The Girl the Trees Loved

By C.M. Washington

A young girl living alone and on the streets is stolen away  to another world, a world of dragons, fairies and magical people.  She is dazzled by it all until she realizes these magical people believe her to be the child of prophecy, the girl returned from exile to free their realm from a witch who has ruled over them in terror for centuries. But how can she save this beautiful land when all she knows how to do is destroy?

• Language: English
• Publisher: C.M. Washington
• Release date: Apr 8, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223857679

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

This story is about a child who broke things, mostly rules, but sometimes other things as well.  Her heart was not pure, but whose is?  Her intentions were not good, but she was just trying to survive.  She was a child who likely started out with a pure heart and good intentions.  Very few children are not born this way.  But her world took that sweet heart, fresh and whole, and broke it so that she, in turn, broke other things. Her world was a small country town.  The other children in her world were not kind to her.  To begin with, this girl belonged to a stepfather who was so surly, so full of his drink, so quick to anger and rage, that the other children in the town were frightened of him.  The other adults in the town would never encourage their precious small ones to befriend our girl because they did not want them near this stepfather. She also belonged to an uncaring mother, full of apathy and sadness, who was nearly always laying on the sofa, staring blankly at their rather small television screen, barely able to care for herself let alone meet the needs of a small and growing girl. She was unloved and unwanted with not a human friend in the world.

There was a wood that grew around the town, wrapping it warmly in a soft rustle of leaves, the piney scent of evergreens, and the beautiful songs of birds.  It was here our girl fled from her troubles, here where she escaped.  She was a peculiar girl in many ways, with her odd demeanor and her wild appearance. To begin with she was very small, with mossy brown skin and wild curling hair, while these children were the robust children of farmers, palish, blondish, and hearty.  She had strange eyes, lovely, but a disconcerting green colored all wrong, like the black of the pupil and the green of the iris were not sure how to live together. She lived in a home stale with smoke and filth, and this lingered on her person, not that she could help it, but this smell, and her clothes that neither matched nor fit, her smallness, her strange eyes, her stark differences to their own selves, made the people nervous.  But in the woods, none of these things mattered. 

For their part, the woods loved our girl better than any other child in the town.  It was our girl the trees could count on to visit them every day, keeping them company even on the coldest, wettest days. She felt safe in the woods, hidden and cared for. And while the rest of the town took the woods for granted because they had always been there, caring for all the people, our girl always remembered, and sometimes even thanked the trees for all they did.  It did not matter whether the day was brilliant and sunshiny, or whether the trees were covered in frost and a chill wind blew, our girl could be found in the woods. It did not matter because here was the strangest thing about her. She was completely impervious to the cold.  She was from nowhere warm.  The winters in her small farm town were angry, with temperatures often dropping below zero and snow drifting across roads causing children to miss school, but this peculiar girl never got cold. Never.  In wind and rain, snow, and ice, she felt warm and comfortable. Always.

Of course, the people did not really know she never felt cold.  They only knew she was always outside, despite never having owned a good winter coat, and while their hardy farm children would come inside after only a short while of playing in the snow begging for hot chocolate and cookies, this odd girl would not come in until well after dark.  In fact, it was those cold, wintry days our girl loved the best.  On the coldest, windiest country days she was more likely to have the woods completely to herself.  If other children were out, they usually could be found at the sledding hill bundled in thick snowsuits, flying down the treeless slopes with friends until the wind began to bite too harshly at their pale cheeks and they fled to their warm fireplaces and the hot chocolate drinks their mothers had waiting for them.  In the summertime she might see other children climbing trees or playing their games in the shade, invading her woods, which is why winter was her favorite.  It was then that the woods were hers alone.

They were not all mean to her, the children of this little country place, but they did all ignore her.  For the kinder ones, ignoring her was the best they could do.  They were just small, frightened things themselves, trying to navigate the world, with parents who did not behave as grown folks should, parents who let this poor miserable creature continue to live unloved among them.  They saw a little girl who was nearly always dirty, covered in the debris of the woods, leaves and twigs nestled in her curls, mud on her knees, a swipe of dirt across her brown cheeks, and she was easy to ignore.  They did not really see her or her need.

