Elizabeth Harding was one puzzle that couldn`t be solved. Like many twelve-year-olds she was fond of MeTube and sausages and fluffy slippers and cartoons and words that started with the letter q (like quintessential) and dogs and purple and three-minute pop songs - although quite unlike most girls her age she did not have a bit of a thing for Alfie Bird from R-Krew, even if they were at number one for the fourth time in a row.

　　She also loved science and adored anything to do with maths. Because maths explained how things in the world worked, like secret codes and time machines and parallel dimensions, which were obviously very important to know about, especially if she wanted to grow up to be a computational physicist. Which today she did.

　　Elizabeth Harding hated balloons, custard, being small and having freckles (even though her mum said that they made her special - particularly because her mum said that they made her special), November 18th, Amanda Pettigrew, having to go to the hospital and living in Hexley-on-Heath.

　　For if there was ever a competition to find the saddest, ugliest, most boring town in the world then Hexley-on-Heath would be the sure-fire favourite to win.

　　Elizabeth had been stuck there now for three-and-a-half months and was yet to have a single positive thought about the place.

　　She watched from her bedroom at the top of Sky View flats as a concrete block horizon kissed a papier-m鈉h� sky. Red tousled hair tumbled down to her shoulders, sleepy green eyes blinked at a feeling of tiredness. She tried, without success, to stifle a yawn.

　　Her mum was calling her again. "Are you nearly dressed yet?"

　　"No", sighed Elizabeth, scanning the buttons on her crumpled blouse.

　　"You`re going to be late for school".

　　"I don`t care".

　　"Well I do, so get a move on. And don`t forget you`ve got PE. Your pumps are in your bag".

　　Elizabeth pffffft, scooping up a jumper with a golden crest from the chair where she kept most of her school clothes. PE was the most boring lesson of the week. It was even worse than art with Mr Bobbins and geography with whichever supply teacher could manage to find the school. The whole thing was a total farce. She was never going to get a job that involved climbing ropes or running about so what was the point of making her do it when she could be learning something useful, such as what to do if the world stopped spinning or gravity floated away? Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author`s consent. Report any sightings.

　　Elizabeth calculated that the probability of a sensible answer to this question was 3,141,592 to 1.

　　Mum`s face appeared at the door. She looked like a cranky squirrel. "Will you hurry up!?"

　　"I am hurrying".

　　"You could have fooled me".

　　Elizabeth pulled the jumper over her head. "Ready", she declared.

　　"And what about your trousers?"

　　"Oh". She gazed in fake surprise at her pale skinny legs, which ended in a pair of giant woolly mammoth slippers. "Sorry. I must have forgot".

　　Mum knotted her arms. "Why are you being so deliberately annoying?"

　　"I`m not".

　　"Yes you are. You haven`t even had your breakfast".

　　"I`m not hungry".

　　"And I`m not arguing any more!" Mum`s expression went into full don`t-push-your-luck` mode. "This is hard for me as well, you know? But I`m doing my best to try and turn this place into a home. So it would be nice, just occasionally, to have some help with things. Now will you please get ready - like I`ve been asking you for the last half an hour?"

　　Twenty-eight minutes actually, Elizabeth thought, retrieving her trousers from their usual spot on the floor.

　　She wriggled into the rest of her clothes as the clock by the side of her bed blinked to 8:16.

　　Time to be on her way.

　　It took four minutes to demolish a bowl of supervalue choccopops, three minutes to reach the ground floor using the lift (five if she had to take the stairs because the lift smelled like a toilet) and precisely nineteen minutes to drag her feet to school - dodging the pothole that turned into a lake each time it rained, creeping through the underpass, popping out by the takeaway with the chicken sign (Every Day`s a Fry-Day!`) and cutting through the park where the swings were all broken to arrive at the Woodside Academy.

　　The sign above the bars of the gate said: Excellence is Our Mission`.

　　Elizabeth`s mission was to try and keep as much to herself as possible. Which was usually the easy part. Because most of the other children seemed to want to avoid her anyway.

　　And who could blame them?

　　For as long as she could remember Elizabeth had been unable to shake the feeling that there was something out of place, a nagging sensation like a tiny stone in her shoe that she couldn`t get rid of. For some reason she never seemed to fit in. It was as if she was an alien, watching events unfold from behind an invisible force field or extra thick bulletproof glass.

　　There was no other way to describe it. Some part of her felt as though it belonged to another world.

　　Exactly which part of her this was and which world it was supposed to belong to were always a bit of a mystery, but the simple, straightforward, unmistakable truth could not be denied.

　　Elizabeth Harding was not like other children.

　　Not like them at all.