Chapter One - The Beginning

Chapter One, following the Prologue (if you haven't read it, check my writing). Sorry for taking so long to get it on here

Life works in funny ways. One day, you’re on vacation with your foster family, and the next you’re being shipped off to the middle of nowhere prairie lands. So two years ago, this is just a part of my story. Or as I have referred to it earlier, the incident.

  “Gate 418 to Miami is now boarding. All passengers with…” And that’s when I stopped listening to the speaker at the booth.  My foster family consisted of my mom, my dad, my little sister, and my slightly older brother. We all grabbed our carry-on luggage and made our way into the line. As usual, on the flight I had the window seat. That’s how it always was with us. I would always have the window seat, my brother had the middle seat, and my sister had the aisle seat. My parents would sit in the seats opposite to us in whatever order worked with the flight seating. You never know when you’re going to lose someone, and I never knew I’d be losing the family I had grown up with for seven years.

 Halfway through the flight, a voice came onto the intercom. They were worried, no, they were scared. The lady was saying “our flight had hit some terrible turbulence and air pressure was going down” and then the masks dropped. My sister was the only one who needed help. That wasn’t the end of this flight though…no it got worse.

   Ten minutes later, I watched out the window how the plane dipped straight down towards the ground. I tried warning my family but there was too much screaming. Everyone was screaming but I curled up into a ball on my seat to protect myself from whatever happened next. Then it touched down, and everything went black.

  “You’ll join us eventually,” was the dark, haunting voice I heard when I woke up. Pieces of the plane were everywhere. People were spread out everywhere…my family hadn’t made it. I knew that before the ambulance worker reached me. So everyone called it a miracle, my escape-from-death pass. Apparently, my mother had been alive but then died of a heart attack thinking that the rest of us were dead. It’s not fair to blame myself but I did. If I had woken up sooner, maybe the man in black, my social worker, wouldn’t have sent me to a hell-hole of a town. Maybe my foster mother wouldn’t have died.

  I didn’t attend the funeral because of lying in the hospital. I healed quickly according to the doctors, but still managed to have a broken ankle and wrist for three weeks. Before I was moved to a place in the middle of nowhere in Canada, I visited my sensei after being released from the hospital.

 “You have been placed with luck, little one.” He calmly spoke.

“It’s my fault she died. If I had woken up sooner, if I had managed to save one of them…” I replied before he cut me off.

“Do not blame yourself. Fate, and life, and death work in mysterious ways. Sometimes it’s terrible, and sometimes it’s good. But we cannot control it which is a lesson I want you to learn in your travels.”

I bowed, “Thank you sensei. Take care,” then left. In a way it kind of made sense, but I still felt guilty and full of regret. I never did find out the person who had spoke to me right as I woke, and didn’t understand it at the time. On the way to Alberta, I figured it out.

 My social worker put me on a train to get to Rivertide, Alberta. There wasn’t an airport anywhere nearby the town and train was cheaper than taking a bus. The morning was brisk, rain clinging to my dark brown air as I waited patiently for the train. It was a new start, a new life, a new chance as not being known as the freak. I was different, but nobody needed to know that. From behind, it sounded like someone was trying to grab my attention but as I turned, there was no one there. Just my social worker, so I started to pay attention to the incoming train as it roared to a stop.

Quickly I boarded the train to end another chapter of my life. The engine starts up roaring, and a smell of gas lingers in the air of the compartments. My compartment was quaint with dark red cushions, matching window curtains and a wooden shelf above the seat for luggage.

 That’s when I took my nap, filled with a nightmare. Darkness surrounded me but I’m not alone. I am holding onto something but can’t see what it was. Lightning strikes down only twenty feet away, thunder ringing through my ears. The area seemed to be a forest type area because of the red eyes in the trees. Lightning crashes down again ever closer than before, sending me flying back. My body smacks against a tree and instantly wakes me up.

 A terrible headache throbbed as I opened my eyes. It was a perfect sunny day outside and had noticed we were at a train station. Then I had glanced at a sign and saw it was my stop to get off.  I got off the train, and began my new life as the new kid to a small town with a population of 7,523.

Author's Note

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