Leave Me [h.s] (On hold)

Chapter 1

Note: My writing is in no way perfect, but I do try to get it as close to that as possible. Please excuse any of my mistakes, as I regularly make them, and enjoy :)
(Contains strong language)

Chapter 1: When I'm grown

He was tall for a 10 year old, far taller than anyone in my class. But of course I didn't mind, I was pretty tall myself.

"Noelle, your brother is looking for you. He says he needs you at home." Harry said and he jogged up to me where I sat in our tiny neighborhood park.

"I don't want to go home. I hate being inside." I replied as he took a seat in the overgrown grass next to me.

"Well your brother said. You should probably listen." He said. He always told me to listen. I couldn't quite understand why, but he always did it. And I always ended up listening. Not because of what my brother actually wanted, but because Harry had told me to.

"I'll go soon." I replied.

"Noelle, what do you want to be when you grow up?" He asked, his voice full of concern.

"I don't know. All I really know is that I'm going to get my little brothers away from here." I said simply. It was true, I didn't want my little brothers, who were only 5 now, to grow up in the same place I did. I always felt like they deserved better. I knew Harry wanted to press further and ask me what I meant by that exactly, but he didn't. He just listened. "What about you?" I said after a long pause.

"I want to be like you, Noelle." He said plainly.

"Why would anyone want to be like me?" I asked him, curious about his strange answer. I mean, when he grows up he wants to be like a ten year old girl? I just couldn't picture it.

"Well not exactly like you... it's just that you're not afraid of anything. I guess that's what I really want to be. Fearless." He said with the hugest grin on his dimpled face I'd ever seen.

"I'm far from fearless Harry, I just know how to live with my fears. Not a lot of people can say that about themselves." I taught him.

"Well Noelle, you're probably right. You normally are."

******** 4 years later ********

I ran down the long street away from my house. I could hardly call it a house anymore really. A year ago, I had concluded that my "house" was more of a hell hole than an actual house. My oldest brother, Janson, who is 17, fully agreed with me. But he never ran. He always stayed right there, in a yelling match with my drunkard of a father. I tried to focus on putting one foot in front of the other as fast as I could rather than listening to the muffled screams of Janson and dad from my house.

I ran away a lot. Only, I couldn't really call it running away, since I only ran a few blocks over to Harry's house every time things got bad. I always hated myself for leaving though. I always regretted running away from my younger brothers, Caleb and Gus, who were only eight now. But they handled things better than I did anyway, just went out into the backyard and played soccer. I envied their youth and their obliviousness every day of my life. They didn't quite understand how much of a fuck up our father was yet. I'm actually glad they don't. I don't need them ending up like me, running, always running.

"Noelle, how nice of you to drop by." Harry said and opened his front door. "To what do I owe the pleasure this time?"

"I'll give you three guesses, the first two don't count." I joked back. He knew exactly why I was here. Why I was always here. But somehow he never faltered at greeting me with a joke and a grin full of dimples. Without Harry, I fear I would have gone mad by now. Hell, I still might be mad even with Harry's jokes to keep me going.

"Twins okay?" He asked simply as we passed his mom in the kitchen on our way to the basement.

"Fine. As usual." I replied, out of breath from running.

"Do you need something to drink Noelle? You're even more winded than usual." He chuckled.

"I was running extra fast from this one. I'll just have some water please." I said and went into his fully furnished, and carpeted, basement. I saw him shake his head as he turned back into the kitchen for my water. But I never got to drink that water, I never saw Harry come down the basement steps. The moment I heard the gunshots, I bolted up the stairs and out the back door, too fast even for Harry to notice as he stared out the kitchen window with his mother.

I was running again. But this time was different. I was running towards home rather than away from it. I knew those shots had come from my house. It couldn't have been anywhere else.

I lost my entire family that day that I had run. Janson, Caleb, Gus, and my father, gone from the world forever. And there's was nobody to blame than my father himself. In his drunken rage he shot all my brothers, then after realizing, even through his stupor, what he had done to his sons, took his own life. I lived because I had run. But in the days, hell, in the weeks following the incident (everyone had been calling it an accident, you know the way people do to refer to a tragedy, but I knew better. This was sure as hell no accident) I felt as though I deserved to be dead as well. Got put in a hospital for "thoughts of suicide" but that wasn't it. I wasn't going to kill myself. I just had an aching feeling, the worst aching feeling anyone had ever had, that I should have died along with them.

And I did. In a sense. As a 15 year old girl, I had zero dreams, zero ambitions, zero interests or hobbies, I had no friends. But that one about friends was the one that hit me hardest as I lay in my bed in my foster home at night, I hadn't seen Harry since that day, and I had come to the conclusion that I would never see him again. I had lost all contact with him, my doctors had made the quick decision that I had to be moved to a foster home out of state, away from Chicago and the big city and all of everything that I knew anything about. They said it would "be good for my health."

Losing contact with Harry was most definitely not good for my health. It was actually the worst possible thing to do to me. But it happened, and I was moved into a foster home, which doubled as a ranch, in Oklahoma. Oklahoma for gods sake. A girl born and raised in marvelous Chicago certainly did not fit in in Oklahoma. But there I was. A shattered girl who was having "thoughts of suicide" on a ranch in Oklahoma with 7 other foster kids and no Harry.

I missed Harry every damn day of my sad little life, and I prayed to god that he was missing me too.