The Station Girl

Chapter 7

The next ten years passed by in a relatively calm fashion, and over the course of that first year, there were many things that Sir and I learned about myself.

My birthday was one of the first things that we learned. It was shortly after I started talking to him that he asked how old I was, and I told him I was five. Consequently, he asked when my birthday was. I didn't know. I was five because they told me I was five. There wasn't anything more to it than that.

It was quickly settled on that my birthday would be the day I arrived at the station, and it was marked on the calendar for future reference. Every year following, we celebrated my birthday on August 20th. We didn't do anything special, but we did go to the abandoned trains every year without fail where Sir would present me with my favorite foods and a new dress.

That first month, clothing was an issue for us. Or rather, Sir thought it was an issue. I looked like a homeless girl, and that was unacceptable. I was most definitely not homeless. I just happened to live at the train station, which not a lot of people did. He asked a few people for favors, and by the end of the month, I had several new dresses to wear. Even if they were on the plain side, it made me happy to know I no longer had to wear my sack-like dresses.

After that first week, Sir spent some time fixing the shed up for me. He boarded up the holes that let in the nights' chill, and swept up the dust and cobwebs around the inside. When he began moving stuff around inside it, he asked me what I wanted and what I didn't want. For most of the things, I didn't have much preference. The one thing I did care for was a toy train set that I'd found in the sole cabinet.

The toy was wooden with the paint flaking off of it, and if I wasn't careful, it would poke splinters into my hand. Underneath the engine, there were letters carved into it. When I asked Sir about it, he said it once belonged to his son David. I made sure to take good care of that train set in the following years.

The whole shed looked much nicer on the inside by the time Sir was done with it. The sole window was cleaned off and let twice as much light in, chasing off the darkness that still frightened me back then. The cabinet had been moved so that there was space for a small table and chair. I still slept on the ground, but I didn't mind. Especially since Sir had made sure to profusely apologize to me for it.

Even after I started talking to Sir, and got cleaned up, I didn't talk to many other people. Back then, Sir was the only one I talked to unless I was approached first. A few of the people who came to the station would comment on how pretty I looked on occasion, and I would politely tell them thank you with a smile, but it wasn't anything more than that.

I find it strange that they all ignored me when I looked homeless, and yet started taking a few moments out of their day to tell me how pretty I looked once I'd been cleaned up.

There were times where I'm sure Sir watched me from a distance, and saw the frowns and downcast eyes I sometimes wore. I missed Lucy. I thought about the kids who'd disappeared. I relieved, unwillingly, the days I spent in the bad room. It was during these times where he would come out of his building unannounced and ask me how I was feeling. Every time he asked, I would beam up at him and tell him I was okay. By the time that first winter came, he stopped asking.

It was during one particularly cold day before the snow began to fall that I asked him if I was supposed to come inside for the winter. I was apprehensive. No matter how much he'd asked me to, I'd never wanted to go into his building. It wasn't because I was scared of Sir anymore. The reason was because his building had a very peculiar atmosphere coming from it. When its door was left open, an odd smell would waft out from the single room I could see into. Whenever I looked into the room, I didn't see the two single benches or the book cases lined up against the wall.

What I saw was the morbid sense of finality that lingered in that room. The room was bright and cheerful in color, yet all I could think of when I peered inside was the grayness that the colors tried so hard to mask.

It gave me a feeling that whoever lived in this room would never be able to escape from it.

So when Sir told me no, I would not have to live in his building with him during the winter, I couldn't help but smile. When he'd fixed up my shed, he'd made sure it was more than capable of keeping me warm. If it wasn't good enough for me, then he was willing to work on it some more if I still didn't want to stay in the building with him.

It was during the winter that we discovered how passionate I was for learning. Instead of holding my lessons outside the way we'd done during the warmer days, he brought an extra chair to my shed and spent part of the morning teaching me.

Without the distraction of the outside world and trains, I showed amazing concentration and aptitude for the work I was given. By the time winter was over, I was no longer tracing my letters or counting simple dots. Rather, I was making simple sentences and multiplying easy numbers together.

All the while, he never forgot about my passion in trains. They were always present in my lessons, even when we weren't talking about them directly. When he was teaching me numbers, he asked me to count how many wheels they had. When he was teaching me words and letters, he would have me name a part of it and then spell it out loud or write it down.

In those days, all was peaceful. I grew up into a woman with Sir as the father I'd never had. It wasn't always exciting, but I was content. I was happy to live my life at the train station.

And then one day, not long after I turned fifteen, David came to the station.

*****

A/N: Time skip, activate! Seriously though, if I would ever be interested in expanding on this story and felt it would be worth it, I have a full ten years right here to insert all sorts of scenes.