The New Girl

The next time I woke up, it was morning.  I could hear people chattering and bustling beyond the walls of the room.  I turned over and stretched my arms upward, freeing my muscles of their stiffness.  I blinked several times before my eyes fully adjusted to the lighting of the pale, peach colored room.  I slept in the bottom bunk at the corner of the room, allowing me to see everyone else.  Two of the girls in my room already woke up and were fixing their beds.  One girl still slept on a top bunk that sat in between my bunk and the other bunk across the room.  The other two girls, I assumed, were already eating breakfast.  Inch by inch, I pulled myself out of bed.  Then I smoothed out my purple blanket.  It was required to fix our beds every morning or else we were assigned to wash and fold all of the blankets on Sunday.  I fluffed up my white pillow after folding the top end of the blanket over it. 

Next, I crouched down and pulled out my leather, backpack sized suitcase from underneath my bed.  My fingers easily spun the four digit code for the locker that hooked around the two zippers to prevent anyone from stealing my stuff.  Inside my suitcase, I kept clothes, hygienic supplies, and a few items from my old home (such as a few notebooks for my stories, a stuffed rabbit, and a picture of my parents holding me as a baby), which lay at the bottom of the suitcase underneath all of my clothes.  I picked up a container that held my toothbrush, my toothpaste, and my comb. 

After securing my suitcase, I headed for the door.  I passed the other two bunks, a closet with white, foldable doors, and a small, light brown table with two chairs before I reached the door at the opposite corner of the room.  I opened the door to see the usual scene: a bunch of girls from ages eleven to fifteen walking up and down the small hallway.  It was like trying to cross the highway.  I leaped into a small gap in the line going right that led to the bathrooms and more bedrooms further down.  The left lane went towards the center front of the building with the kitchen, cafeteria, and the office.  Going to the center of the building also gave access to the other hallways and rooms.  Boys and girls had to stay out of each other’s halls.  

I lived in what people called a group home " except this place took more kids than most group homes.  The name of this particular group home was Carol’s Home for Children, or else CHC for short.  Inside a large fenced land, three buildings separated kids according to elementary, middle, and high school.  There were six caretakers (so called parents) per building.  I was thirteen years old, so I belonged in the middle school building, which contained four hallways: two for the girls and two for the boys.  Every hallway contained one large bathroom and seven bedrooms, all of which usually held five girls or boys " depending on how many kids were dumped here.  In the morning, everyone woke up by a certain time for school and breakfast in the mini cafeteria designed for three hundred kids.  All of the kids at the group home were dispersed between the nearby schools in order to prevent crowding all of us at one school and to exclude the need to hire teachers for the group home. 

I hurried down the hallway and followed several other girls into the bathroom.  As soon as I entered, I found an unoccupied sink along the wall and started brushing my teeth.  The mint paste foamed up in my mouth while my faded, blue eyes gazed aimlessly into the mirror.  I was just minding my own business when my nose caught onto an odd scent.  I couldn’t figure out what it reminded me of, but my stomach suddenly felt empty.  I was probably hungry for breakfast.  I sighed, spit out the toothpaste, and rinsed my mouth.  When I straightened up to comb my hair, I noticed a girl had placed herself at the sink beside me.  She had bright red hair, which flowed down in curls, and round, green eyes.  Her nose was small and pointy while her lips seemed to be pouting.  She was a few inches shorter than me.  With her small hands, she took up a brush and combed her thick hair.  I soon noticed how awkward she was.  She kept her arms tucked in close and glanced in every direction " that is, until she caught me staring.  Her eyes grew ever wider as they gazed at me, and her mouth opened just a crack.

“Morning,” she peeped. 

I blinked a few times before croaking a, “Morning,” back.  She began to smile, so I hurriedly combed my straight, brown hair and rushed out of the bathroom before she could say something wild like, “Can I touch your hair?”  Girls were weird.  They were into all of these strange things like friendship, makeup, and cute boys.  That wasn’t me.  As soon as that girl caught me staring, I knew that she was going to cling onto me like crazy, and I didn’t like the thought of that.  My solution?  Run away as fast as possible.

I stuffed my morning supplies into my suitcase and jumped back into the hallway traffic heading for the kitchen.  At the end of the hallway, the carpet changed to white, smooth, tiled floors.  The ceiling opened up another story high.  Several octagon shaped skylights covered the ceiling, letting the morning rays into the room.  Behind me to the left was the other hallway for girls.  On the far side of the room were two hallways for the boys.  To the right was the cafeteria filled with round, white tables and a variety of colored chairs.  It was still pretty quiet since it was morning, but some groups of friends were lively as ever.  Past the cafeteria, near the entrance of the building, was the office with windows going all around it.  In the office, the parents in charge of CHC relaxed, and people also came there to adopt children.  To the left was the small kitchen cut off from the cafeteria by counters speckled with different shades of blue.  A ten foot section of the counter facing the cafeteria had large, rectangular, metal pans within the counter top with a variety of foods, which we picked from.  The kitchen workers shuffled around in their black aprons and blue uniforms with nets holding up their hair, cooking and replacing food as fast as they could. 

