Unwanted (Petrified Of Exemption book 1)

2

I woke up. I was laying on a bed in a strange, unfamiliar room. I sat up and looked all around me. The walls were plane white and there was a cupboard at the far end of the room with many locked drawers. The cupboard read "Medical Supplies." I looked to my left and there was a short colored woman with short, spiked like hair and beautiful glossy eyes. She wore a tight black skirt and a white button up blouse. Her outfit reminded me of a business woman. The woman was looking down at a pile of papers she had on a clipboard until she must have heard me make a small noise because she looked at me as soon as I looked at her.

"It's good to see that you are finally awake. How are you feeling?" She asked. I gave her a strange look, as I was lost as very confused. "Where am i?" I asked a question with a question. It was the only thing I could manage to let escape my thoughts. "You are in child services. You are here because we need to find you a new home. Somewhere.. Safe to live" the woman hesitated, but her look showed she was as serious as can be. I could not comprehend why I needed a new home that was "safe." My home is safe! Why was she being so honest, yet so hesitant. It was like there was something I was not suppose to know.

"I don't want a new home! Where are my mother and father?!" I shouted. She looked at me for a few seconds, like she was trying to get all of the facts together, and then she got up and sat beside me on the bed. She looked at me and she said, "sweetheart, your mother and father are in heaven, with the angels."

I felt a tear drip down my cheek. I was only 6 years old, but I understood what she was telling me. My tiny heart was broken. I sat there, silently thinking about how this could have possibly happened. Then it hit me. The fire... That man. That strange man! He killed them. He killed my parents. "Did he kill them?" I asked bluntly, but still sad. "Who?" She asked. "The man that was in my house last night. Did he kill them?"

"Chloe, your parents left on a burner on top of your stove. One of the curtains must have blown onto it from a open window and it caught fire. The fire spread quickly and there was not an alarm to let everyone in the house know. Your neighbors seen the fire and ran to your house and found you passed out on the lawn. You were very lucky you got out on time. You did very well escaping the house without being scared." I could not believe what i was hearing. None of it was true. "But I-" she interrupted. "Its all right. We can make sure that you are safe now. If you come with me down the hall I will help you find out where we are going to place you" she said it as if I were just some sort of zoo animal that needed a new cage. She took my hand as I got up and I followed her down the stairs to a room that looked like a work office.

The room was so plane, just like the one we were just in. The walls were a pale gray. There was nothing but a desk, two chairs, and a filing cabinet. The woman sat in the chair behind the desk and I sat in the other chair across from her. She started looking through a folder that she pulled out of the filling canner. After a few silent minutes she closed the folder and she looked up at me. "You are going to be transferred to New Zealand. A passport will be made for you, and someone will be there with you on the plane to help you get there and make sure that you are safe. You can not live in England anymore because of the death of your parents and the fact that you have no other family that.." She hesitated again. "You just, cant stay in England any longer. We need to keep you far away from your home in Burton Upon Trent. You must start living a new life."

From that moment on, I had no clue what happen the night before, when my house burned down with my parents in it. What I did know though, was that there is something this woman was either not telling me, or did not quite know herself. She may have possibly thought that I was to young, maybe they thought, at my age I could not handle the truth. Maybe I would not have understood. Or maybe she just knew as much as I did.