by M. L. Rice
Riley looked at Aidan, who was deep in thought.
“Detective Hutchinson?”
“Yes, Aidan?”
“Is it bad that I don’t feel sorry for them? I mean, I was so sad when our parents died, but…now I just keeping thinking of how Aunt Joan and Uncle Ted will never be able to hurt Riley again.”
Detective Hutchinson smiled, but had sadness in her eyes. “No. That’s not a bad thing at all. I can see how much you love your sister, and I know how poorly they treated you both. I’m sorry that you will have to face yet another change in your lives, but I know that we’ll be able to find a much better home for both of you.”
“Just make sure that we stay together, okay?” Aidan reached out and took Riley’s hand.
“You’re a wise and brave young man, you know that?” Detective Hutchinson smiled and stood to leave. “A social worker and counselor will be visiting you shortly, and I will personally make sure that you guys get placed in a foster home together. We won’t separate you. Promise. Riley?”
Riley looked up at her with a small smile.
“You stay with your brother tonight, okay? I’ll have the nurses make a bed for you.”
Riley nodded and scooted closer to her brother’s side.
Chapter Two
The social worker assigned to them was a distracted woman in her late forties who had tried her best to get both Aidan and Riley paired with a nice foster family, but the only families willing to take in more children could only support one at a time. When Riley had screamed and thrown a very wild tantrum on the floor of the hospital at the mere suggestion that she and Aidan go to different homes, the decision was made to keep them together at an available group facility in a small, brushy, wooded area just outside the San Antonio suburb of Whitehill.
As they pulled up to the gate, Aidan placed his arm around Riley’s nervous shoulders. He was always so good at reading her mood.
“Don’t be scared, Nugget.”
Riley relaxed a bit at his use of the pet name their parents had given her.
“This is supposed to be a good place. And you know that I’ll never let anything bad happen to you again. At least we’re together, right?”
He looked down at her and she nodded with wide eyes, still staring past the dashboard at the country house they were slowly approaching. Children were swinging on a rusted, but working, swing set, playing with toy trucks in a large sandbox, and a few girls were sitting on the porch, braiding each other’s hair. It looked pleasant enough, but Riley had never been very social, and the thought of having to get to know all of these new and very different kinds of people made her nervous. What if they hated her? What if they bullied her like some of the kids at her previous school had? She looked up at Aidan, who smiled back reassuringly. As long as he was with her, she would be okay.
After being introduced to Ms. Suzanne, the head of the house, as well as rest of the children, Riley and Aidan were led to a room with three bunk beds lining the walls. Riley noticed that only girls were in the room.
“Where will Aidan sleep?” she asked Ms. Suzanne.
The woman smiled kindly. “The boys sleep in the rooms on the other side of the house. He won’t be far.”
Riley’s pulse quickened and her breathing became shallow and hurried. She felt sweat bead up on her forehead and the room started to spin. Ms. Suzanne noticed and bent down quickly in front of her. “Riley? Look at me.” Her voice was calm, but insistent.
Riley’s eyes were wide with panic. She could barely focus on the woman in front of her. A jumble of terrified thoughts tumbled through her head. What would she do without her brother there to protect her from the people who wanted to hurt her? Who would comfort her when she had the awful nightmares? Who would know how to pull her back from what her brother had taken to calling “brain storms”? No one else knew the kind of fear and anxiety that leveled her on those occasions. They could come out of nowhere. They happened when she was getting abused. They even happened when she found herself alone.
She snapped. “No!” She screamed and flailed and tried to pull herself free from the woman’s grasp.
“Calm down!” she said, trying to hold on to Riley so she wouldn’t hurt herself.
Riley just continued to scream.
“Hey. Nugget.” Aidan spoke forcefully and stood in front of her now.
She quieted, but fear continued to claw at her heart.
“No one is going to hurt you here. Aunt Joan and Uncle Ted are dead. They can’t do anything to us anymore. We’re safe now. Isn’t that right?” He turned to the kind woman.
“Absolutely right.” She smiled and moved to put a comforting hand on Riley’s cheek. Riley flinched, seeing only a hand that meant to strike.
Ms. Suzanne instead held her open hand in front of her. “If you’ll come with me, I’ll show you exactly where Aidan will be staying. It’s not far. You’ll see.”
Riley attempted to get her breathing under control. She hated losing her temper like this, especially in front of new kids. She glanced into the room and found five girls staring at her with a mixture of interest and fear. She shakily put her hand into Aidan’s and was led to the far side of the house where the boys’ rooms were located. It was true that it wasn’t far, but after sharing a room with her brother her whole life, the thought of sleeping in a room with strangers without the security of his presence scared her to death.
Aidan seemed to know what she was thinking. “I need you to be strong now, Riley.”
She looked at him with teary eyes and nodded. If he asked it of her, she would do it. She branded his words into her memory. She wanted to make him proud. This was going to be a scary new experience for her, and she wanted to have his voice and his support there when she needed it most.
I need you to be strong now, Riley.
She could be strong. No. She would be strong.
