Alaya

Chapter 5

    I was in my room alone. My mom went out to go get Alaya from school. I knew my mom wasn’t so mad after I told her that she didn’t start it, but in a way, she still looked a little disappointed in her.

    I got up off of my bed and went to my desk. I was just about to do my homework, but then I decided to do something else. I opened up one of my desk drawers and grabbed out a sheet of paper and a pen. I started to write a letter to my cousin Jacqui. Jacqui is my best friend and the best cousin ever. Whenever she came to visit, she usually took me somewhere like the movies or the mall.

I wrote to her about Alaya. I wanted her to come over to meet Alaya. Then, all three of us could have a great time together.

“Dear Jacqui,” I began to write. “I miss you so much! I really want you to come over. When you do, you may notice a bit of a change. Why? Well, my friend, Alaya, is living with us for a while until we can find her a forever home. I hope you can come over soon. I really hope you guys can meet. Maybe we can even hang out together, just the three of us! Love you, Jacqui! Signed, Kayla.”  

I grabbed an envelope and stuck the letter inside of it. Then, I licked the glue strip to seal the envelope. Finally I put her address and my address on it and put it downstairs on the coffee table.

I went back upstairs to my room. I looked out the window to see if my mom and Alaya was home yet. Surely enough, I saw her grey car pull up into our dirt driveway. I got off of the chair that sat by my window and quickly ran downstairs to go see Alaya and my mom. My mom went into her room to go lie down and Alaya sat on the couch. She seemed a little tired and bored.

“School wasn’t like this in Kindergarten.” she started.

“Well, that is because in Kindergarten everyone played around. There were pretty much no rules. Now that we are all in sixth grade, they are giving us rules to follow and work to do.”

“Oh. Okay.” she sat on the couch for just a couple minutes before she said something else. “I wanna go to the lake.”

“You can’t just go to the lake anymore. You have to ask.” I explained to her.

“But why?”

“So that way they know that you are okay. They don’t want to think that you have been kidnapped.”

“Okay.” Alaya got up from the couch and went to my mom.

When she was in my parents’ room, she stopped. She turned to me. She looked like she didn’t know what to do. I motioned to her to just go and ask her. She walked up to my sleeping mom and tapped her on the shoulder. After my mom wouldn’t wake up, Alaya shook my mom a little until she woke up. My mom finally opened her eyes and asked Alaya what she wanted. Alaya told her that she was going to the lake. My mom told her that she could as long as I went with her.

We both walked out of my mom’s room and got our shoes on. Then, we walked outside. The outside world is where we both connected in the first place. We have always connected strongly when we were outside. Outside has always been a safe haven for Alaya, but for me, it was just a place to hang out. Though, somehow, we both seem to have connected strongly in the woods that surrounded my house.

Alaya kept running. She would run, then she would kick the old crispy leaves, that lied on the dirt path, and send the flying into the air, then she would run again. The cycle just kept going the whole way down to the lake. I could tell she was happy. I wondered if she liked it more than she liked staying at a house.

We reached the lake. Only, it wasn’t just a lake anymore. Around it, where a bunch of trees used to stand, was clear land and a couple construction sites. I looked at Alaya, who had the look of confusion all over her face. She looked disappointed. She didn’t seem as happy as she was a couple of seconds ago when she was making piles of leaves fly. She seemed as heartbroken as a child with no home. She seemed as heartbroken as a little orphan.