I winced, as a deep, painful banging on my body jarred me awake. I curled tightly into a ball, waiting for my attacker to stop, or at the least pause, but the new position did nothing to ease the pain being inflicted upon me. I slid my eyes open, and was startled to find nothing, and nobody, around me. Nothing but a train car, gliding smoothly along an unblemished track.
I slowly pulled my body into a sitting position, flinching all the while from the soreness. I was sweaty from the July heat. Placing my hand on my chest, I felt my heartbeat, felt it's steady beat pulsing to the rhythm of the pain. It took a few moments to connect my heartbeat to the nearly unbearable pain, but sure enough, every pump of blood sent aching into every piece of my body. It was curious, of course, that a heartbeat could do so much damage, but a quick glance at my bruised arms and legs told me that the beat was just refreshing pain from something else, but what?
My mind was still blurry from sleep, so I just sat down on the car's floor. My hair was in my face, the brown mat of tangles and knots tickling my nose and itching my skin, so I groped along the floor for something I might be able to tie it up with.
My hands closed around a short length of string, and I pulled back against the wall, curling back into my huddled position. Fluidly I tilted my head, the curls momentarily hanging down into my face for an instant, before my hand gathered the locks up in a bundle,pulling them tight to the back of my head,and I tied the ponytail.
Hair aside, I started pawing through my memory to grasp something, anything, to help me understand why I was here, huddled against a wall in the train car. Finally my mind straightened itself out, and thoughts tumbled into my mind, all mixed and mangled together, I remembered now. I remembered things I would rather forget, but that as much a part of me as anything;
My parents, left dead from an attack on the government building they both worked at. The officer who told me the news kept telling me "It'll be okay, Alexia, it'll be fine." But it wasn't, she knew it, and I did too.
A woman brought me to a foster home. I didn't like them, and the feeling was apparently mutual. The family decided they didn't want me, and I couldn't say I was very sad. I was never told why, but from what the papers I stole from the social worker said, they found me to be "dangerous" and "extremely unpredictable". Actually, I was surprised they didn't add kleptomaniac, because that was the word teachers had used to describe me for years. But I was put with in a new home, with a new family, in the end.
The next home was like the first, a prissy family who want a charity case, who didn't expect the klepto and damaged child that I was.
The next home was the same.
And the next.
And the next.
Then came the Brewleys
I lived with this new family for a few months, and for the first time since my parents died I felt accepted. But then we got in a car accident. At the hospital I learned that once again my family was taken from me. I broke out of the hospital that night.
I ran as far as I could every day for a week, stopping only to sleep and eat whatever I could find. I stumbled across the railway, and waited for a train to go by. After about two days, I began to doubt that the tracks were still in use. Still, the tracks had to lead to something, so I followed them, ignoring the complaints of my body and stomach. After a day, I heard a train horn, and froze.
I had backed up a few steps and flung myself at an open train car. I almost missed, and my legs dangled precariously while my arms struggled to keep my body from the ground, straining against gravity. A sudden burst of adrenalin gave me the power to pull my body up. I slept, but the images that crept through my dreams hardly allowed rest to be a release.
