Survivin' - [B.C.]

Chapter 4: A First Time For Everything

He clapped his hands on his knees before standing up. "Hungry? I was thinking we order fast food and watch a movie." I nod vigorously. He fist-pumps.

"Off we go, then."

========== SURVIVIN' ==========

I feel like all the official and legal stuff would bore you. So I'll skip all that. Basically, we were interviewed by CPS for the entire rest of the week we were in NYC. We didn't even have a lot of time to do anything else because of how long everything took. Well, of course Ben occasionally missed some things due to filming, but he made up for it as soon as he could. We did wind up staying an extra day for that. But it's cool. And more importantly?

I was cleared to go home with them.

So fast-forward, it's 1:00 on a Sunday morning and I'm restless in bed. I've gone through periods of being so giddy and happy to wear I was silently cackling, and through others where I felt those emotions and more and wound up sobbing into the pillows on my bed. Now I'm extremely tired but still unable to fall asleep.

I just lay on my back and stare at the ceiling. The silence burns the inside of my ears. I longed for the fan I'd kept in my room ever since I was little, but it was still at the group home with the rest of my belongings we couldn't get until later today.

Just five more hours... I tried to reason with myself to make the wait seem less unbearable. But it wasn't really working. My ADHD mind was OFF the charts - probably literally. And all I could do was lay here.

Then I had an idea.

I hadn't touched my phone throughout almost the entire week. I'd not had any time.

I practically threw myself out of bed and ran over to where my old shoes lie, toppled over and forgotten. I reach my hand inside the little compartment I'd made so long ago and pulled out the cracked iPhone 7. It had been my dad's old phone and when I was 12, he gave me it so that I could contact them during emergencies. But he didn't say anything when I used it for more than that.

I pranced back to my bed and laid across it on my stomach. I first pulled up Facebook. Now, I didn't have Facebook to use it for my own personal things. But the group home leader lady thing always posted up there about what she was doing at each part of the day, so I used that to my advantage. But now it served a different purpose.

I connected to the hotel's guest WiFi using the password written on the sticky note that was taped to the lamp. Then I opened the search bar and typed out that wonderful, beautiful (not) full name.

"Toby Matthew Gregson"

A few profiles popped up, but none of them were the Toby I knew. I closed out the app and went to Instagram. Now, I never use Instagram, but when I want to snoop on a celebrity, it's very trustworthy. This is also where I started to realized that a lot of people use usernames instead of their full names on apps like this. But I still used it in the search.

As expected, nothing came up. Snapchat was my only hope now. I anxiously typed in the name into the "find friends" bar and waited as it loaded. I was expecting nothing to pop up and was almost ready to accept defeat when one singular profile popped up. The name was "Tobyyy" username "tobesthepianoman" and the bitmoji avatar was just about as close as one could get. My heart basically yeeted itself against my chest. I went to add him, but I paused.