At least some of the time…
Riley and Aidan were briefly separated so that they could get to know their new roommates. Aidan was left in his room with two older boys who looked to be about fifteen, and Riley was taken back to her room where two snotty-looking girls her age glared at her from one of the top bunks. Luckily, the other three girls introduced themselves and invited her into their circle where they were play-acting at putting makeup on each other while talking about the cutest boys at the Home.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for one of the girls, the one who seemed to be the leader, to notice the scars.
“What happened to you?” the girl asked, pointing at the small, ugly, and unnatural red circles that dotted the freckled skin of Riley’s forearms.
Riley quickly rolled down the sleeves of her hand-me-down shirt. She didn’t care that it was a hot summer day. “Nothing.”
The girls glanced at each other uncertainly and whispered to each other, right there in front of her. Some of them laughed. A couple looked disgusted.
Riley fumed. Was it always going to be like this? Would she never just get to be a normal kid with a normal life? Why did bad things have to happen to her?
*
That first night in the Home brought one of the worst nightmares Riley had ever experienced.
Someone slapping her. Fire. A monster with smoke hiding his face. Fire surrounding her bed. Fire erupting from the lit end of the cigarette that he crushes down on her arms. Pain. The smell of burning flesh and hair. Riley. A hand grabbing her neck and squeezing tightly. Too tightly. Riley! She can’t breathe. She wants to scream, but the strong hands are a vice on her throat.
“Riley!”
The voice startled her out of her terrors. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, but through her tears she saw the face of Ms. Suzanne. The woman was gently shaking Riley’s shoulders to wake her up.
“Riley, you’re having a bad dream. You’re safe.”
Riley shook and felt the cold sweat that had drenched her as she slept.
“Where’s Aidan?” she managed to whisper.
“I can get him for you if you’d like.”
Riley sniffed and nodded.
“Okay. Come on. Let’s get you something to drink.”
She picked Riley up out of her bed and carried her to the kitchen where she set her down at the table. A large glass of milk was placed in front of her, and Ms. Suzanne left the room to get Aidan.
Only a minute passed before Aidan shuffled into the room wiping sleep from his eyes. “You okay, Nugget?”
Riley didn’t know how to answer, so she just took a drink of the milk and then held her arms out to him. He walked over and gave her his protective brotherly hug.
Riley buried her face on his shoulder. “They’re still going to get me.”
“No. No, they’re not. They’re gone.”
“But in my dream—”
“They can’t even get you there. They may try to scare you, but they can never hurt you again. Okay?”
Riley hesitated, but nodded and lifted her head. She saw Ms. Suzanne leaning against the counter on the other side of the kitchen. A tear ran down her face.
“Feel better?” Ms. Suzanne asked.
Riley nodded again.
“Ready for bed?”
The images from her nightmare reappeared in her memory, and the all-too-real cigarette burns on her arms started stinging and itching again. She nodded anyway. She was so very tired.
“Okay. Say good night, Aidan.”
He hugged her again and said, “See ya in the morning. Then you’ll see; things are going to be different now.”
“’Night,” she said quietly and followed Ms. Suzanne back to her room. She heard the hurried shhh of whispers as they opened the door. Of course the other girls had heard her struggling with her nightmare. She had been loud enough to wake up Ms. Suzanne in the room down the hall. A squirming sickness swirled around in her stomach. It was her first night in the Home and already she had embarrassed herself and drawn unwanted attention to her problems.
How was this ever going to get better?
I need you to be strong now, Riley.
She swallowed hard and let Ms. Suzanne tuck her back into her bed.
Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow she would try to be strong. Tonight she needed to curl up in a little ball and cry the fear away.
*
Despite the rough start, Riley soon realized that being at the Home with other orphaned or in-need kids was better than being used as a punching bag or ashtray almost every day. Still, she didn’t make many new friends. Aidan was her protector, her best friend, and her confidant. He was big for his age, so the bullies of the Home left them both alone for the most part. Most of the other kids were nice enough, but some had come from situations even worse than theirs, and a few were just juvenile delinquents ready to age up into full-blown criminals. Those were the ones who scared her and kept her pinned to her brother’s side at all times.
In total, the facility housed about fifteen kids, give or take, as some were taken into individual foster homes, sent back to their families, or aged out when they turned eighteen, but most were about the same age as her and Aidan. Ms. Suzanne and the other people who ran the Home were nice, but too busy to give much individual attention to each child. The elementary school children were taught on-site, all their meals were served in a large converted barn next to the main building, and there were always plenty of books to read and toys to play with. Still, the care felt impersonal and rushed most of the time.
“Aidan?” Riley asked one day after they had finished playing “War” with a few of the other children.
“Yeah?” he responded, sitting on the front porch with her, slightly out of breath after chasing down a laughing girl who was playing as one of the bad guys.
“Do you like it here?”
He turned the stick he had been using as his M-16 over in his hands. “Yeah, I kinda do. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Do you like it here?”
She shrugged. “It’s better than Aunt Joan’s and Uncle Ted’s.”
