Ever since the day Jadyn watched Riley get adopted, something within her was never the same again.
After their mother's suicide, both children were put into a foster home where they were completely inseparable. Jadyn was fiercely protective of Riley, often fighting with the other kids in the home for simply looking at Riley the wrong way. Riley didn't speak to anyone other than his sister for the first few months, but slowly that began to change.. Instead of being glued to his sister's side as he had been after their mother's death, he began to venture out and make friends.
Everyone began to realize things about Riley that Jadyn had always known. They realized he was smart. He spent more and more of his free time tutoring the few kids who were younger than him, and even some of the older ones. They realized he was incredibly mature for a 10 year old. He never pulled the girl's hair or tried to prove his dominance to the other guys. Riley was someone that everybody wanted to be friends with. He was funny, constantly making everyone laugh and he never had any problems with the other children once he began fighting his own battles, and not letting Jadyn do it for him.
Jadyn was practically the opposite of Riley. She was always getting in trouble for mouthing off to pretty much everyone, she was usually in multiple fights a day, and her marks in school were unbelievably poor. It wasn't that she wasn't smart, she was just as smart as Riley, if not more so, but she just didn't care.
About anything.
She would listen to Riley cry at night, when he thought nobody was paying attention, and she wished she could feel as much as he did. She wished she could feel anything at all, but she couldn't. The only thing she was holding on to was her love for her brother, and as he slowly drifted away from her, she began to feel even more alone, and became even more reckless.
She was only twelve at the time, yet somehow she always managed to get ahold of cigarettes, and she was caught with them a trillion times. Each time she received a smack on her wrist, until they realized that was doing absolutely nothing to solve the problem. So they began grounding her, keeping her from seeing the few friends she had at school. Only this didn't work either. Sometimes Jadyn just wouldn't come home after school.
Eventually, they began to give up on her.
"Jadyn Lacaze is a lost cause. Nobody is going to want to adopt such a little troublemaker." They said.
"Oh but her little brother, Riley? He is absolutely charming. Families ask about him all the
time. It's just...he refuses to be separated from Jadyn. That's the only thing keeping him from being adopted into a loving family. His juvenile delinquent of a sister."
A few days after Riley's 11th birthday, he met with a family that he instantly fell in love with. They started visiting him regularly, taking him out for snowcones, and bowling. They had two other adopted children, a boy and girl, and when they were alone with Riley, they gushed about how amazing their parents were. Riley slowly began to bond with this family, and at night he would tell Jadyn all about them, that is the night's she actually came back to the home.
"Jadyn, they're just awesome! You would love them, I know you would. Maybe if you came home after school sometime, they'll take you with us to go get snow cones. At first my favorite flavor was blue coconut, but now I really like the wedding cake one."
The conversations were usually one sided, Riley would go on and on and on trying to convince his sister to love another family with him, but Jadyn didn't want to. She didn't want to love anyone ever again. She knew she was the only reason Riley hadn't been adopted yet, and part of her really wanted to put on some big show for everyone, she wanted to become just as perfect as Riley was, but she knew that was never going to happen.
She knew she had to leave.
So, one night after Riley had talked himself to sleep, Jadyn quietly snuck over to the closet and retrieved the bag she had packed earlier that day, while he was out with the other family. She slung it over her shoulders, and tiptoed to the window. Right before she climbed out over the window sill, she was hit with a wave of emotions, more emotions than she'd felt in the entire time since that fateful afternoon.
She was abandoning her little brother.
She was doing it for his own good. Wasn't she? She tossed the bag outside, and made her way to her brother's bed for her final goodbye. She listened to his snores, tears forming in her eyes as she thought about how he would feel in the morning.
"I love you Riley," she whispered, "I always will."
She pulled something very special to her out of her back pocket and, carefully, she slipped it under Riley's pillow.
She couldn't hold in her cries once she was out of the room, with every step she got further and further from her brother, she found it harder to breathe.
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When Riley woke up the next morning, he looked over to Jadyn's bed, as he always did.
She wasn't there.
"It's fine," he thought, "She'll be back soon." He began making his bed, and as he pulled his comforter up to his pillow, he noticed the corner of something peeking out from underneath. It was a photograph. There were creases all over it, as though someone was constantly folding and unfolding it.
It was a picture of him and Jadyn, taken by their mother when he was about 5 years old. They had apparently moved their beds together, as they often did back then, and they were sleeping. Jadyn's arm was holding onto him, he knew she always believed that was the best way to protect him.
That's when he realized Jadyn wasn't coming back, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He couldn't help but cry later that day, as he began a life with his new family.
