Lonely Hearts

Chapter one: Lincoln

I'm used to being alone.

That's what happens, when you're nearly sixteen and haven't yet found your forever home. I've been in the social system for as long as I can remember. I've played all the games, tried all the tricks.

It doesn't matter. The care home is almost like home now anyway.

Mum used to say she would come and get me out.

She never did. I never knew what happened to her. I only know that she is, in all the likely scenarios, dead.

I miss her.

I hadn't seen her in seven years, but I miss her. Each day as painful as the last. But I'm used to it. Mum was never really there very often anyway.

Not like my sisters.

Emma used to write to me every week to tell me what she and Max were doing. But they've moved a lot and I couldn't keep up. Couldn't write back.

It's now been three years.

Emma will be fifteen in August, and Max is...ten? Eleven? It's been so long. Too long. I can only hope they're still together.

She and Max were living with a lovely French couple who fed them brioche and taught them to say 'bonjour' and 'ça va' and 'comment allez-vous.' (I had to look up the last one.) Last I spoke to her, she reassured me they were fine. The house was fine. The school was fine. The people were fine. All fine. 

Good. They deserved it. After all they've been through, they deserved to have a happy home. Even if it wasn't permanent. Who knows? Maybe it would become permanent. They were young. Sweet. Sparkly-eyed and chubby-cheeked. Hopeful. Always hopeful.

Those two were the best things that had ever happened to me. They gave me hope. Laughter. They gave me a home.

Without them I was nothing. Just a lost kid who didn't know what he was doing or what he was looking for. But I knew I had made the right decision sending them away. They needed a real home. I had fought hard for them. I had worked so hard to find that home for them. I'm glad they're safe. But that didn't mean I didn't ache when I thought of them. 

I looked around the cafeteria before choosing a seat away from the busy tables, sitting next to Marvin, a quiet lad with his head in a book. He wouldn't care about the can of Fosters I had snuck past Charlie and Fred.

Charlie and Fred were the evening supervisors, more challenging than the morning supervisors, they wouldn't take anybody's shit. They used to scare my sisters so I always fought to keep them out of the home as often as possible. Sending them to foster home after foster home so they were always out of their reach.

I quietly opened my can, prompting Marvin to look up and raise an eyebrow at my audacity, before looking back at his book without a word.

I took a couple of sips, ignoring the hungry looks from the kids at the next table. They can buy their own lager if they wanted it. If they wanted to risk Charlie or Fred taking away their internet privileges or sending them to Head.

No one wanted to be sent to Head. I should know, I'd made more trips to her office than my own room. I even had my own chair that was plumped just the way I liked it.

I picked at the healthy mush on my plate gingerly and grimaced as I scooped up some softer-than-average parsnips. Did they think we couldn't chew ourselves or something?

I sipped from my drink washing down the stuff that stuck to my throat and made it hard to swallow.

"Come on, Johnson." A voice from behind told me.