20 degrees Celsius. I shouldn't be breathing, let alone going to school and attempting normal. I should be frozen – dead. There is no way that my organs should be able to function under that temperature. And yet, they can.

I was told by the doctors who did tests on me when I was young that in order to keep my organs and body from freezing over, I absorb the heat in the air around me, turning my temporary home freezing and uninhabitable – they were the ones who told me it's what's keeping me alive.

But the doctors have yet to work out the cause for my abnormally low body temperature. They've been studying and researching for years now, but sometimes I wish they would just look at it from another angle. They keep calling it a rare, undiagnosed disease. But I'm not stupid enough to believe them. Everyone knows that it can't be a disease – even my peers refer to me as 'demon' and 'freak of nature'. I know there has to be something more to it.

But what?

A/N

This chapter's dedicated to @breaktheocean for suggesting the song up top! [It's called "Winter Bird" by AURORA, if anyone's interested] It's amazing and I definitely recommend giving it a listen!

- Shaye