The arrival of the Kayes

In Oserien street there were no children the same age of Jean Hart's. According to the inquiry her parents had done, there were no children in Zedoha either. During a great deal of her childhood, Jean had been schooled in the comfort of her home. The Harts shared the subjects and, by what the neighbours had figured out, Jean spent ten hours a day studying, still preserving the perkiness her age implied.

However, when she was about nine, Jean began to feel lonely. She did not ask a lot of questions, therefore she was probably not aware that people her age used to go to school. Some inhabitants of Zedoha were convinced that Jean believed that people were born already adults and that she might have been an inexplicable exception.

Jean got bored and desired to have someone like her to play with, until the day of her tenth birthday. The house next to the Harts', number 74 of Oserien, had displayed the 'for sale' banner for six whole months. The owners were losing hope of doing any business, when the Kayes appeared. They were a middle-aged couple with two children: Anne and Elliot, fourteen and ten years respectively. The Kaye family was relatively conservative: the sort of people who expects and are expected to preserve the forms.

Mr and Mrs Kaye (or, as they hoped the rest of the world would forget, Michael and Susan) sent their children to St. Ameus School, a bilingual school of very long hours and very high standards. Anne and Elliot had earned significant scholarships thanks to their qualifications, and were the children all their classmates' parents would have liked to have. Mrs Kaye boasted about Elliot's athletic and academic achievements: he was captain of the St. Ameus' football team and the first of his class. On the other hand, Mr Kaye was so proud of Anne, who was content with a modest second place in her class. The young Kayes were, without doubt, the teachers' favourites. Everyone could count on them to restore order in the classroom, and they were among the few who still raised their hands before speaking.

Anyone who had seen the situation from the outside might have thought that Jean Hart and Anne Kaye would be much less than incompatible. And yet, what nobody could see, regardless of it being the most essential, was the fact that Anne also felt very lonely.

So, when in the afternoon of her tenth birthday, Jean and Anne saw each other for the first time, destiny quickly moved its threads in order to turn them both into two little friends who, over the years, would become inseparable.

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1. The Harts

2. Nightmares