Our girl’s mother was pale, just like the rest of the town, with lank brown hair and watery blue eyes and so she believed she must have taken after her father, whoever he may have been.  She had asked her mother about him, once she had started school and learned of fathers, but she had received no answers. She often wondered about him.  What was his name?  Did she look like him?  Did he love the woods too?  She wondered if he had any family that might look like her and love her if they only knew she existed in the world.

Instead, she lived here where the kindest children ignored her, and the kindest adults acted as though she did not exist, as though she was not their problem.  Of course, most adults know a mistreated child is everyone’s problem, which is why these adults had to pretend not to notice, pretend this girl who looked so differently from their own children, did not need their help. No one wants to ruffle feathers in a small town. So, the meaner children, they teased, they put things in her hair, they stole her lunch, and all those other ridiculous things children do to feel better and braver and more powerful than someone else, and they got away with it.  She would have stopped going to school altogether, she did not think her mother would notice, but for the meals that were provided and the books that could be found there. 

As the years went on, the years of being either ignored or mistreated, our girl withdrew more and more from the other children.  She simply ignored them back, pretended she did not hear their taunts, but when she was eight and feeling particularly angry at a girl who stuck her foot out and tripped her in the hall, she came to a decision.  She made a calculated, and given the circumstances, understandable decision.  She sat on the orange carpet of the school hallway rubbing a bruised knee, her disconcerting green eyes staring daggers at this girl, and she was resolute. She decided she would have her revenge.  Not immediately, but she would find a way soon to teach this horrible girl what if felt like to be the object of another’s spite.

It was not long before a wonderful opportunity presented itself to our girl.  People in small towns do not often lock the doors of their vehicles and so she quietly opened the door of a very nice car, swiftly opened the glove box and relieved that car of a rather lovely pocketknife.  Three days later in the dark of night after spending the day in the woods she slashed the tires of the girl’s very new and rather shining bicycle with that pocketknife.  Then she took that knife and buried it deep into the tires of the car parked in the driveway.  Because, really, children only are what they have been raised to become.  On some level our girl understood this, though mostly it just felt good to break something that was not her heart, and so after she broke the bicycle, she ruined the car as well. And her heart lifted a little and she tucked her stolen pocketknife away for safe keeping and she never once felt remorse for the theft or the vandalism.  Her stolen knife was forever with her after that because if no one else would be her friend, this tiny, brown, sharp little knife would be.

Mr. William Henry the pocketknife was a beautiful knife.  He was very small, like she was, with a soft brown wooden handle, very nearly the same shade as her.  She liked her shade, the same way she liked the shade of the knife, because it was the same color as the bark of the trees in her woods.  The blade was a smoky color with a whirling pattern and when she was alone in the woods, she would press the little button over and over, opening and shutting the knife.  Mr. William Henry was an excellent listener and so all the things she had to tell, all her sorrows and her fears for she had no hopes or dreams, she poured out to her dear little knife.  He was also a helpful friend as he was very willing to assist her in all her revenge plots, slicing more tires, defacing properties, poking holes in the bottom of things and other such wicked delights. 

She took him to the woods with her, crafting a target out of cardboard and old paint from the trash pile behind her house, and she learned to throw the knife.  It was only a few days before she could hit her painted bullseye every single time.  She loved the thudding sound he made as he buried himself in the very center of the target.  She loved how very few tiny holes there were on her cardboard crafted circle that were not at the very dead center.  She was proud of how good she had gotten at throwing her little knife.  She was very careful to keep Mr. William Henry well-hidden so that she could never be incriminated for her crimes and, of course, so he would never get taken from her and returned to his original owner.  She was certain Mr. William Henry was happier with her anyway as they had become such good friends over the years.  She doubted his original owner ever spent much time telling him stories as she always did. And he was also a knife who appreciated a good crime spree, and she knew for certain he had not been allowed to commit any crimes before he met her.

