1,000 Words

Chapter 2

I quickly fell asleep after all that. I was physically and mentally exausted and even though I wanted to open the package, I couldn't stay awake any longer. I hoped Kelly wouldn't come looking for me.  She was like a little sister to me and I love her, but I just wanted to be left alone and sleep for a few hours. After a while I woke up to find a little girl staring at me, about 3 inches from my face. I shreiked and jumped backwards, falling off the bed and hitting the floor with a loud thump. I heard laughter coming from the other side of the bed, and the little girl jumped on top of my bed and looked down at me.

"You're so silly Jessie. Why are you on the floor?" she asked.

"Well Kelly, maybe I wouldn't fall on the floor if you didn't scare me" I said, getting up and sitting next to her on the bed. She stared st me with her big, sky blue eyes.

"Who, me?" she asked feigning innocence. We both burst out laughing which only increased when I grabbed her and began to tickle her stomach. She laughed and shreiked and finally begged me to stop, which I did. We flopped back down on the bed and she then turned to me asked,

"Jessie, will you braid my hair?"

"Of course, sweetie. Come over here." She turns her back to me shakes her long, blond hair behind her shoulders. I love her hair. It's long, silky and pin straight. Combined with her blue eyes and sweet face, she looks very out of place. In a world like this, where everything is dark and cruel, she is like a little ray of sunshine or an angel straight from heaven. If only the poor girl was from heaven. She was really from Chicago where, at about 2 years old, she lost her parents in a car crash. Since she had no other family, she was shipped over to New York. There she went to a Catholic boarding school, where she stayed year round. She was taught to live by the Unspeakeable Laws, and to never say a word out loud. After living there for 4 years, and causing more trouble than the nuns wanted to deal with, she was moved down here to Cedar Island, North Carolina. She was placed in Miss Abigail's Home for Orphaned Children with me and the others who were already here.

There's Isabelle, a quiet sort of girl with staight brown hair and big glasses, Nathan, who is a year older than me with dirty blond hair and deep blue eyes. He is great with the younger kids. There's little Katie and Sarah, the twins who never go anywhere without each other, Derek, a redhead kid who has trouble making new friends, his older brother Daniel, who is your avaerage super hot, incredibly amazing guy who, if he was in school, would be football captain and most popular guy on campus. He's not a bad guy though, and a pretty good big brother. There's also Zoe, with dyed purple hair, who is a bit of a downer and generally avoids the others and Luke, who is my age, with curly brown hair, hazel eyes and a love of music. All in all, not a bad group of kids. But Kelly didn't really fit in at first. So I took it upon myself to help her make some friends. In the end, the best friend she made was me. But she's also pretty good friends with Derek, which is something new. I've never seen Derek so close to anyone except maybe Danny.

It's not too bad here. If I'm not with Kelly, I usually hang out with Luke or Nate. We all have A.C.'s or 'alternate communicators'. We have them programed so they sound like our voices when we type something. The only person I use some of my 1,000 words for is Kelly. She hates the A.C.'s because at the Catholic school in New York, that was all they had. And even those had a word limit programed into them. If anyone spoke a single word, they were severly punished. It happened to her on more than one occasion. So after 4 years of not speaking, she uses the A.C. as little as possible.She still has to watch how much she says but she prefers that to letting a machine speak for her. She's so little and she's been through so much. I often wish I was as strong as her.