Lucy was an ordinary little girl who everybody at her school liked. She had a pretty face with shiny long hair. Nobody ever picked on little Lucy, because everybody was her friend. One day Lucy was walking home from school when a strange lady sitting on a bench caught her attention. Lucy walked over to the lady and sat beside her.
"I was a young girl just like you once," the strange lady said, "But then I found this coin." The lady opened her fist and sitting on her palm was a golden coin, that Lucy didn't recognise.
"What is it?" Lucy asked, reaching for the coin. The strange lady closed her hand quickly and shook her head.
"It isn't for little girls to touch." she said, "I touched it and was never the same again."
"What happened?" Lucy asked, still looking at the strange lady's closed hand. The lady put the coin in her pocket and shifted on the bench to see Lucy's face better.
"I found the coin lying on a street, just like this one." she said, "I saw it glinting in the sunlight and picked it up, thinking I could spend it later. But first I had to go home to my parents and eat my dinner which was waiting for me, so I put the coin in my pocket and forgot about it, and went home.
"Nothing happened to me for the rest of the day, and I went to bed at nine o'clock, as usual. The next morning I woke up and got out of bed to get washed and dressed for school. But while I was in the shower, a thought occurred to me. 'Why do I have to go to school?' I thought, 'I already know everything.' So I stepped out of the shower, dried myself, and dressed in my weekend clothes. While my mother was still downstairs making my breakfast, I climbed out my bedroom window and down the drainpipe, and dropped silently into the garden. I woke up our little Labrador puppy and took him out across the garden and over the fence into our neighbour's garden. Our neighbour lived in the house on the corner of the street, so I climbed over her fence as well and was out on the street. Just a ten year old girl and her little puppy, alone on the streets in the morning when I should have been getting ready for school.
"And so I started walking, where to I had no idea, I just seemed to know which alleyways to avoid, which roads to walk down, when to hide from people and cars. Eventually, by the end of the day my puppy and I were in the next town, fifteen miles away. I looked at the clock on the town hall and saw that the time was past nine o'clock, well after my usual bedtime, and I was very tired from all my walking, so I found a quiet corner in a dark alleyway and went to sleep, my puppy curled up beside me. When I woke up the following day, the sun was still rising, and I was slightly damp from dew. I stretched, woke up the puppy again and we set off, carrying on further and further from my home and my parents, who were very very worried about me. But I didn't seem to care; I knew they would be worried for me, and I knew that I should be feeling guilty about leaving them like that, but for some reason I felt calm and had a clear conscience.
"Well, I and my puppy stayed on the road for a whole ten days, walking forever it seemed, each day reaching a new town, each one further and further from my home. At one point I even heard on somebody's radio the news about a missing girl, they even named me, and interviewed my mother, who broke into tears, and then my father, who also started crying. But still I didn't feel guilty. I soon settled in a small town over one hundred miles from my home, living on the streets, somehow finding food and warmth for me and my puppy when others were shivering cold and hungry in their little cardboard huts. The weeks turned into months, and the summer turned into autumn and of course that was followed by winter.
"As a bright little girl like you realises, a cold winter can be very dangerous for people who don't have a warm house to live in, but I was fine. I stayed warm, still wearing the simple clothes I had left home in, and my puppy was warm and well-fed also. I befriended a boy called Simon who was two years older than me, and we looked after each other, but one cold night, I started to feel the cold and so I cuddled up close with my puppy, and told Simon that I was cold. But Simon didn't answer. When I looked over at him, expecting him to be fast asleep, I saw that he was dead. He had died from the cold, and also he had starved to death. I was puzzled at first, because he and I both had the same amount of clothing, and we had been eating the same as well. Yet I was still very healthy. As you can understand, I was very upset because I had lost my friend, and I started to cry. I searched in my pockets for my handkerchief and out fell this coin." The lady retrieved the coin from her pocket again, and held it between her fingertips, for Lucy to see.
"It rolled across the floor," the lady continued, "And soon settled, catching what little light was present, looking exactly as it had the day I found it. I was confused, because I didn't remember it, but then the memories came back to me, and I sat back, looking at the coin. For some reason it had captivated me, broken me out of my grief at Simon's death. I shuffled slightly to get more comfortable, and instantly the coin stopped catching the light, and I started shivering. I was so cold, and so very hungry too. I looked at my puppy, and he was cold and hungry also. In a panic, I lurched forward, planning to find a kind person to help me, perhaps someone who could take me back home to my parents, who I now realised loved me very much, and I felt guilty for leaving them. But after I had lurched forward, the coin caught the light once more, and suddenly I was no longer cold, and I no longer needed food. My puppy looked similarly content and warm and well-fed. I picked the coin up and returned it to my pocket. "Once again I no longer felt guilty about leaving my parents, but now I knew that I should go home back to them and show them that I was well. So I wrapped my coat around me, picked up my puppy, and started walking back home. But my puppy was too heavy for me, so I put him down on the floor and was amazed to see that he was no longer a puppy but a fully grown dog, and very handsome too. I was shocked and surprised at that, but even more shocked and surprised when I saw that I too had grown up, I was now a fully-grown woman, bearing a similarity to my mother. I reached into my pocket and found the coin once again, and took my first close look at it. On one side of the coin was a pattern of squares, and on the other side was a face of a little girl. I looked closely at the face, and saw that the little girl was me. In shock, I dropped the coin, and took a step back. The coin was now partially buried in the snow, and I started shivering. I picked it up once more and stopped shivering. I was beginning to understand what had happened to me, but not how or why it had happened.
"I didn't take any sleep or rest until I got back home, eight whole days later. I had been walking non-stop, through snow and wind and rain, all the while thinking about the coin. When I reached home, I knocked quietly on the door, which after a short while was answered by my father, who was now an old man. At first he didn't notice that I bore a resemblance to his wife, but suddenly he did notice, and was shocked when he realised that I was his long-lost daughter. I hadn't said anything yet, but he knew for sure who I was. He opened the door for me to enter, and showed me to the living room where my mother sat. She recognised me instantly, and began to cry. I asked her how long I had been missing, and she replied,"