Mr. William Henry had a second brilliant talent that our girl discovered was even more helpful in her little retributions than his ability to cut and slice and fly through the air. Our girl had learned she could use her friend to pick almost any lock that was trying to keep her out.  It was an excellent skill, picking locks, and had aided her in many revenge plots.  For example, the principal arrived one morning to a terrible infestation of fire ants in her desk drawer.  A grown up, thank you very much, cannot be forgiven when she fails to stop children who have never been taught any better from behaving poorly.  She had seen them steal her lunch and sprinkle the chips into her hair, and yet she had done nothing.  Pretending she did not notice this small grievance had made her day so much easier.  No detentions to give out, no parents to call, no worrying over the strange, small girl whose troubles were easier to forget.  So, with Mr. William Henry at her side, she made sure that Principal Patterson paid the price for not doing her job as the adult in the building.  Though her previous day had been easy, her workload would be extra this day.  She only smiled inwardly at the screaming and crashing that came from the office that morning, as a real smile, visible on her face, may have given her away. 

She peered quietly over the top of her book through the large glass window in the library and took a deep satisfied breath when she saw a group of men in gray jump suits enter the school and take over Principal Patterson’s office.  She felt the full measure of her retaliation when she saw the horrible woman perched at an extra table in the office, kicked out of her own private space, and she knew what a terrible day she was going to have.  She hoped the exterminator’s fumes would linger in her office for days.  She hoped her principal would suffer from the chemicals.  Maybe a nice rash on her skin, she thought, to go along with the fire ant bites that were scattered across her hands and looked rather angry, and our girl hoped they felt as terrible as they looked. She sank down into her seat, her face never betraying her satisfaction, and our girl lost herself in the lovely book she was reading.  It was about a miserable child whose parents did not love her, but she had discovered she could perform fantastic feats with the power of her mind, and she used those powers to take revenge on the terrible adults in her life.  She had read this book a million times.  It was her favorite, and the library was her second favorite place to be, second only because the trees loved her better than the library did.  She had once tried to move a pencil with her own mind and had been disappointed to find that she lacked any special powers.  But books like these gave her a feeling that maybe one day, possibly, she could grow up and escape all of this wretchedness. Also, she had discovered, if you read quietly in a corner of the library, you sometimes could go unnoticed for hours.

For years she made mischief in her small town, slicing things, and breaking things and playing tricks on the folks who did her wrong.  Maybe some suspected her, but she was tiny, quiet, and smart.  She had learned to melt into the darkness, and no one ever saw her, nor did they want to because they had worked so hard for so long to pretend she did not exist. She was also patient and would wait for the right time and the right opportunity and so she was never caught.  She became a master thief and would take things, beautiful things, from people who had done her wrong.  It felt almost as good as breaking things. She never kept a single purloined item for fear of getting caught.  She really did not even want them.  She would bury them in the woods and be happy that the horrible people who placed so much value in those things would now have to go without them, just as she went without so much.

The only item she had stolen that she ever kept was Mr. William Henry, and, of course, the cash money that she had hidden away.  She needed that cash money ever so much more than the terrible people she took it from because those paper bills would one day aid her in the eventual escape she planned to make.  At first, she thought of her escape as her ultimate revenge plot, but then she realized that very few people were likely to even notice her absence.  She was going to leave these people behind, all of them, and there would be no trace, but it was simply her escape plan, her ultimate plot, no revenge involved. 

She had begun to dream of escaping her country town and her mother and stepfather when she was very small, but she knew there were two things she needed to accomplish before she could go.  First, she needed survival skills.  She felt that picking locks and throwing knives, stealing what she needed and learning how to slink about a town unnoticed were a very good start to being able to survive all on her own.  But she also knew she had to get big enough to go unnoticed.  A small child wandering around a city would attract too much attention.  She was plotting and planning, but she was also waiting to grow up just a little bit more.

She had read about runaways in the city, and she intended to become one of those.  Her desire, her one goal, was to be a street urchin.  She had, as was previously mentioned, spent many hours reading in the library and she loved the stories of the street urchins that grew up to lead magical and adventurous lives.  When she read about urchins or saw them on the television, she thought they seemed as unloved and unwanted as she was.  She liked the word too.  She knew it was not a modern word, but rather an old-fashioned word from the books she read, but she liked to use it regardless. She would one day be a street urchin. She would have adventures and a posse of other urchins, and they would love her because she would be the best criminal in the streets, she would make sure they always had good things to eat and warm clothes to wear, she would care for them and love them too, and she would finally feel less alone. Then somehow, some way, she and her urchin friends would all grow up and find a way to live a good and prosperous life, just as the heroes of her stories did.

