Wishing And Wondering ⚣

Third Time's a Charm

Chapter Three: Third Time's a Charm

"Today we will learn and ponder the resemblance of freedom, and money.
Today, we cannot live our life without money.
Food, clothing, shelter, partners, enjoyment of life- can only come from money.
We play the lottery for money, we marry to people we do not love for money, we take jobs we cannot stand and force our children into education in the hope that one day they can make what?
Money.
Does this make money a poor choice and a bad thing? No, it does not.
Because if there's one thing we need, it's new. It's 2015! Why on god forsaken earth would we want anything less than new?
Why the earth would stop turning of there were no new iPhones!
To think about a world where shoes don't lace themselves and cars don't fly- hell!
We need money to survive don't we? Lord knows we cannot live without luxury.
I really just hope that science can invent a pharmaceutical that makes money easier to chew when we have nothing, but our luxury."

Jackson

After some time figuring each other out and talking about the holes, when are you going home, what did he tell you I need, what do you eat, ect., it was about 5 p.m. and I decided to make dinner. I gave him a few types of food like, pasta, bread, meat, salad, and he liked ravioli best.

Campbell's it is then.

I made the sauce from scratch and boiled the ravioli slowly so that I didn't burn it. Halfway through I noticed Ethan had been really quiet, what could he be doing? I walk into the large main room to see him sat in the middle staring at my wall clock. Poor dude. He's probably board out of his mind. I got back to the pot and saw I still had 45 minutes on the garlic bread and 30 on the ravioli and sauce.

What does one give an angel to entertain them? TV? He wouldn't understand. Books? Can he read? Coloring books? Baby toys? He was sitting in the middle of my living room staring off into space. "Hey Ethan?" His eyes darted from the oh-so-interesting clock and he stood up to come to eat. "mhm?" Ethan bounced like a bunny around the island a couple of times but soon stopped to he peer into the pot.

"Is it ready?" He asked. "Oh no, dinner's not ready I was wondering though, can you read?" He sat in thought for a moment before meeting my eyes with a sigh. "No, I can't read."

Okay, cross out books. "Want to learn?" Soon he could though, I could teach him and hopefully he wouldn't be as bored. "Sure!" He piped up. "For now though, do you know the basic colors of things? Like trees are...?" He shook his head. Okay.

"How about I pick you up some books that will help you read and write- they won't be boring I promise- and one that has a ton of pictures for you to color in and learn about the world? Sound cool?" He nodded his head and walked away. What a strange creature. I hopped into my car and drove to the nearest Target for coloring books.

I'm driving to a store to buy a coloring book for an angel. I smiled to myself. What the fuck even is my life? I have an angel, that lives in my home and I'm buying him coloring books and crayons. Sounds like a Supernatural episode to be honest.

Soon I came upon a Walgreens and looked at the time, I've been gone five minutes. Still have 25 minutes. There was only one person- not including the cashier- in the store when I arrived.

I walked through the isle and found the 82 crayon box set and three books to color in, two that help with reading and two more to improve with writing. I continue to laugh about this whole sounds-like-a-joke-but-really-isn't-a-joke-situation.

Ethan still hovered in the same spot when I entered my house, "any alarms go off?" I asked. "Only one, this one." He pointed up at the microwave, which seemed to have landed on zero. I took the garlic bread out of the oven and finished up the ravioli while Ethan set the table. The food was laid out on the table and we both sat down to eat.

.

Dinner went fairly well without many an accident. Ethan choked once on garlic bread and learned not to eat past when you're full the hard way, but other than, he learned to write the basic "upper-case alphabet" and is learning to sing it. It's pretty hilarious so far, learning that 'A' can make different sounds based off of what other letters are in the word is difficult for him to grasp but at the same time, he's so smart that he just knows.

What now? I thought. I hang around with this seventeen year old boy until my life gets better, yeah, but how? And why? And what do I do in the meantime? I looked back at the innocent boy. Will he live here? What will he do while I'm at work? Oh.

I guess that's what I should do in the meantime, look for a job. I almost forgot about the previous horrible day I had had. It's easier not having Alyssa here now that he's here to keep me distracted, and I suppose I will have some free time to teach him how to take care of himself before I go off to work. I left the boy at the table and walked into my office to go job hunting.

About 20 minutes and with no luck, I decided I would go see how Ethan was doing. He was furiously scribbling something in on his notebook. I noticed that all of his reading and writing books had been set aside and most of his crayons dumped out and broken. "Ethan?" He did not stop coloring nor break his eyes from the paper. "Ethan?" I called again once again A bit more loudly this time. He seemed not to notice me. I walked to the table and looked at what he was coloring.

What. Why. And fucking how.

On the backside of one of the pages there was an extremely detailed picture of a lotto ticket. Well, should I say multiple. There was two scratchies, one have won $10, one had won $5 million. But you could barely see the name of the scratchies underneath all of the numbers.

There are numbers written all over the page, 52, 12, 36, 19, 1, 50. They were scribbled multiple times all over the pictures. Ethan quickly dropped his gray crayon and picked up the black one to fill in the name of the scratches more clearly, Buddha billions, dazzling dollars, I had never heard of these...

He back was scribbling the grey into the winning scratch ticket, dazzling dollars, on the page the ticket had one $4 million, Buddha Billions had one 10. The Powerball ticket he had scribbled had all correct numbers fifty-two, twelve, thirty-six, nineteen, one, fifty.

What the fuck.