Little Drummer Boy

Chapter 2: Open Doors and Open Arms

A/N: Another kind of slow chapter, but I hope you like it. I'm looking for a cover for this, so if any of you could make one, or even know a picture that would fit it, please let me know. Thanks!

Chapter 2: Open Doors and Open Arms

I’ve never been one to make friends quickly. It’s not like I’m a loner or anything, and I have a number of friends. But put me in a room with a stranger, and we’re more than likely just going to sit in silence. And it turns out, a car is not much different.

Dad was driving the car, Mom was in the front seat, and then Jace and I were in the back. It was really weird having a brother next to me that I’d known for all of 15 minutes. Sure, I knew that this might be happening for a while, we’d talked about it during the whole application process. It never seemed like it would actually happen though.

Mom and Dad weren’t going to let us just have a quiet car ride home though. They had a lot of questions for Jace, though most of those he answered with only one or two words, not seeming to want to talk a lot. I’m sure it was as hard for him as it was for us, probably even harder. Sure, we’d have a stranger living in our house now, but it was the same home and for the most part, the same people we’d always known. For him, this was something completely new. After a few questions, and some encouraging words that things were going to be okay, and that they were there for him and everything, we decided ended up just sitting in silence as we turned onto 81 and went back home.

As we sat, I noticed that he was tapping his fingers on the windowsill to the songs playing on the radio. He had his eyes closed and a smile across his face. I wondered what his old family was like, what changed so suddenly that he had to come with us. By this point, we’d been through enough of the fostering process to know that in most cases we’d know about the foster child for a few weeks beforehand, get to know him a little bit before he came to live with us. However, this seemed to be an emergency placement. I looked toward Jace who was facing the window with eyes closed. Seeing him like that made me wonder if he’d fallen asleep, but I saw his finger taps keeping pace with the music, so he seemed to still be awake some.

“Caleb,” Mom said softly.

“Yeah?”

“Cindy said that he seemed really nervous when he came into them today, really unresponsive to anything she said or did.”

As she said this, I noticed him shift slightly, moving so his ear was pointing to her and he stopped tapping his fingers, which told me he was listening. Mom didn’t see this though.. I had seen myself how some people were like that, they appear distant, but they pick up on things that everyone else misses, or thinks that they weren’t paying any attention to. After all, the quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.

“Did Cindy say where he came from?” I asked, not wanting to talk about him like this when he was awake. However, he could have stopped this by saying something, or just indicating he was awake. So I decided to keep the conversation as light as possible, not wanting to make him feel like he couldn’t trust us due to us talking behind his back. I imagined earning his trust would be hard enough as it was.

“She said a homeless man brought him in. Said that the kid needed a home, and just left him there.”

“Was that his dad?”

“No,” Jace said sitting up and stretching his arms out as much as the small car would let him.

We all waited for Jace to explain more, but he just leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes again. “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Mom said.