"Twelve years darling. We were so worried about you, we thought you had been kidnapped. What happened?"
Lucy rested a hand on her mother's shoulder and the two of them sat down. Lucy took a deep breath and started telling her mother the story of what had happened.
"The day before I went missing, I met a woman in the street who told me a strange story, and gave me this coin." Lucy held the coin out for her mother to see. "Don't touch it, I daren't think what would happen to you if you did."
Lucy's mother stared at the coin, upon which she could see the face of a woman. It was like looking into a mirror, the face on the coin was her own. But she stayed silent, letting her daughter tell her tale. "The morning I disappeared," Lucy continued, "A strange impulse came over me, I didn't feel it necessary to go to school because I knew everything there was to know. Exactly what the strange lady in the street told me was happening to me, I could feel it. But I couldn't stop what was happening, it was like I was just watching it all on a television screen. You say this happened twelve years ago, yet to me it has been only seven months. I can't begin to explain how anything happened, because I simply don't know. All I know is, this coin stole twelve years of my life from me, and twelve years from the life of the woman who gave it to me, and who knows how many people before her. But when she held the coin, the face on it was hers, aged ten, and now, it's my face, aged ten -"
"No," her mother interrupted, "It's my face, as I look now."
Lucy looked down at the coin, and true enough, her mother's fifty year old face was staring back at her from the shining golden metal. She started crying at the implication of this.
"This must mean that it's going to take twelve years of your life from you." she sobbed. Her mother reached out for the coin, and grasped it in her hand. Even as her daughter watched through the tears, her appearance changed from that of a fifty year old woman who has lived the past twelve years in worry, to that of a thirty-eight year old woman. Her husband and daughter also became younger by twelve years. The rejuvenated family retired to their beds in confusion, and when they awoke the following day, all memories of the events that had taken place the previous day were gone. As was the coin.

Melissa was walking home from school when a small bright light caught her eye. She stepped closer and there on the ground was a strange-looking golden coin, with three happy faces on one side.

The End

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