When You Walk Through The Fire

Chapter One

This isn't proofed.

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Ellie's Point of View:

I sat in the backseat of my social workers SUV playing with my fingers. I was incredibly nervous. *sigh* I guess I should tell you guys why.

My name is Macey Whit... erm, no. My name is Ellie Fulfer. I am 13 and I am currently going to meet my brother for the first time is 11 years. I was a missing person and I didn't know it... it's been... I am sorry, I'm mumbling and skipping all around. Okay. Let me try again.

A year ago my mom disappeared. She has always suffered with mental health issues. She would get treatment, do better, stop taking her medication and seeing her therapist, and do really bad again. She often lost her jobs and we moved a lot. I remember her being asleep more than I remember being awake. I sound really cold about her, but I guess I'm really hurt about it. I always wanted my mom to pay attention to me, to show up for at least one school function, or at least to treat me like a child and not a roommate. Back to the disappearing part, sometimes she'd be missing for a day or two, but this time she was gone for over a month before a neighbor got suspicious and called Child Protective Services. I obviously was taken and placed into foster care that day.

My foster care story isn't like most. My families were really nice to me. I have been in three so far, but I didn't move around because I got sent back or they were bad or anything like that. Since my mom moved us around so much I was really behind in school. It seemed like every school was in a different place than my last school had been in, so I really lacked the basics of education. The foster care people.... or the system... however you would phrase that had me tested for developmental delays and we found out I had Dyslexia and ADD. Dyslexia means that I see things backwards sometimes, and ADD means I have trouble focusing. We found out later I had Generalized Anxiety Disorder too.

Anyway, the first family I was with was really kind, but the school they were zoned for wouldn't work with my disabilities, so I was moved to a second home. They were zoned for a better school and they were nice too, but I have really bad nightmares at night and I kept waking up the smaller children with my crying and screaming. I really didn't mean to, it just happened. I can't control them. My social worker said that they were bad fosters because they should have known how to handle the situation, but I wasn't sure. I thought they were nice. The third family I was with were my favorites. They were an older couple and they really spent a lot of time with me. They even took me to church with them, the other families let me go, but they didn't go with me. The wife took me out for dinners, and we even got our toes done once a month. I went fishing with the husband sometimes and we always had dinner together. It was great. About seven weeks ago, we went on a weekend trip, and their house was broken into. One of the officers that came out kept staring at me, and asking me a lot of questions. I really thought it was because I was the foster kid and he thought I had something to do with the break in. I was WAY off. He left and came back a few days later with a file. It had a picture that had been digitally aged and it looked a lot like me..... well it was me.

After some research and A LOT of phone calls and questions, my social worker discovered that my mother had abandoned my older brother when he was 17. He was in juvie and according  to the reports she just stopped visiting and responding to calls. She seemed to be pretty good at that. My brother had filed missing person reports on us and technically she was in legal trouble because my brother was still a miner when she left.

She must have  been planning it for a while because she even had fake birth certificates and social security cards for us. My real name was Ellie Fulfer. I was only 2 at the time. I felt really guilty because I didn't remember anything about my brother, but he said it was okay. That I was just a baby. I didn't really believe him, and I talked to my therapist about it too. She's in the front seat *points* she's been with me for about 8 months. You'll learn I ask her about a lot of things. Between my anxiety and my guilt, I'm pretty much a mess.