{ELEMENTISTS OF WILLOW FOREST BOOK V} The Journey Across Water

Smartphones

17: Smartphones

Care Home Number Six looked about the same as any other care home from the outside. You know, a sort of dumpy, stupid-looking suburban building somewhere stupid and suburban.

However, the kids there weren't the sort of dumpy, stupid-looking children who followed confidence like insects to honey I was used to dealing with and impressing.

Firstly, the average age was higher than at all the other places I'd been to recently. Dunno why that was, but I was suddenly one of the little kids again, even though I was ten, which would have made me practically a grown-up anywhere else. I hadn't had to deal with being one of the youngest for a while now. It was awfully strange, being small. I'd thought that being ten would mean I'd never ever have to deal with being underestimated again, but I been wrong. Almost everything is different in a different place. You have to be very strong to keep what is most important the same.

Secondly, they weren't just a bunch of stuck-up older kids.

They were a bunch of stuck-up older stinking rich kids.

Maybe it was just that part of town. Maybe it was just that part of the country. But everyone seemed to be the son or daughter of some semi-celebrity or millionaire who was too busy living the high life spending money to take care of them properly, yet still found the time to send them a fifty pound note every Friday, or, at the very least, had a super-rich roommate they'd known forever who'd buy them all the stuff free of charge.

Everyone, that, is, except me.

I felt like I was living in an entire house of Posh-Tot Torys. I'd say, "Ooh, I'd be in the garden at three in the afternoon if I were you, 'cause I'm gonna fix the hose up so it sprays Sam the Social Worker in the face" then they'd be all like, "Yeah, okay. But how much water is there gonna be? Because I'm like, gonna wanna film a little kid pranking the social workers and upload it on all this snazzy social media stuff I've got, and I wouldn't want either my Samsung phone, my brand new iPhone, my iPad mini or any of my three other tablets to get wet." Then another would be all "Oh, it's okay, you can film it on my new thousand-pound waterproof high definition camera I bought yesterday." Then they'd reply saying "Don't worry, I could always film it on my old iPod. You know, the one that's still worth hundreds of pounds but that I barely use since the newer version came out and I got that instead." And I would just feel like smacking them.

I'd grown up as an under-privileged girl in a world of idiots, but at least I'd always been shoved with other under-privileged people. Now, for the first time, I couldn't fit in, simply because I didn't have all this money and designer trainers and slinky new technology everyone else did. I wouldn't be asked to 'hang out' with them, because I was younger and didn't have anything to play Angry Birds on. I'd never be invited to any of their birthday parties, because I didn't have all this social media they used to contact each other.

It made me angry. I was stuck in the one building now I couldn't go to school, and the only people I could legally be around shoved me out of everything, not because of what they'd heard about me, but because I didn't have as much expensive stuff as them. It wasn't something I could change. I could break all of their tablets and iPods and Kindles and Phones and Speakers and Laptops and Cameras and whatnot, but I had a strange feeling that they may not like me afterwards, which would kind of defeat the whole objective.

I decided that this place I was going to find one day had better have free phones and gadgets as well as talking sharks. Otherwise I wasn't going.