Excerpt: Mockingbird

Truth was, I didn't have many friends. My mother knew it, and so did I, but I still wandered purposefully down the old cobblestones, under the browning leaves and past the broken streetlamps. I had a wrinkled handkerchief held up to my nose and mouth; the smoke in the air tasted bitter, especially by the train station. It made my insides feel gritty and gummed-up, and pulled my mind back to the base of the cliff by the citadel. It was all over, I reminded myself. Long gone.
It was late in the morning, and all the shops were already open. Mister Toush, though, the baker, was running late as usual. I smiled faintly and doffed my cap as he hurried past, but he didn't look my way. I didn't expect him to. He had a handkerchief to his face as well, I noticed. It was good to know I wasn't imagining things.
Go play with your friends. Honestly.
My mother arrived in Rosston thirteen years ago with a bundle on her back me clutching her skirts. Everyone else in the village still lived in the same houses as their great-grandparents, and they didn't take kindly to strangers. Still, progress was taking hold in the cities to the north; railroads were springing up, and there were more outsiders moving in all the time. Which meant there was a real need for an inn, so we provided. The Green Bird was small and hastily built, but its repairs were constant and loving. We did a decent business.
People called my mother a whore. Which I knew for a fact was never, ever true. It didn't help, though, that we told everyone I was a bastard, born of some stranger she never saw again. It rankled me to say it, who understood my origins as well as she did, but it was important for our safety that nobody know the truth.
So, "Who's your father?" the other children would tease me.
"I don't know," I would answer, but there was never a bigger lie.
It was some combination of all these things that caused everyone in our little one-room schoolhouse band against me. I was a pale, dreamy-eyed mumbler of a boy, and I kept well to myself. I knew my dirty words well before the rest, and once when a bigger boy had tried to hit me, I'd known to duck under it and get to him first. There were some advantages to having an extra life inside me, but I never thought it was worth the confusion.
I stopped, and adjusted my handkerchief as I thought. Go play with your friends.