Mouse

CHAPTER ONE

Oddly, I had never dreamed of being alone.

It's not that I didn't experience the pangs of abandonment once or twice. My parents were born addicts, and being the second most important thing to them was standard. I had bounced back and forth from group homes to foster homes, back to whatever hole my mother was living in, and yet I had never truly considered that one day I'd be completely alone.

During those times, I was always surrounded by people. And sure, it could be lonely, not knowing anyone and certainly not when I couldn't speak anymore- but I wasn't ever really alone. And my mother, as shallow and out-of-it as she was most of the time, was always present in one way or another. Whether through the odd man that would bang on our motel door or through the bills that would pile on the table. It all reminded me that I was, at the very least, in the right place. They were looking for my mother, Ms. Gloria Gale, who floated through life like the petal of a flower- whose only fate was to die if she ever touched the ground. I often wondered if the stress of life ever got to her. The stress of always chasing a high and fighting a low. It certainly got to me.

In the winter, her body gave out on her. It was bound to happen again- it hadn't been the first time. I just hadn't counted on it being the last. As I stood in the cockroach-infested motel room we had been renting, I suddenly felt ashamed. If I could speak, I would have screamed at them that it hadn't been my choice to live in such a degraded, disgusting place. I would have told them that I would have fought harder than I did. They probably wouldn't have listened- that wasn't really their job. The only person who made an effort was Ms. Kim, my caseworker, who was the first to say something other than "sorry."

"You did the best you could."

It was the only thing I truly heard in those few hours before being carted from one temporary home to another and then pulled out by my aunt.

My aunt, Gilly, met me with a baby strapped to her chest and three more following close behind her. I had met her before, briefly as a child, in one of my mother's short stints of sobriety. She was younger then and had far fewer kids, which is why I think my first memory of her was far more fond than my second.

She said she was sorry for my loss- a loss we should have both shared but didn't, and then quickly moved on to us leaving the agency as quickly as possible.

"I shouldn't have had to come all the way out here," Gilly said as I followed her to the elevator. "They have drop off cars, you know? Dumbasses, all of them."

I stared at the ground, shifting my school backpack, duffle bag, and another backpack on my back. I didn't think Gilly was wanting to hear me speak, even if I could.

The days after my mother's death- and the subsequent months which followed- proved the opposite of loneliness. With Gilly, I shared a room with Rory, my 7-year-old cousin, and Eli, her 2-year-old brother. The house, a small, single-story house that what busting to the seams with kids, was never empty. It shuttered when Gilly entered and calmed when she left.

It wasn't her fault; my uncle had chosen a 23-year-old bar girl over her, and she hadn't fully recovered. Telling me to leave should have been expected, and yet the sting of hearing the words come out of her mouth was intense.

Standing in my makeshift bedroom, piling the few changes of clothes I had into my duffle bag, I felt truly and utterly alone. I had grown accustomed to packing my life into a bag and moving on to the next place, but it was terrifyingly different this time. There was no next place. I had aged out of the system, and since then, it had been a courtesy for Gilly to let me stay in her house.

One bad bill later, and it was my turn to go. She couldn't kick out her own kids, but she had no claim over me.

I took a deep breath, shutting my eyes tightly as I finished zipping my last bag up. It was a rude awakening, arriving home from school to her fire-hot anger. I hadn't gotten the chance to shut the front door before her screaming started.