Those You've Known (Newsies)

1: Left Behind

Jack Kelly was used to funerals. The somber, mournful occasions were just a part of his life by now. For as long as he could remember, death had been a part of his life and had taken away so many people he cared about over the years. Though the young man’s choice color was blue, much of his clothing was black in mourning of the losses he had felt over the years.

The first death came early on his life. His mother had died in a car accident when he was only a couple months old, leaving him without a guiding female presence for the early part of his life. He didn’t remember her at all. The only reason he knew her name or what she looked like was because of his father. That tie disappeared when he was eight, and his father passed due to an accident on the job.

He got used to taking care of himself and others after he became an orphan. As he traveled between foster homes and group homes, death still seemed to surround him as illnesses and accidents happened to the people who came in and out of his life. His first foster mom was the first casualty, but she certainly wasn’t the last. In his almost eighteen years of life, he could no longer count the number of funerals he could remember on his fingers. Everywhere he went, death seemed to follow him. But, although he felt like the curse, he tried his hardest to protect his friends, who became more like his family than most of the foster families he had lived with.

That was why he was certain that this funeral hurt the most.

The ceremony was a blur for him. He couldn’t even remember what he said in his eulogy, though he had a pretty good idea from what was written on the script in his pocket. Everything in his mind was a bleak scene distorted by tears. Jack wasn’t normally one to cry. When he was with his real father, he had basically been taught that crying was for weaklings, but the plastic bag full of tear-stained and snot-filled tissues in his new foster mother’s bag told him that he had cried quite a lot. But, he didn’t care about looking weak. Everyone else was crying, so why not him? The only thing he remembered clearly from the event itself was watching his best friend’s coffin sink six feet under while he and the other mourners tossed dirt into the hole.

It felt wrong. He felt wrong.

When the ceremony ended and people started to depart from the cemetery, Jack’s feet stayed rooted to the ground. A large percentage of the other kids attending the funeral chose to stay as well. Most of the adults there had hardly known the young man lying in the coffin, and were only there to offer their sympathy. There weren’t many parents there either, because the dead boy had no parents and neither did most of his friends. Most of them knew each other through group homes and foster homes through the years. Jack and two other boys, Davey and Les, were the only people lucky enough to have at least one adult taking care of them at this point. The only adult that remained at the graveside was Medda, surrounded by a large group of boys.

Medda Larkin was Jack’s fifth foster mother. After years of getting to know him through school and volunteer events, she had chosen to go through the process of becoming a foster parent and had taken him in on his seventeenth birthday. She was the only person he had ever truly considered his mother, since he hadn’t known his own for long enough. She even planned on adopting him if it were at all possible. She had never had children of her own, but Jack was as close to her as her own flesh and blood. Medda had given him a good life in the few years she had been able to house him. Following years of poverty living with his father and instability while traveling in and out of foster homes, Medda offered a foundation for Jack to rebuild his life and whatever he needed to do that.

By the time the majority of the adults left, it was just Jack, Medda, and a group of ten or twelve young men who stood around the freshly dug grave. For the first time that Jack could remember with them, the entire group of rowdy teens was silent. The boys, and Medda, just stared at the grave, trying to come up with the right words to reveal their true feelings. Finally, a younger boy with freckles scattered all over his face spoke up. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”