Since as long as Arne can remember, he has always been able to understand and communicate with animals.
It has been a weird thing, a weird thing he always carried in himself, the secret just whispered to his mother frenetically when he was eleven years old once, when a boy in his neighbourhood got down from his bicycle and kicked down on Arne's legs and said, "Are you crazy? Why are you talking to a reptile?"
Arne remembers that reptile's voice in his head as if it was just yesterday, "Don't listen to him, he is the crazy one."
And then the reptile jumped on that boy, make the boy screech and jump away from Arne, he almost remembers the reptile winking at him, before going under that boy's t-shirt making the boy scream louder and resulting in throwing off his t-shirt above his head while the other kids had stared.
They had started calling him a freak the next day, jumping away whenever he passed them, as if he would throw a reptile on them.
He didn't do anything, he did not even tell the reptile to jump on that boy, it jumped on its own.
He tried to tell it to a blonde haired girl sitting two seats away at the park. But the girl screamed and ran away from him as well, calling him a freak again.
He had gone to his home and had asked his mother, "Mom what is a freak?"
And his mother had looked at him with wide blue eyes, her blonde curls tumbled into a bun, she had knelt to his level in an old dyed pink t-shirt, and had asked him in a soft voice, "Where did you get to know that word baby?"
"That girl in the park screamed 'Freak' and ran away from me. I just tried to tell her that I didn't tell that reptile to jump on that boy."
"Which reptile?" his mother had asked in a breathless voice, "What boy?" Her hands had reached out to his elbows clutching them very tightly.
"I just...." he had known then, at least an essence of it, that it was not right, that something was not right in the way his mom was looking at him, but how could he not tell his mom? She was the only friend he had. "I just..." he had said hesitantly, "I just saw the reptile on the ground and I could hear its voice, it was searching for its mother." He had looked down at the floor, not sure how his mom would react, "I knelt to the ground and picked it up, told it that I could help her find her mother, and it said thank you. But the boy kicked at me and said I was crazy for talking to a reptile." And he had told his mom the preceding story after that, and when he had looked up, he had found his mother staring at the floor, not looking up at him.
When she had realised that he was looking at her, she had blinked and touched his face with her small cool fingers and told him, "You are not crazy, freak are the people who are extra intelligent, it's just that the others don't understand them, okay? Hey! Look at me." She had held his chin in her hand, and said with a surety that had made her blue eyes shine with something that had coiled around his chest like a tight vine, like words that always stay inside you in seams, "You are very, very, very intelligent, and people are not going to understand that, so you know what they will do? They will make fun of you because they want to be like you. You don't need to tell them what you are, and why do you do it, you know what you do?"
He had whispered, "I don't know."
"That's what I am here for baby, you don't tell them anything, and....." she had taken a deep breath and told him astutely, icy blue eyes held firmly "and you ignore the animals."
"What!?" he had said in shock, tried to step back from her.
But she held him very tightly in her arms, she was his mother, and she had said, "The animals lie sometimes, they lure you into something that's a lie, and you forget where you are, you have to beware of that."
And he had frowned at her that day, not understanding anything. "Why would they lie?"
"Because I am telling you, they do."
"But mom," he had said, weakly, unsurely.
"Arne." She had shaken her head, her brown curls tumbling free from her bun falling on her bright forehead, "Do you understand?"
"Yes." He had said.
And after that, his mother kept asking him about animals about different weird things "Did someone tries to talk to you except them?"
"No," Why would they?
Wherever they went, on the streets, in the gardens, in parks, at his school, at the ceilings at his home, and at their kitchen, his mother's eyes stroked up at his, as if telling him to 'beware.'
He didn't even know what she meant, he never told her mother how he could even hear the whispers of the flies, the mosquitoes urge to bite.
And as he grew older, when he was fifteen, he understood, he said, "Mom I am not crazy."
And she said softly, wearily, kissing him on the forehead. "I know baby."
He just didn't tell her one thing, one thing that kept him awake at night and made him sneak off away from home.
He made friends and they never lied.
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