Nepenthe • Something that can make you forget grief or suffering.
Never feeling like they belonged was a feeling that Lissa Dragomir lived with, even with her family and life long best friend, although they aided in that feeling not being so strong...
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Katherine Alistair was one of those children that fell through the cracks of the legal system of CPS, Children's Protective Services. So much so that she's been legally emancipated since she turned 16, which had been a couple of weeks ago, November 3rd.
It wasn't that Katherine was a misbehaved child, at least not in the sense that she was rebellious and talked back, or that she got into trouble or anything like that. No, in fact Katherine's only issue was that her hypervigilance and tendency to stay awake for, either days on end or until late hours in the night, scared the families she was staying with.
And if that didn't scare them, the fact that she would repeatedly appear in their dreams, both pleasant or not, watching from afar, always surrounded by a red glow, creeped them.
But creeping them out scored very little on the chart of reasons for Katherine to return to the orphanage or agency, especially when her GPA varied between 3.7 and 4.0 depending on the years, she didn't have a criminal record, she didn't party or stay out until late, unless it was exam season and then rarely would someone see her outside the library, she didn't do recreational drugs and she was always willing to do more chores than her own.
All things that adoptive parents, or prospective adoptive parents wanted in a child that came from the system.
Especially given the fact that Katherine lost her whole family in a house fire that also took her own life, people who suffer near death experiences often want to experience life to the fullest, they want to experience every thrill possible in life, but Katherine simply wasn't one of them.
Katherine had been 7 when she was put in the Foster system, and until she was emancipated, and she'd lost count of how many foster homes she'd been in.
She'd worked part-time jobs from the time she was 12, small things at first but she'd been insistent on being independent, knowing that each and every stay in foster homes would not often last longer than a year.
She'd been moved across the US so much from the age of 7 until she turned 16 that she didn't particularly feel any connection with one state.
However, when she returned to the group home after her court hearing for her emancipation, Katherine was given a letter, a letter with very little content but a credit card, said credit card information and a letter with nothing but 'Enjoy the world to the fullest.'
Normally, a rational and normal person would be wary of getting a credit card in the mail, from a complete random person, with a hefty amount of money in it. But Katherine was genuinely and honestly just thankful, curious but thankful.
It was with the credit card that Katherine wasable to secure a room in an apartment on a student housing campus in Oregon,apply to transfer to a high school nearby the student housing, which wasdifficult in itself but given her academic record wasn't as hard, and buy a busticket there, with nothing but the clothes on her back, an old wallet with apicture of herself as a young child along with her late twin brother and latemother, and a tattered and beat up back pack that held her remaining earthly belongings.
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