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[Alexandr Korol]

– I have no one to talk to. My circle is foolish. They all just want silly things. Like money, cars, all that — bragging. They’re all constantly judging and showing off to each other. I don’t want that, it hurts me, it’s unpleasant to be around them. I sit at home, I don’t go out.
– What do you do at home?
– Well, I write in a diary, when I feel really down. Just like a cry from the soul. Just — who am I and why is all this happening to me? And she said:
– Write a book.
– Well, I’m already writing a diary, for many years now, since I was sixteen, since 2006.
– Well, when you finish it, collect it all and make a book out of it.
– What should I call it?,- I don’t know why I thought of the title right then. And she said:
– Well, what else — what? What have you been doing all this time? What are you always searching for?
– The answer.
– Then call it that — ‘The Answer.’ That’s it. ,- and then I asked:
– But who am I? Who am I? Please explain it to me.
– Well, you are...,- she smiled and looked at me,- you are a golden child.
– Well, okay, and what then? So I’m a “golden child”, and then what?
– You’ll have a difficult destiny.
– You mean hard? You mean bad?
– No, just not like other people’s.

Not like other people’s, she said. I don’t know what she saw in me. She seemed both happy for me and worried at the same time. Both happy and worried. And then yes, the next day we spoke on the phone, and she said that someone called Alexander — my namesake — had called her, asking who she had met with, what she had been doing, and who that boy was. He said he wanted to meet that boy — me — that he needed kids like that. And it instantly reminded me of the movie “Indigo Children.” Just a year before, a Russian movie had come out where indigo children with special abilities were being tracked down. And for me, it felt like maybe this was some unusual man, some kind of scientist, who would confirm to me that I wasn’t crazy, that I really was magical —