What Little Worlds

Three

As the school year went on, Amelie tried to stay in the familiar rhythm. She went to school, did her homework, played with Maggie, and occasionally hung out with her dad. He was not home often anymore, since Mom had died. She knew he was taking extra shifts to make up for losing her mom's income, but she also wondered if it was a way to help him cope with the loss.

Her big brother, Thomas would come by often on weekends to make sure she and Dad had enough food in the fridge, and he would stay and try to play with Amelie as well. He was in college now, but, even when he was young, Amelie remembered having trouble playing with Thomas. Imagination to him was not an exercise worth any effort or time, and he did not enjoy playing Pretend with her.

Maybe it was because she was adopted that they had trouble connecting? Maybe the nine year age gap was too much for them to feel like real siblings. They never fought like Maggie and her sister either.

The only activity they could both somewhat enjoy was playing catch or talking about baseball. But, even then an awkward silence inevitably filled the air. Often, she would glance at the hedges while they were playing catch and consider asking him what he thought about Adrien; simply to fill the silence and connect with her brother. But, she never did.

She never told anyone about Adrien. At first, because she didn't want her Dad and Thomas to be angry at her for letting a stranger into the house, and she didn't want Maggie to be jealous she missed meeting the boy. But also, Amelie liked that Adrien was hers alone.

By the time summer came, she had began to think the boy must have been a dream. She had no evidence that he had come to her house, except for her fading memory. She slowed when she walked by the alley every day now, hoping to catch a glimpse of the honey blonde hair. She started wondering if maybe he was homeless and he had been lying to her about the field trip. At first she was angry but then she started to worry that he may still be out there, alone and hungry.

She started carrying Oreos in her backpack just in case she saw him.

It had occurred to her that he did not look dirty and had the hair of someone who had recently gotten a trim, but him being homeless was a better explanation than him being on a bizarre and cruel field trip for school. One day when Maggie was over, she asked her to go exploring. They walked all around the neighborhood looking for "clues" for a hidden treasure (they were pretending to be on a desert island), while Amelie secretly looked for clues that Adrien had returned without seeing her.

By Fall, Amelie was convinced she had let a poor homeless boy into her house and rather than call the police, she had let him go back to starve. When she was playing computer games at home, or working on the fifth grade research project, she would sometimes stop and look up look up the name Adrien on missing persons pages. She wasn't sure if he spelled it Adrian or Adrien, but either way there were no missing persons with that name under forty years old in her county.

After the grey winter melted and a drippy spring emerged, more than a year had passed. Amelie stopped walking by the alley.