The Guardian Children (book 1) [SAMPLE]

Chapter 2

Next update: Monday July 21

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“Don’t make me do this,” I repeated, looking out the window at the large, intimidating building that I now had to call ‘my school’.

“This will be good for you Cody,” she insisted. “It’s important for you to build a future.”

She sounded too much like a campaign ad, it hurt my ears. I had heard phrases like that so many times in the past six years that the motto had become engraved within my mind; go to school and you’ll have a good future.

To me personally, school felt like a means of torture; just another year that I would have to spend as the new kid when Katherine and I both knew that by the end of it, something out of my control was going to happen and I would get expelled again. That was just the cycle of my life. I was always getting blamed for things I didn’t do. Well, most of the time, anyway.

“I already know what my future is going to be like,” I muttered grumpily. “It’s exactly what every foster parent, teacher and counselor I’ve seen so far have warned me about. No matter what I do, I’m going to end up in juvenile detention, or maybe even prison. That’s what everyone expects of me.”

The remark didn‘t render her speechless as I was hoping it would, nor did my tone. Sometimes, my tricks to get my way worked on her, like that night at the carnival. Other times, like now, not so much.

Instead of sympathetically telling me they might have a point and that I should be careful, she smiled at me with a knowing look in her eyes, like I actually had no clue how lucky I was.

Right. Lucky. Lucky my parents abandoned me when I was born. Lucky I was put in an orphanage for ten years before they decided no one was going to adopt me and putting me in foster care. Lucky I went to five homes in six years, six homes if you count this one. Since I was eleven years old, my birthday had passed with me in a different location each year.

Every home was worse than the other. All except one. My last home was the only one I liked; I was genuinely happy with the Foresters. But the system snatched me away because of something I didn’t even do. Again, story of my life.

Yeah, I was that lucky.

Don’t get me wrong, it was the moving around constantly and not being able to stay in one place that I hated the most. Although, aside from the Foresters, I did hate all the families they had placed me with. Katherine was a different case. Like I already said, she wasn’t a parent, but I did consider her to be something close to a sister. With the Foresters, on the other hand, it was sort of a complete package; a father, a mother, and two younger brothers. Katherine’s package was missing all of those elements.

“That’s not what I expect of you, Cody,” Katherine said softly. “I see great things in your future. If only you saw that, too.”

I liked her, I honestly did, but she didn’t really understand me so well –naturally so, since we’d only been living together for about five months. Still, she should know me enough to realize that I was used to having nothing, and just the idea of having a promising future was impossible for me to even imagine.

“I won’t give up on you,” she told me very seriously.

This revelation came as a slight shock. She and I never had heart to heart conversations, and I wasn’t expecting her to go soft on me. But I couldn’t deny that it did relieve me a little bit. Very few of my previous foster parents ever made the effort of showing that they cared. The Foresters did, and that was one of the reasons I loved being with them. She sensed the direction of my thoughts and kept going.