Chickens

While his parents are being transported into an ambulance to the hospital after a fatal collision with a propane truck that leaves his mother six feet under and his father in a lifelong coma, Adrian Grant is sitting seventeen feet away from the crash on the boiling pavement. Burning, dying, and floating away in the black flames of ash dancing through the blue sky. Laying there and staring at the sun as he burned alive was an experience he didn't think most people lived through. He wasn't supposed to live through it either. But he did. So now he was graced to live with the fact that his parents didn't care enough to tell the ambulance or the officers that their child was dying on the rad a few feet away. They only cared about themselves. Like always. Walking around the hospital after waking up from a four-weeklong coma from the impact of the collison, Adrian spent his days staring at his father through the window and counting the burn scars he was given. He counted them knowing they were't insecurites and instead were just cruel, cruel memories.
When being released from the hospital and deemed a certified orphan, Adrian is taken to some lesser-known family friends, the Sanchez's, who could only be described one word. Odd.
There, Adrian meets a dog named Frito Pie, a chicken named Pig, and an overly eccentric and hyperactive boy named Ell who seems to stick out from the bland and small town he was raised in. With rainbow stickers tracing his freckles and bandages covering his fingertips that were poked from sewing, Ell doesn't only stand out to Adrian. He makes everything better in every way. And his smile lights Adrian up more than the flames that broiled around him ever did.