Abandoned

He was stocky and strong for his age, packing the pack with the blanket roll neatly lashed at the top easily. His young freckled face showed very little except pangs of hunger when he passed a bakery or a small café. He kept his cap pulled low over his eyes, never making eye contact with people he passed in villages. He didn't want anyone to notice him, he didn't want anyone to know him.

At the age of thirteen, Joe was on his own. He didn't mind it anymore. It had been scary when he was passed from foster home to foster home as a very small child. Finally, when the social workers told him he had to move again because the family wanted to have their own baby and there wasn't room for him anymore, he left in the dark. He took only the money had had earned himself, mowing lawns, carrying bags for old ladies, doing chores around the house when he had foster parents who paid for that sort of thing. Sometimes he even had an allowance. He saved every penny, hiding the bills inside his teddy bear some nurse had given him when his mother broke his arm and she brought him to the ER. Again.

He left that foster home three years ago and never looked back, doing odd jobs for farmers who paid him cash and didn't care about his name or his age. He was always good at school even though he never stayed long enough to make friends and he knew how to use a library. When he would pass through a small town big enough to have a library he could lose himself in, he would quietly go through the sections for school children and find books where he could tutor himself in math, reading, geography, history, grammar and spelling. He took the books that he needed to learn from and sneaked them out through an accommodating window, avoiding the need to get a library card, or the inevitable explanation for why he didn't have any parents to give permission for him to get a card in the first place. Then, when he was finished with the books, he would simply mail the books back to the library in a flat rate USPS box. Otherwise it would have been stealing. Even at such a young age he vowed he never would be like his mother: a thief and crack whore who spent her days high or desperately doing whatever she could to get her next short-lived high.

It was in the town of Marshall, however, that Joe discovered that he wanted to learn more than his books could teach him. He needed to actually go to school. He had three problems. He needed a fake name, he needed fake parents, and he needed a real place to live.

He smelled the air as the sun started to go down and accurately predicted that it smelled like rain. He looked around from out under the brim of his ball cap, his green eyes showing strikingly old against the youthful freckles of his face. The dusty dirt road continued onward as far as he could see, curving to the right by a skeleton of a tree. As he walked the curve, he saw that an old broken down double-decker bus hulking under the tree. The moon had fully come up in all its round faced glory as he got closer to the bus. It was fairly gruesome up close as he studied it, but it was a good location, only fifteen minutes from the road where he could catch a bus to school and the nearest farm was twenty minutes away. He could trade whatever he made in the town for supplies from the farm.

The idea that one family would get to know him made his stomach squirm but he settled his shoulders and sternly told himself that was his life now. He was going to settle down and make his roots. He walked closer to the bus and realized as he looked up and down that the cold steel didn’t seem to take to him much more than he had taken to it. He wondered vaguely how an ancient abandoned bus had made its way to a dirt road under a skeleton tree but in the end he didn’t care.

Taking a breath, Joe walked directly up to the bus and used a rock to break a single pane of the door’s glass out. He reached in with his hand covered in a rag and used his strength first unlatch the rusty closed door. He pushed it open, hearing the wind whistle through the bus, already cataloging repairs he would need to make to his new pad.

The bus did nothing to help him make his homecoming welcoming, warm or fuzzy, but he was ok with that. After so many foster homes, the stark honesty of unfriendliness seemed almost comforting to him. He would rather earn his way to a friendly home than have the frightening experience of being accepted then kicked out again, wondering what he could have done to prevent making these people who said they loved him and would take care of him from hating him so much that they told the social worker to make him leave. Adults were unpredictable and he hated them; from now on he would only use them.

Joe stood up straight in the bus and lit a candle. This bus, which had been left to rust its way to a lonely death, was now to be a home for an abandoned boy that no one really wanted. And the boy, who had been left to die in a meth-heads home at the age of three, was going to get justice in some measure from the world, beating the world at its own game.


Note: image by Kiya as inspiration for this piece.