I Feel Your Voice [BOY x BOY]

Chapter 1

"Adam?"

The sun is so high. It's playing hide and seek with me again through the leaves. I hold out my hand to touch the car window, keeping my eyes on that playful sun. The trees passed me so quickly that I could barely tell one tree from another.

"Adam, sweetie?"

I space my fingers out as if stretching it, letting the sun's light stream more into the car. A Beatles song was playing on the radio. 104.5 FM. My favorite station. John Lennon's voice filled my ears. I tried to catch the sun's rays.

A hand touches my knee. I blink and immediately cringe.

My foster mother, Carla, looked at me with an almost pleading gaze in her eyes. "Adam, could you listen to me please?" She tells me. Her voice is always soft and pleading like she wants to calm me down. 

I put my hand down. I remember Tyler's voice last night. Be kind to her, he said. She has to go to the hospital for another checkup tomorrow. I gulped hard and looked directly into her eyes.

"We're nearly at the train station. You brought everything, didn't you? Did you bring extra clothes? Your toothpaste?" She signed as she spoke. Her signing wasn't the fastest; sometimes, she mixed her letters up, but I knew she was trying her best.

I nodded solemnly. Of course, I thought to myself—the train station. 

Tyler, her husband, glanced at me from the rearview mirror. His words echoed in my mind. My hand touched my left cheek, and a tinge of pain surged through my body, making me wince.

It happened just last week, exactly seven days from today. A tall boy at school, this grunt from the 9th grade, walked up to me while I was washing my hands in the bathroom. He had two other scrawny, pimply grunts with him. They sneered at me like lions looking at their next meal.

"Do those gang signs again, you idiot," the leader told me. He was easily two heads taller than me and probably weighed 200 pounds. I looked him dead in the eye as he wriggled his fingers at me. 

"You part of a gang or something? What's with the hand stuff, huh?" He kept teasing me, his fingers coming closer to my face. His goons laughed. I felt my left hand ball into a fist.

"Idiots like you are only allowed in this school to make us look good to the mayor. You can't even speak, right? Are you brain dead or something?" he taunts me. I bite my lip, thinking of how to escape. 

One of his goons had closed the door with a taunting grin. I was trapped.

I glanced around me. The window was too small and high to fit through. The cubicles had spaces at the bottom of the door, so they could still grab me. I had no way out.

The main goon hit me hard on the shoulder, making me fall over. "No wonder you've got no parents," he laughs at me. "No one would want an idiot like you as their kid."

When the principal and the school counselor talked to me afterward, I couldn't say what happened next. I blacked out, I guess. I looked up at them from the floor one second, my shoulder aching. 

The next, I was looking down at the main bully as he groaned and grabbed his bleeding nose. I looked down at my left hand. My knuckle was a bloody mess.

Now, here I was. I had a large black trunk next to me and a train ticket in my pocket.

Carla told me about Tyler's sister, Hilda, who lived in a small seaside village. She has a husband and no children; they live in a small but comfortable house. She said they were getting old and always wanted to care for a child but could never have their own. Like you and Tyler, I thought privately. I knew better than to say it directly to Carla.