Chapter 2
Haven
Haven Marina Clarkson got herself in trouble again.
It was a familiar statement that had followed Haven throughout her life. Usually spoken with no small amount of long-suffering annoyance or resignation. The adults in her life always sick and tired of her and everything she did.
The first time she remembered hearing it had been when she was in grade school. She was a little girl sitting in the principle’s office, hands stained to the elbow with black ink. The sentence had been spoken with tight rage by her mother to her father when he finally arrived, confused about what was happening.
Haven had managed to sneak into the teacher’s lounge and, there, she found the printer. Not the small one in the classroom, or the cheap one in her dad’s office at home. It was a large, boxy printer, bigger than herself, and humming happily as it waited for a job to come through.
Or, at least, it had been. Until she figured out how to break it open and began going through the internals, trying to figure out how it worked. How it was different from her dad’s printer. She’d already taken that apart and put it back together, so shewas confident she could do the same to the much more complex office printer.
She was wrong. Not only was she wrong, but she had discovered the ink cartridges. Something her father had removed before letting her at his old, cheap printer. Curiosity had driven her to breaking one open like it wasa walnut, and her prize was the thick ink coating her pretty blue dress, her hands, her arms, and a large spot on her left cheek.
She had gotten in a lot of trouble for that one, and her dad had been responsible for paying for the printer. She felt bad – she did. She didn’t want tobreakthings. She just wanted to learn. And she felt like she learned a lot. At the cost of being grounded for a month, losing her toys, and having double chores.
Yet, that hadn’t stopped her from doing it again and again. Being in trouble was never a deterrent for her curiosity. To the point that it drove her parents to even seek medical help for her. They felt compelled to try to find some way to control her compulsions. If that was a pill, then maybe that’s what she needed, they told each other.
Haven Clarkson got herself in trouble again, the nurse would say to the doctor when they thought she couldn’t hear. By then, people knew to keep her away from electronics or machines because her itchy fingers just needed to break them down. To pull them apart. To figure out how they worked. It was never her goal to destroy them. She always tried to put the things back together so that they’d work again. She just wasn’t always successful.
So, they tried medication. They tried therapy. They tried counseling. But the problem was that Haven didn't see herself as having a problem. She wanted to know, she wanted to learn.Being told she was wrong for that went right over her head simply because she didn't want to hear it.
It soon became very obvious that she couldn’t be distracted or diverted. And her parents tried. They offered rewards, they tried punishments, they tried alternatives. They enrolled her in sports and gymnastics and school clubs. And she did great in them. Especially gymnastics, she really enjoyed that. It kind of felt like herbodybecame the machine, and she got to learn all the ways it could move and stretch and flex. It was fun.
But there were still plenty of hours in the day after gymnastics, and she was willing to sacrifice sleep if it meant she could break open the TV and figure out how it worked.
Her parents loved her, she knew. But she could also feel how relieved they were when she moved away for college. By then, she had gotten really good at fixing things, so even once she broke something down, she almost always put it back together successfully. But that didn't matter when her mother would anxiously hide her new laptop or her father wouldn’t let her near his car. She was a source of anxiety and they were always afraid she’d break something else.
And that was a sentiment that followed her throughout her life. Her dorm mates, roommates, coworkers all inevitably ended up right back at that mixture of annoyance, resignation, and inevitable disappointment in her.
Haven didn'tlikedistressing people. She didn't like that her out of control curiosity would drive her to hurt people or their things. If she broke something, she always paid for it, taking over that role from her father once she became an adult. But that didn't matter as everyone became frustrated with her, despite the warnings she always gave them about her tendencies.
I’m curious, she’d say. I break things. I’ll try to fix it, and I’ll definitely succeed if you give me enough time, but they might be broken. I’m sorry. I’m warning you now that I’m like this.
They didn't believe her. They didn’t take the warning seriously. They got mad at her for doing exactly what she told them she would do. The refrigerator, the microwave, the washing machine – nothing was safe from her curiosity. And it would inconvenience them, and they’d be mad.
And just like that, the friendship would end. They’d mutter under their breath as they left her and her curiosity behind.
Because Haven Clarkson wasn’t justintrouble, shewastrouble.
An annoyance. A burden. A disappointment.
And as it so happened, it was easier for Haven to cut out people than her own innate sense of exploration and curiosity. That part of her that was inherent in her blood, in her brain, in her heart. It was impossible to stop or remove. People, however, were easy to get rid of.
So, she did exactly that. She warned them, they didn’t listen, she did what she wanted, and they’d leave again. They warned others away from her. She never tried to get close to anyone. Those that pitied her would sour upon actually getting to know her.
And she got to be alone.
She let her impulses guide and drive her. She allowed her curiosity to spark endlessly in her soul. Even if it did mean that she would find herself in trouble.
Getting work in an airport had been easy. Working on planes came naturally. She loved learning airplane mechanics and engineering. She spent a long time in the repair hangers just soaking up a seemingly endless amount of information.
Using that knowledge to stowaway and sneak out of the country had been an accident. Genuinely, she hadn’t meant to do it. She had crawled into a tiny space in the plane, she exhausted herself poking around, and then fell asleep. When she woke up again, no one had noticed her being there, and she was already in the sky. Too late to call out or turn the plane around.
When theydidland, she was able to sneak out and found that her lifetime of avoiding people, avoiding their judgement and whispers, had given her a skill she didn’t even realize she had. She was great at hiding, at sneaking around, at being quiet.
On her mama, she had absolutely intended on sneaking onto a plane bound back home. She got herself in trouble, but she would get herself out of it. And it made sense that if she could sneak away in a plane, she could sneak back as well. She’d return home, no one the wiser, and things would go back to normal.