I headed for the kitchen and joined the line of hungry kids.  My fingers fiddled around as I stood in line, glancing at my surroundings.  When my turn came up, I took a blue plate from the colorful stack and started putting whatever foods I liked on there.  It was breakfast, so the menu consisted of pancakes, toasted bread, eggs, sausages, potatoes, biscuits, yogurt, peaches, apples, blueberries, and breakfast sandwiches.  I took the tongs from the pancake pan and grabbed one, fluffy pancake, which was about the size of my head.  Then I added a scoop of scrambled eggs, one sausage, and peaches to my plate.  At the end of the counter was a collection of condiments.  Off to the side against the wall was a machine with different drink options.  I poured a little syrup on my pancakes and took a cup of orange juice.  I twirled around and found myself facing the dreaded cafeteria room filled with other middle school kids.  I bravely stepped into the cafeteria and maneuvered my way around tables and chair legs until I found an empty table.  I sat down in a yellow chair, clasped my hands together, and stared at my food.  I had been doing this for almost eight months, and I still felt a sense of awkwardness every time it came to the cafeteria.  I pursed my lips and squinted at the food.  Why did I care so much?  It wasn’t like anyone bothered to talk to me anyways.  Most girls seemed too scared of me.  I sat up straight, picked up my plastic fork and knife, and cut away at my pancake.

***

            After breakfast, like everyone else, I hurried back to my room and pulled out my backpack from underneath the bed.  Then I followed the crowd of kids out the entrance of the building and into the court yard.  Sidewalks weaved throughout the large area of grass, leading to various places such as the gate entrance, the basketball court, the playground, the volleyball court, the other buildings with different ages, and additional places.  Only a few group of trees spread across the yard. 

Everyone was headed for the entrance.  Clumps of cliques found their way in the chaos, but I ignored everyone and headed straight for the gate.  I peeked through the rusted, dark gray, metal fence with all of the bars pointing straight up and down so that no kids could climb it and escape.  The only horizontal bar held the entire fence together at the very top, which was about fifteen feet above the ground.  To further reinforce no climbing, the vertical poles shaped into pointy spikes at the top of the fence.  I stuck my hands in the fuzzy pockets of my blue sweater and looked at the outside world.  There wasn’t really much to see considering the fact that, outside the fence, trees mostly surrounded the fence.  However, several blocks away, I noticed a small neighborhood and a bus heading in our direction.  It was for the Lincoln Elementary students.  The younger kids headed out the large, open gate and onto the big yellow bus as the parents ushered them on.  “Normal” kids on the Lincoln Elementary bus inspected us (the CHC kids) like we were aliens.  That bus passed, and more buses came, one after another.  The elementary, middle, and high school students maneuvered around each other to their buses.

I waited and waited until I saw the words Pine Middle School on the side of a bus.  I perked up, not because I was excited, just that I’d been waiting so long.  Another chunk of the middle school kids, including myself, left the gates of the group home and attempted to make a single file line on the side the Pine Middle School bus.  We slowly huddled inside one by one, waddling about like penguins since we barely inched forward.  Finally, I came up to the bus door and took those big steps up the stairs.  The bus driver, a woman named Patty with thousands of thin strands of curled hair and round glasses, greeted each one of us with a little, old lady smile.  I mumbled a hello back, and then went into the tight aisle of the bus.  My eyes searched and quickly spotted one of the last empty seats.  I hurriedly placed myself in it, not even bothering to remove my backpack.  The ride wasn’t that long anyway, and moving around in these crammed seats was troublesome.  I looked out the window at CHC and a few groups of kids still waiting for their buses.  Suddenly, I smelled that aroma again " the one I smelled this morning in the bathroom.  My eyes narrowed, and I glanced around at the other kids in the bus, looking for a reaction to the scent.  No one seemed to notice.  Then I saw a head with big, red, bouncing curls coming down the aisle.  I immediately knew who it was, so I looked away in hopes that she would not notice me. 

“Um, hi…can I sit next to you?” the little voice said.  My muscles tensed.  I slowly turned around, only to realize that she was not speaking to me but to the girl in the seat across from me named Madelyn Floyd.  Madelyn’s curled, blonde hair reached down to her lower back.  Her eyes were a sharp blue, and her face like a Barbie doll, except without the smile.    

Madelyn stared at the red head through her long eyelashes, and her eyebrows came in closer. “This seats taken,” she said in a sassy tone. 

The red head blinked. “Oh " uh " sorry,” she stuttered, stumbling on to find another seat.

A bone-thin girl named Alaska plopped herself down next to Madelyn shortly after.  She flipped her straight, brown hair back over her shoulder as the two of them grinned at each other.

“She’s so stupid,” Alaska said. Two more girls, Sydney and Jessica, came up over the back of the seat.

“I know, right?  She couldn’t stop stuttering.  Maybe she has some sort of disorder,” Sydney, the girl with short, light blond hair said.  They all snickered.

“Is she new here?” the last girl, Jessica, asked.  She had her brown hair tied up in a ponytail. 

“Duh,” Madelyn said. “Her parents probably gave her up because she was so dumb.”

The bus stopped vibrating and jerked forward.  I gazed at the fogged window, drowning out their conversation as the bus went towards school.