She hated him. He hated her. And that was alright in their world until one night. Everything changed then, conversations exchanged between drags of a shared cigarette having developed a mutual respect between enemies.
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Slowburn enemies to frie...
The obvious answer would be four walls and a roof.
But that's not quite right, is it?
A house is four walls and a roof. A home, however, now that's a tricky question.
For the last eight years, home has been a library of dingy brick corridors that reek of cigarettes, filled to the brim with angsty teens and hoards of energetic kids. Pearl's House: Home for Misplaced Kids was a dump, respectfully, and to no fault of Miss Pearl herself. The children she took in were frequently walking nightmares with legs and voiceboxes. They weren't all bad, though. They just needed a little love; a few hugs and three warm meals a day brought the kids out of their shells in no time.
I'd been at Pearl's House off and on for half of my life. Miss Pearl would manage to sucker another young couple into fostering me, then a few months would go by, and they'd realize their mistake. That's when I would pack my things and move back to Pearl's.
Miss Pearl was a honey-souled black woman from Florida. She spoke with a heavy Southern accent and with a welcoming dialect that instantly gained her everyone's trust. Unfortunately for her, having a soul comparable to God himself doesn't stop the universe from giving you shit. She was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and died within the year, leaving the children of the Home to be liquidated and sent out to different states.
Between the joyful chaos of over a hundred kids crammed into a repurposed elementary school and Miss Pearl herself, there's a lot to miss about home. It's been fifteen days since I last slept tucked into scratchy wool blankets and dozed off to my bunkmate Ivy's train-like snoring; fifteen days since I carved a fourth dash into my assigned bunkbed, marking my final time to leave the Home.
Two weeks, one day, three hours, and a handful of minutes since I last laid eyes on the coast of California, kissing it goodbye with a flutter of tear-soaked eyelashes on my way to Hawkins, Indiana.
Hawkins, Indiana. Who the fuck names a town Hawkins? What an awful name. Perhaps I'm biased.
Claudia Henderson had taken a special interest in my case and drove thirty-three hours to California to meet me right before the Home shut down. Why she'd willingly adopt a teenager seven states over bewilders me. What, they don't have orphanages in Indiana? Or maybe she wanted to challenge herself with the most difficult orphan she could find.
When I met Claudia, I immediately noticed a deep-set sadness in her eyes. She does well to cover it, but I could tell there was something missing inside her; a gap she needed to fill. I suppose I'm the patch for that hole. A terrible decision, really.
I met Dustin, her one and only child. The twelve-year-old curly-haired, gap-toothed genius and I instantly got along. He even helped me unpack my things, which was an embarrassingly small amount, on my first day in Hawkins. When Dustin took note of my minuscule collection of worldly possessions, he offered to dip into his life savings of allowance and birthday money stored in a round pink piggybank on his dresser. I hastily declined, though I appreciated the gesture.
I moved in thirteen days ago.
Since then, Dustin and I have taped glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling of my assigned room and hung up posters Claudia had bought for me. I had brought a stack of books with me and spent the majority of nights reading the stories aloud to Dustin, who lay sprawled out on his belly against the shag carpet.
I got a job at the Hawkins Cinema and enrolled in the local high school. My first day of school is this upcoming Monday.
Realistically speaking, I should be gleaming with joy right about now. I've got everything I could've ever asked for; peace, food, shelter, a job, a real education...
But I'm not.
An agitating cloud has been looming over me since I arrived. Though Claudia speaks seriously of adopting me, I hold great doubt about her promises. Soon she'd send me back, but to where this time I am unsure. Pearl's House had been disbanded, effectively decimating any chance of being sent back home to California if the Henderson's didn't work out.
When they didn't work out. It never works out. Call it bad luck if you will, or maybe I'm not an unforgiving God's favorite. All I know is that while some kids were born with a silver spoon in their mouths, I was born with a punch in the face.
I recall the first time I was fostered frequently.
I was twelve years old, and the Lumien couple was twenty days away from finalizing the adoption paperwork when an intruder broke into the home. It happened in a blur. He writhed in the air as an invisible force wrang his neck free of oxygen until he ceased his movements and I let him fall limp to the ground. I did what I had to do...but they didn't see it that way. Miss Lumien labeled me the antichrist, clutching the cross that always hung from her neck as her husband all but threw me out the front door.
I arrived back on Miss Pearl's doorstep shellshocked and starving. It had taken me days to walk back from the Lumiens, and by that time they had already called her to label me as a murderer. Miss Pearl knew better though, and walked me to the chapel that was once the gymnasium when the building was a school. She proclaimed that if I were truly evil, I'd burst into flames right there. She wasn't upset, more perplexed than anything. She asked me how I did it. I couldn't give a straight answer. I knew as much if not less than she did.
From then on she took her under her wing, trying her best to explain whatever gifts I'd been born with. As I grew older my senses heightened, and my mind became connected to everything and everyone around me. I developed psychic abilities at fourteen, my first vision being that of an incident that would happen days later when one of the lunch ladies would accidentally set the kitchen ablaze. It happened as if scripted by myself, down to the minuscule details.
Miss Pearl was the only one who knew about my abilities. She was my anchor, my rock. And now she's dead, buried in some cemetery that no one will ever visit.
Reading seems to keep my mind off the supernatural elements of my life. Luckily for me, books are cheap, and Dustin enjoys them as well. Many nights he'd listen to my narration until he was passed out on the bedroom floor. He slept there all night most of the time.
I've taken a liking to the cold, gloomy town of Hawkins and my newfound friend. My job is imperfect but supplies me with a steady book-buying income.
I remind myself that I can't afford to fuck this one up. After all, there's nowhere to go after this.
I've already survived fifteen days. How hard can the rest be?
