Okay. Let's face it. I've never really been "in-crowd" but I'm not totally alone. Then came the ninth grade.
~♦~
The teacher drones on as I sit in my dark corner of the class room where I'm never called on unless I talk. Which is a rare event.
I doodle, not caring about math mostly because we've been on this topic for a week. I reach to my neck and touch the angel-wing pendant my mother had given me the last night she ever kissed me goodnight.
~♦~
"Ready for bed?", she asks me.
"No." I reply, shaking my head and crossing my arms, trying to seem firm.
"Okay, but it's way past your bedtime and we wouldn't want Santa to put you on the nuaghty list Christmas eve would we?" She smiles and I know she has a point.
"Okay, Mommy, but you have to come tuck me in." I tell her picking up my stuffed bear and crawling up the stairs to my bedroom. I here her follow behind me, she was always scared I would fall down the stairs and hurt something.
She picks me up and places me in bed, kissing my forehead then taking out a little box rapped in shiny gold paper.
"An early Christmas present, sweetie." She says and smiles, handing me the box.
"No, Mommy I can't open a Christmas present before christmas morning!" I say, surprised she would think about that.
"Okay, I'll put in under the tree so you can open it in the morning." She kisses my forehead again,
"Goodnight, Alexis."
"Goodnight, Mommy."
~♦~
When I woke up that next morning my mom was gone, my dad had left too. But the tree lights where on and the little box was rapped in gold paper was sitting underneath it, all alone, just like me.
I open the box just as I had promised, finding inside the silver, angel-wing pendant on the fine silver chain, and a note.
Alexis,
I'm sorry I have to leave you but I promise I will find a way to see you again. Wear the necklace, it will protect you from evil. I hope you will remember me forever.
I will see you again,
Mommy
The note was stained with my mother's tears only to be stained again by my own.
I was seven. And all alone. My mother gone, my father gone with her.
That entire Christmas I sat on the steps of my front porch while it snowed and watched the family across the street go through their Christmas celebrations while the scent of Christmas hams and turkeys wafted from every house of the street but mine.
It was about nine o' clock at night when a police car drove down the street, on patrol most likely, and stopped in front of my house, where the first sight he saw was a seven-year-old girl in her flannel pajammas with tear-stained cheeks all alone in the dark, cold, night.
"Where are your parents, sweetie?" he asked me coming up to the porch. This made me start to cry again and I grasped the pendant, trying to get the words out. Finally, I did.
"I don't know." I choked out before I stared sobbing hysterically. I heard the officer say something into his radio then he said to me: "Go inside sweetie, get a coat and shoes and anythign else you need, then meet me back out here." He told me gently, I reconized the ordering tone in his voice.
"Okay." I said then went into the house.
~♦~
I spent the rest of Christmas in the police station. And a month after that in the custody of Child Services where they tried to find some relative I could stay with. The whole time I never took the necklace off.
{ A/N: Writting this literally made me ball. At one point I had to go to the bathroom and calm myself down because i was getting hysterical. I hope you like it.}
