The girl in the wheel chair smiled at me and called my name before I could tell her
She rolled into class on a Wednesday morning, wearing a bright green dress that clashed with our dull uniforms, her hair pulled back neatly, her wheelchair shining with sun-colored wheels. Braces lined both legs, and yet, she carried herself with a quiet dignity that made you stop and notice.
At first, everyone treated her like she might break—gentle smiles, soft voices, awkward kindness. But I didn’t. I spoke to her like anyone else. Asked her where she was from. She looked at me and smiled like she already knew me. “You already know,” she said. I blinked. “I don’t,” I replied. But then she said my name—“Eleanor”—with a strange familiarity. “Do you remember me?”
I didn’t. Her face didn’t match any memory, but something in her eyes stirred a sense that I was missing something important. “It’s okay,” she said kindly. “It’s been a long time. You were very little when we last saw each other.”
Her name was Violet. She didn’t flinch around me the way others did, and in turn, I stopped treating her like someone to tiptoe around. We slowly became friends. I pushed her chair at lunch, carried her books, rolled her across the schoolyard when the weather was nice. She made me laugh—dry humor, clever comments, a quiet awareness that she saw the world differently than the rest of us.
One afternoon, helping her with math, I pointed at a problem and groaned, “Why does any of this matter?” She looked at me and tilted her head. “You really don’t remember, do you?” I stared at her, confused. “Remember what?”
Violet rocked slightly in her chair, eyes thoughtful. “I used to be just like you. Not in this chair. But I was lost too—searching for answers I couldn’t find.” Then she said it: “We were friends once. In another life. Something happened. It changed everything.”
I blinked, unsure whether she was joking. But she wasn’t. “We were meant to help each other,” she said. “But we were separated.”
Her voice was calm but filled with something deeper. Over the next few weeks, she opened up a little more. Told me about the accident, the way her body changed, the way her mind adapted. She spoke about her past as if it were more than just childhood—like it belonged to another existence entirely.
I asked, “How could we have been friends? I don’t remember any of that.” She nodded slowly. “Something made us forget.”
Then one day, walking together to the bus stop, I noticed a symbol tattooed faintly on her wrist. It sent a chill through me. I had seen it before—in a dream I’d had years ago that never left me. “Where did you get that?” I asked.
Her smile deepened. “That’s the key. It connects us. You’re starting to remember.”
And I was. A dream, a symbol, a feeling of knowing her long before I ever saw her roll into our classroom. “I think I remember,” I whispered.
She nodded. “The world needs us to do something important. Don’t forget it again.”
Before I could respond, a black car pulled up. A tall man in a suit stepped out and said, “Violet, it’s time. We’ve been looking for you.”
Her expression changed. The playful Violet vanished. She turned to me with solemn eyes. “This is where our paths part. You have to continue alone now.”
“Where are you going?” I asked, panic rising.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “You are. You’ve always had the power. I just came to remind you.”
Then she was gone.
In the days that followed, I kept turning her words over in my mind. Her mysterious past, the dream, the man in the suit—it all hinted at something larger, something buried deep inside me. And for the first time, I was ready to believe it. Maybe Violet didn’t just help me remember a past life—maybe she woke me up to my purpose in this one. I didn’t know what was coming next, but I finally knew where to begin.