Mute | A New Beginning

Chapter 4

Something that was almost like tradition for Little River Orphanage was the preparation in which they all took part in when a visit was approaching. The kids were always given a heads up before hand, creating a buzz in the air in the upcoming days, everyone being excited to see who was coming and what the outcome of their time here would be. During this preparation time the kids were all instructed and helped to clean their rooms and organise the classrooms, but the best thing about Little River was that they always made this period fun and exciting for everyone. The children were never made to feel like they were doing mundane chores, but instead they played tidying up games and made fun little races out of making beds and folding clothes.

This is where Arlo found herself now, at 8:00 in the morning, the day of the much-anticipated visit. Mrs Moore was also in the girls' room, assisting them, and right now the small girl was currently heading towards last place in the bed making race.

Despite Mrs Moore's consistent cheers of encouragement, the little girl was just too short to efficiently reach all the corners and edges of the mattress. She had already tried the method of staying on the bed throughout the entire process, shuffling around the sheets and crumpling the parts she had already done. This method was especially difficult when it can to the fitted sheet as Arlo quickly found out that if she crawled away too roughly, she would pull up the corner she had just completed, effectively making her look like a puppy chasing its own tail.

Another method she attempted was staying completely on the ground, which worked well with fixing and straightening up the corners, even though it took quite a while to run around the bed to get to each corner. However, when it came to adjusting the comforter, it became quite challenging to see on top of the bed to smooth everything down.

By the end of it, Arlo was doing a half-on-half-off balancing act around the rim of the bed frame. This way she could see the top of the bed whilst not ruining the part she had already worked hard on. Despite this small personal victory, by the time the girl had figured out this successful strategy, all the other girls in her room were done, cheering with Mrs Moore and each other, two of them bickering about which of them were first, one having been done split seconds after the other.

Thankfully Mrs Moore, knowing Arlo quite well by now, knew the perfect balance between praising the girl that she had finished without making too big of a scene out of it. The woman clapped gently, sending Arlo a big grin and a whispered cheer, making the small girl blush whilst sticking her second and third fingers in her mouth for comfort, all whilst the other girls laughed joyously with each other having already moved on to the next thing.

This so happened to be getting changed into their clothes for the day. All the kids in this bedroom had already had breakfast, so naturally getting dressed and brushing teeth was the next step. The kids knew this, probably because it happened every morning, but Mrs Moore was always needed to make sure this went smoothly, and the little ones didn't get distracted and take hours. Most of the different rooms had a caretaker assigned to them, someone who would normally supervise and help, giving the kids as much of a sense of normalcy and structure as possible. For the 4-year-old girls' room Mrs Moore was there every day to bring them where they needed to go, so they didn't get lost, and to do what they needed to do, like morning and night-time routines.

During Arlo's time at the orphanage, she had seen numerous visitors come and go, all of which never spent that much time in her shared room. Usually, if time permitted, the visitors would play a small game with the girls to engage with them best. For Arlo, these games were relatively nerve inducing, being the only person in the room not shouting out or giggling, she simply sat there, trying her best to silently participate in the game, whilst cuddling and stroking her dinosaur stuffie.

Recently, Arlo had seen 2 of the girls who slept in her room get adopted, leaving 4 left altogether, including Arlo. This was the smallest number of kids she had shared a room with here and it was a little unsettling to have so many empty beds. The problem with having so few children with her was that it meant when it came to visitors, it was much more difficult to blend into the background and be pretty much ignored.

The small girl could be described as many things: shy, relatively intelligent, and extremely adorable, but a fashionista was not one of them. A daily occurrence between Mrs Moore and Arlo was the former asking and encouraging the latter to pick out an outfit that she would like to wear and Arlo giving her a semi-dirty side eye and a stubborn cross of her arms, waiting for Mrs Moore to give in and pick her outfit for her. Both knew that the child would much rather stay in the comfiest clothes possible if not her pyjamas, which the pant half of the duo almost always ended up discarded and thrown on the floor during the night, Mrs Moore having to coerce her to put them back on for breakfast. Arlo was not a fan of having to wear more presentable clothes when visitors were pending, always feeling a little too restricted or suffocated with her movements, not that she ever really moved much, but that's just how she felt.

As a result of this small stand-off, Mrs Moore had neatly lain an outfit on her freshly made bed, consisting of pale-yellow leggings with little embroidered daisies on the leg cuffs, a white t-shirt with a cute little bumble bee in the top right corner and white frilly socks. Thankfully this was fairly simplistic for a visit outfit and so Arlo wasn't too mad when she finally got changed for the day while Mrs Moore was busy assisting the other girls with their outfit choices, sending the now fully dressed girl an approving smile as she headed into the bathroom to brush her teeth before the other girls came in and crowded the small space.

All the kids were informed that the visitor would be here pretty early in the day and so when the girls were finished getting ready Mrs Moore left them to do whatever indoor activities that they wanted and when the woman had exited the room, all 4 girls were setting up one of their favourite games to play, making Mrs Moore proud that Arlo was willingly participating with the game and sitting next to the other girls.