Sage's Eyes by V.C. Andrews Read Free Book Online Page A

was another, an original one. Despite what rights adopted children supposedly had when they reached a certain age, I suspected that in order to keep me from discovering my birth mother, my actual birthdate was different from the one my parents celebrated with me. It could easily have been my birth mother’s decision that her identity never be made known to me. Maybe I was younger or older than my parents told me I was, or they really didn’t know themselves. There was only one person who was certain about my age, and that was my birth mother.
    When I once asked to see my birth certificate, my parents told me they couldn’t find it. They thought it was just misplaced. They promised that if they didn’t find it, they would help me get a new one. I had never questioned that, but now I knew that my birth certificate had been in my father’s filing cabinet all this time.They had to know that. Why all these lies and secrets? It made every corner of the house seem darker and every whisper even more forbidden.
    Unlike other children, I didn’t look forward to my birthdays. Whenever I had one, my parents studied me even more intently, analyzing with more intensity every word I said and everything I did. What were they watching for as I grew older? Every birthday since I was ten made me aware that they were looking for some sign, something to confirm a suspicion or a fear. Age was slowly uncovering what was inside me and who I really was. I felt like some bird emerging out of a shell.
    Because of the way they acted, I would wake up the morning of my birthday and immediately look in the mirror to see if my face had changed in any way. Were my eyes a different color, a different shape? Did my hair, my ears, my mouth, any part of me, look so unlike the Sage Healy who had gone to sleep the night before? I even talked out loud to myself to see if the sound of my voice was different. Then, when I rose, I checked my body, not for the small, subtle differences every young girl might find as time passed but for changes so dramatic that I might have trouble fitting into the clothes I owned, as if I had suddenly returned to the body I was supposed to have.
    There was one terrifying thought that gave me a nightmare even my soothing voices couldn’t stop, and that was my looking into a mirror one day and seeing an entirely different person. In the nightmare, as time passed, I would not only look different, but Iwould act differently, and soon I would forget who I had been. My adoptive parents wouldn’t know who I was, either, and I’d be out on my own, a stranger even to myself, wandering about, looking for some nest to crawl into like an orphaned bird whose mother had cast her out.
    How I wished I had a close friend who was also adopted so I could compare his or her life to my own. Was my parents’ behavior normal for adoptive parents, especially if they had never met their child’s biological parents, which was what my parents claimed? If that was true, I guess it was only natural for them to wonder almost daily about what their adopted child was turning into, looking like, sounding like, and behaving like.
    I tried to convince myself that I shouldn’t criticize them for their anxiety about me. Yes, they were much stricter about what I could do than the parents of almost every other girl my age whom I knew. But maybe I shouldn’t dislike them for that, I told myself. Maybe I should be more understanding. After all, they had been willing to take me in and make a home and a future for me. They were willing to take risks, to invest in someone unknown. Also, I had to consider that I was, after all, an only child. I did see that parents of only children were more controlling, more nervous and concerned about everything the child did.
    All of my parents’ friends and the students I knew at school who had met my parents seemed to understand. However, my school friends let me know they wouldn’t