Mute | Adopted by Scarlett Johansson

14 - Arlo

As Arlo sat in her classroom, working on the newest math problem the class was given, she cursed the construction men and the work that they were doing to the grounds, frustrated that they were preventing her from getting to know Miss Johansson better, and possibly forming the start of what had the potential to be quite a strong bond between the two. Her thoughts then led her to the fact that the orphanage didn't even need any new upgrades. It would still be the place where she had spent so many years feeling alone, for the most part, no matter how many new buildings they added or walls they painted.

The math question wasn't even hard, Arlo didn't understand why it was taking the teacher so long to move on. In the past, they had been given much harder questions with unreasonably shorter amounts of time to complete them in. The girl spun her head around, briefly glancing at all of the other kids around her, trying to guess what they were doing while waiting for the next question. Analysing the room, Arlo found that almost everyone else had their heads down working on something in their books, and they would only occasionally look up in front of them before getting on with whatever they were writing down on their pages. It was because of this that Arlo looked at the board, finally realising, with a sinking feeling in her chest, that the teacher had in fact already moved on and had put up 8 more questions for the kids to complete. Being pretty far behind the rest of the class, Arlo started the next question, blaming the construction workers for distracting her and causing yet another problem in her life.

After the last class of the day had finished and Arlo was heading down the corridor, she saw Mrs Moore, which caught her attention. The woman was talking to another one of the caretakers, having a seemingly serious conversation, as Arlo did not see either of them display the usual signs of having a friendly chat. Instead, the two women were talking in low voices, as if they feared being heard by any of the kids also walking down the hall. The girl didn't realise that she had been staring for much longer than what was deemed socially acceptable, and Mrs Moore must have felt her stares as the women looks away from the other woman for a moment, finding Arlo's eyes and motioning to her to make her way over to them. However, as she got closer, the other woman walked off, leaving just Mrs Moore, which Arlo appreciated substantially, usually finding that having to be in the presence of more that one adult was pretty intimidating and she could quickly become overwhelmed.

"Good Afternoon Arlo, I was just about to come and find you."

The small girl waved with a small, polite smile.

"I just wanted to tell you that Miss Johansson has emailed me back, saying that she is going to be able to come on Thursday, in three days time, so that you can have another meeting with her. She has informed me that she is available all day, so I had a little idea that maybe if you wanted to, we could all go out together, maybe for lunch, or ice cream and we could even go to the park, hmm, what do you think about that?"

Arlo signed to Mrs Moore 'I would love to sit in the park and eat ice cream.' Not being too keen on being around loads of people in a restaurant or cafe but maybe ice cream would mean that they only stayed in the building for a small amount of time. In truth, the idea of leaving the orphanage and venturing out into the big, scary world made Arlo immediately feel anxious, stressing over the idea of being around more people than she was used to.

"Okay fantastic! I wanted to ask you first before Miss Johansson, so I'll go email her back now and see if she is okay with these plans too. Have a nice evening hun, I'll probably see you around a little later." And with that Mrs Moore headed to her office to set the plans in motion, whilst Arlo continued her journey back to her room to kill some time before it was time for dinner.