Summer's Desire Vol. 1 (Complete)

Part 2: Chapter 4 *with Summer's picture

Part II

Chapter 4

Summer

In the last five years since leaving Rockford, I have been in and out of seventeen foster homes. My night terrors have gotten worse with each year, and the most sleep I can get at night is five hours, if I'm lucky. I'm constantly tired, moving like a zombie through my hellish life.

No matter how exhausted I am, I can't sleep during the day. If I try, I just lie there but never manage to drift off. I can't take sleeping pills either. I've tried that, and it's true they make me sleep for eight hours straight. But they also stop me from waking up from my nightmares, which messes with my sanity.

Not that, were you to ask them, would any of my former fosters call me sane.

I haven't been able to stop my night terrors, but I have been able to stop my nightmare-induced cries. Mostly. I sometimes go entire months without the screaming episodes—the longest has been seven months (which, not coincidentally, is also the longest I've stayed with the same foster family).

But then after some time, I inevitably get those nightmares again—the ones that are actually memories. The ones in which I see my parents dying. I see him walking toward me, holding the knife that's dripping with my parents' blood... and then the knife is in my hand... My head implodes, and I wake up amid such awful shrieks escaping my throat that even I feel aghast.

All my fosters were horrified at my screams. After at most three such episodes, they moved heaven and earth to get me out of their homes, away from them and their families. Once, when I stayed with this deeply religious couple, they even thought I was possessed.

I was in their house for less than three weeks.

I've seen a total of six psychiatrists, mostly during my interim stays in group homes in-between foster placements. That hasn't helped me either. The first shrink made me talk about the blood-soaked night when I lost my parents. He claimed that, in order for me to get better, I needed to "confront my past" and "work through it". Well, his brand of therapy not only didn't help me "get better" but it actually triggered some of the worst night terrors I've ever had.

Needless to say, after that I learned to keep my mouth shut with the other shrinks.

My antics have driven tetchy Ms. Walker, my social worker for the last three-and-a-half years, to the brink of despair. I kind of feel sorry for her, actually. After I arrived up north five years ago, I changed maybe five caseworkers in the first year and a half: once they got acquainted with my special brand of trouble-making, they usually couldn't get rid of me fast enough. Eventually my case file landed on Ms. Walker's desk—and then, I think, she was just stuck with me.

I mean, I'm sure that after her first months shackled with me she had to have tried lots of times to pass my case to someone else. But I was probably too infamous in her circle—not surprisingly, all the local caseworkers had heard of me—so it must be that nobody fell into her trap. At any rate, in her unfortunate tenure as my social worker, Ms. Walker has kept me fairly close to her in the placements she got me.

Until now.

After I was booted out of my last home (the foster mother called Ms. Walker in the middle of the night, crying hysterically after I had almost brought the house down with my nightmare-driven screams), there was something different about Ms. Walker, in the way she looked at me. She seemed... deeply reflective. Alarmingly so.

Then three weeks later—four days ago—she called and told me she had found my next placement. 

Somewhere far away.