The Station Girl

Chapter 3

There was a clanging sound, and the moonlight I had come from disappeared. A moment later, it was replaced by the orange glow of an oil lamp. A grizzled old man held it close to his face.

"Lucy," he said, "why did you bring her onto our train?"

"She's a little girl, papa," She replied. "I couldn't leave her to get caught."

"We can't afford to keep another. She's too young to work."

I knew they were talking about me. I trembled, fighting the tears that wanted to flow. If I couldn't escape on the train, then they would put me back in the bad room. But I had to be okay. I needed to be a good girl.

"I'm okay," I told them with a smile. I wondered if they could tell it was forced. "I'll get the next train."

"Please, papa! Can't we keep her until the next station? Surely the station master there will care for her!"

Lucy wasn't much older than me, and yet she knew much more of the world than I did. She saw a fake smile for what it was, and she knew what would happen to a caught stowaway. Even if her papa had wanted to throw me out, it was too late to do so as the train had begun to move during their quarrel.

They argued for another minute or two until her papa finally relented. I would be given nothing to eat or drink, but I could ride with them until we reached the next station. There, Lucy hoped an old station master would care for me.

Shadows danced on the walls of the train cart. There were more people in there than Lucy and her papa, but I didn't look for them. Even if I had wanted to talk to them, they wanted nothing to do with a runaway girl who could offer them nothing.

"Your hair is pretty," I told Lucy when she led me over to a small pile of blankets. It was a golden color, a color that glowed even in the flickering light of the lamp.

"It may be pretty, but yours is much more practical." It didn't long for me to realize why that was. The little I'd gleaned from the fight earlier told me that being on a train without permission was a bad thing. I would blend in with the darkness while Lucy would shine like the day.

She took my bag from me and laid it on the ground between us. When she asked where I was from, I told her little. All I said was that it was a bad place, and she asked nothing more. Instead, she talked about herself, and I chimed in when I had something to say.

It only took her a single sentence from me to realize something that I didn't realize for years afterwards. A simple fact from me told more than any other words combined could have.

I was damaged.

Lucy talked and talked and talked. For every ten minutes she talked, I barely said a minutes' worth. But she didn't mind. She just smiled gently, and patted me on my head from time to time. Eventually, her father told her we needed to sleep, and promptly blew out the lamp.

We laid down amongst those couple of blankets, my bag still between us. Surprisingly, I wasn't cold. I didn't shiver and ask for one of the blankets to cover up with. I'm sure if I had asked, Lucy would have let me used one at the expense of her own comfort.

But she warmed my heart. She filled a void that I hadn't known I was missing. Friend? Mother? Sister? Maybe it was a combination of all three of those. When it came time for us to part, I would miss her dearly even though we'd only spent a single night together.

After her papa had extinguished the only light, we continued to quietly whisper. We were laid right over one of the train's mighty wheels, and so our voices could not be heard by the others. We barely heard them ourselves. And when we eventually fell asleep, it was with clasped hands as the rumble of the wheels and the whooshing of the wind outside filled our ears.

Somehow, the night I stayed with Lucy, the darkness had not frightened me.

The next morning, Lucy was shaking me awake. They had taught us to wake at the slightest touch, so it did not take much for her to get me to sit up. When I did, it was with wide eyes that darted around the cart. It took me a moment to remember where I was.

Her papa stood at the open cart door, motioning for us to hurry up. I was the last to awaken, and everyone who'd been in the cart with us last night was long gone. There was barely enough time for me to grab my small bag before I was being pushed out onto a small platform.

"Take her to the station master, and be quick." Her papa was rough, pushing us in the direction of a small, dilapidated building. She took me by my hand, and reassured me that everything would be alright. Was it the trembling of my hand or was it something else that told her I was frightened?

"Excuse me?" She called out at an open window. The top of her head barely cleared the small shelf above us, but even though he couldn't see us, he knew we were there.

He didn't bother looking out the window. Rather, he came straight out of the building to meet us. Even when I first met him, I knew he was old. Tall and hunched, with thinning gray hair. His face, covered in so many wrinkles they were uncountable. But he smiled at us, and I smiled back.

"Sir, she needs a place to stay. Could you find a place for her?" I watched the two, tightly holding Lucy's hand. His face darkened for a moment in what may have been thought before he smiled again.

"Certainly. I'll find her a home." He reached out a hand to me, and I hid behind Lucy's back, trading her hand for the back of her worn out shirt. They both chuckled when they saw me peak my head around her arm.

"Lucy, we need to go! I knew we shouldn't have let her sleep so late!" Lucy turned to face me, a forlorn smile on her face. I could hear the commotion behind me. Everyone must have been getting back on the train.

"He'll take care of you, okay? You won't ever go back to that bad place again."

"Will I see you again?" As much as I wanted to hide it, my voice choked a bit. She clasped the both of my hands between hers.

"If we both wish really, really hard for it, I'm sure we will." Lucy kissed my forehead, and the train whistle blew. And then she was gone, racing for the train that slowly began to move. Her father was there to hoist her up into the cart. Safely on the train, she turned around and waved the both of her hands at me. I couldn't make out what she said, but I'm sure she was telling me we would meet again.

I waved back at her until I could no longer see her or the train.

Itwas the second time I had cried since the bad room.

*****

A/N: And there's Chapter 3! I don't know why, but Lucy is my favorite character out of this whole book. I think it has to do with how I tried to portray her as a genuinely kind and caring girl. Am I the only one who thinks I did that right? I mean, I'm the author so I'm probably gonna be biased toward my own characters >.< But what I really wanna know is do you think our protagonist and Lucy will meet again one day? Leave a comment telling me what you think!