Gliding my fingers through Artie's hair, my eyes glaze over as I try to plan for life's newest curveball - foster care. Gina and Jake, our "parents" have been arrested for drunk driving, dealing drugs, assaulting a police officer, obstruction of justice, and since they have seen me and the twins probably child neglect will be added. Honestly, the last one will hurt a bit, I know we didn't look great, but I always tried my best to keep us healthy and clean.
Drew gently tapped me on my shoulder grabbing my attention. His chapped hands signed 'drink' before gesturing towards a water dispenser with plastic cups leaning against it, I nod, before holding up three fingers. When Drew returned with cups for each of us, I sat Artie's fatigued figure upright and handed him his cup. Artie started gulping it down and I scolded myself for not taking care of this sooner especially since we had free access to a water source.
Soon after we drank our fill, a middle-aged woman with a cheerful smile pasted on her face, walked in holding a Manila folder. She, our social worker, explained that our parents were being held in prison until the trial and considering the evidence wouldn't be coming out anytime soon, mine and my twins DNA samples had been taken and analyzed. She mentioned something about the process being shortened by some generous donor for all cases of children coming into the polices' care. But the news that sent me and the twins into shock were not them, but the sentence, "Your oldest brother has agreed to take custody!"
I wasn't that surprised that we had family members out there, our mother never talked about her family, but biology said she had to come from two people. However her sentence meant we had at least one brother, and considering she said oldest we probably have more than one. And he agreed to take custody of us.
Our social worker seemed eager to get us going to where ever our brothers are. She didn't give us many details just had us pick up the rest
of our stuff from our house telling us to keep it to personal and hygiene stuff and that our brothers would buy the rest for us when we arrived. I didn't try to argue we didn't have much to bring either way, although Drew had the most he always liked to hoard Knick knacks we managed to come into possession with throughout they years, but it still wasn't much barely enough to fill half his backpack.
The social worker finally gave us some information. We had 3 older brothers and Jake wasn't our biological father like we had been lead to believe. But our biological father was no like no longer alive he passed away about a year go I made a mental note to remind the twins not to bring the topic up. We don't want to trigger any negative emotions that could result in our harm. I always did my best to protect my brothers from the abuse, but there was only so much a 13 year old malnourished girl could do against two relatively healthy adults. And three adults would put me at even more of a disadvantage.
I wasn't enough to protect them, to provide for them and those facts hurt more than any torture our "parents" managed to come up with.
YOU ARE READING
I Am Here (UNEDITED)
General Fiction*Completed, but unedited* Delia, a 13-year-old girl lives with her abusive parents and her eight-year-old twin brothers. She shields them from the cruelties of their parents as much as she can. The twins try to provide her with support but they are...