Aidan put his arm around Riley, who was using her own gun stick to draw cat faces in the dirt. “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you better there.”
Riley hugged him back. “You did protect me. They hit me less when you were around. I didn’t want them to hit you instead, though.” Riley always felt guilty about that.
“Well, they’re dead now, and I won’t let anyone hurt you ever again. That’s what big brothers are for.” He paused, thinking. “Is someone being mean to you here?”
Riley shrugged again. “Not really. Just stupid stuff. They make fun of my hair and my burns. They call me an ugly ginger.”
“They’re just jealous because your hair is different and awesome-looking.”
Riley snorted. “I wish.”
“Your hair is really cool. Boys like girls with red hair. Just wait. You’ll see. And anyway, try not to think about it, and if they do anything serious, you let me know.”
“I will. They’re really okay for the most part, though. A couple of them scare me a little, but they usually just ignore me.”
“They’re stupid. Just ignore them back.”
Riley smiled at him and then jumped up and ran after a squealing younger boy who had just tried to shoot them with a bazooka tree branch that was taller than he was.
*
As Riley and Aidan settled in permanently to their new home, she started to notice that whenever her brother was off with the other boys, some of the girls, despite their initial friendliness, had decided that they had a crush on Aidan and were becoming jealous of his devotion to Riley. She knew it was stupid, but slowly Riley became more and more ostracized from the other kids. She would find malicious cartoon drawings of herself taped to her bunk bed, her flaming red hair exploding in snake-like tendrils—nothing like the wavy shoulder-length hair she actually had—around a bucktoothed and freckled face. Unfortunately, that part was kind of true. Her weekly allowance would go missing mysteriously even as she changed the hiding place daily. At night, when she was trying to go to sleep, she was constantly bombarded with statements like “Your brother is totally cute. What happened to you?” or they would say offhandedly, “Aidan must have gotten out of the house first since you got all of the burns.”
She regretted having told anyone about the fire.
The treatment by her so-called “friends” was ridiculous, and even at her young age, Riley could see how illogical it was for girls who wanted to go out with her brother to mistreat his sister. It didn’t matter, though. She knew her brother would never give any of the girls a second glance. He was too into watching war movies and playing sports. Girls weren’t on his radar yet. That, and none of the girls in the Home were worth his time. A few of the older ones were already smoking and drinking when the staff wasn’t watching, and Riley had already been threatened with severe bodily harm should she ever rat them out. Most of the kids were decent and wanted nothing more than a family to call their own, but the few that ran things really could make life horrible for those that they decided weren’t cool enough.
Riley wasn’t cool enough.
She put on a brave face around her brother, knowing that heads would roll if he ever found out about the bullying, but she knew that he could tell when things were going badly. The problem was that Riley wouldn’t tattle on the other girls for fear of their reprisal later, and those same girls who treated her like crap were the ones who were sugary sweet to her when Aidan was around. She felt herself getting more and more angry with them and her situation as time passed. She often took out her frustration on the person she loved most, and that only made her even angrier.
Two-faced jerks. Riley would fume as the girls batted their eyes at Aidan on the playground and pretended to be funny and witty. They failed miserably.
Aidan never fell for it, of course. He was a good judge of character and would simply roll his eyes and smile exhaustedly at Riley. This didn’t help her standing with the girls either, but still, she was
proud of her brother and knew that he would never be taken in by such dumb behavior.
It was always a struggle for Riley to be happy. She was still scared a lot of the time, but she couldn’t really tell why. She got angry so easily too. She was getting better at hiding it, though; only Aidan could see through the act she put on. But the problem was that she didn’t know why she got so upset so easily. She just felt…scattered. Like part of her was still back with her parents near Houston, another was still the cowering girl at her aunt and uncle’s house, and the third part was either the blatantly invisible freak or the one who stuck out like a sore thumb at the Home. Nothing seemed able to keep her safely in one piece. Aidan was her only tie to the stability of the ground. Without him, she felt like she would disintegrate into a million minuscule shards that would be blown away to nothingness at the whim of the formidable Texas winds. During these times of fear, during these “brain storms,” she could only focus on the words, I need you to be strong now, Riley.
Even after months of trying so hard she felt she would turn to stone, she had yet to live up to that request. Luckily, not all hope of good things to come had been lost.
*
“Tell me the story again,” Riley whimpered as Aidan consoled her after yet another particularly terrifying nightmare.
“You know it by heart,” he said, tucking her back into her new bed. A large closet had been converted to house a single bed for her. It wasn’t fair to the other girls in the Home to get woken up so often by her almost nightly screams and crying.
“Don’t care. I wanna hear you tell it.” She snuggled under her blankets, ready to hear the story their mother would tell when they got scared of the dark. Her mother had told it to her, and her grandmother to her mother before that. Aidan could recite it almost perfectly by now, word for word, just like their mother had. They had listened to it that many times with their mother playing soft classical music in the background. Now, Riley often asked Aidan to tell it because it made her feel close to her parents again.