Until that day that patiently waited for her in the future, our girl spent her days in her trees.  She knew those trees loved her best of all.  The other children could use their shade, could climb in their boughs, could use their fallen branches to build forts in the woods, but she never once saw the branches of those trees bend to gently wrap their boughs around another child like they did for her. She knew the trees did not tell those other children that they would be safe so long as they stayed in their woods, like the trees told her.  Of course, the trees in the woods behind her house did not actually speak to her.  It was just something our girl knew.  Stay here, with us and we will keep you warm and safe always.  Never leave your woods and we will keep you hidden from any who would do you harm.  Stay, girl.  Stay. And she did.  For the longest time, she stayed close to her trees, safe and loved and warm in their protective branches.

Eventually girls do grow up though, and as her body grew and began to change and she no longer looked like such a babyish thing, she began to think differently.  She knew she could not stay much longer.  With each passing day, her stepfather grew angrier, more prone to violence and rage.  Her mother never minded when he raged at our girl, because it meant she would be left alone. She knew the two things she really needed to leave were hers now.  Her body had grown just enough, and her skills were honed.  Her trees begged her to stay with them, hidden for just a bit longer.  There were days when she would listen, days when she knew it would be unwise and frightening to run away into the unknown, days when she knew she needed the protection of the woods behind her house.  But there were also days where she felt like staying would be the death of her, and despite her sadness she wanted a chance to live.  She wanted to know what it was like to really live.  And she wondered very quietly in the back of her mind, in the secret places of her heart that even she could sometimes not find, if there might be people out there who could love her and who she could love back.

So, our girl began to prepare in a very real kind of way.  Her feeling that she needed to escape became less of a fanciful, distant idea and more of a concrete thing she was going to do.  Soon.  She began to ready herself, so that when the day came, when the right opportunity was before her, she could seize it.  Maybe she could stay until she was eighteen like the other children did, and then quietly slip away to school or to a job and live a regular quiet life.  But there was also the chance that if she did not leave before then, she would not make it to eighteen.  So, she carried out her preparations, her plans, and she told them to her trees and Mr. William Henry only.  And while her trees did not want her to go, for they felt only they could really keep her safe, her little pocketknife was ready for the adventure. He was always ready for any adventure our girl wanted to take him on.

Her mother and stepfather usually went to the tavern on Friday evenings.  They would stay out late and come home and sleep heavily.  If she fled just as soon as they left the house, she would be quite far away before they realized she had left them.  They never checked on her when they came in, so they would likely not notice until late the next morning she was missing.  If she was lucky, they would assume she was just out wandering the woods and may not begin to wonder where she had gone until the evening.  She wondered if it was even necessary to plan for them to notice her absence, if they would even care that she was gone, but she planned for them to look for her anyway, because she could not risk them finding her and bringing her back. 

The first Friday of the month was the day her mother brought home groceries.  It would have to be that Friday that she chose.  She had a small bag packed with just a few necessary items in addition to the cash she had been stealing and saving for years.  The bag with the cash and a toothbrush and clean socks and underwear were hidden under a loose floorboard under the mattress on the floor where she slept.  She would load another bag with food on a first Friday and she would go.  Many first Fridays had come and gone since she had packed this bag, but the time was close, she knew.  She had plenty of cash to go anywhere she chose.  She was beginning to feel big enough, she just needed to feel brave enough as well.

Then a day came where all her bravery came flooding in, a day where she knew she was ready to go. It just so happened to be a Thursday night.  Her stepfather had been in a particularly foul mood, and he had taken it out on her.  She locked herself in the single tiny, dirty bathroom of the house and stared at herself in the chipped mirror.  The mildewy scent filled the air and made her feel ill, but she did not leave. Her hair was tangled, for no one had taught her how to care for her curls, and she pushed a matted lock out of her face and looked herself in the eye.  She thought, a little bit, her eyes looked like the moss on her trees, and she thought of leaving her trees and it frightened her. But she also knew they could keep her safe no longer.  Hidden for a while, but not safe from this man she shared a house with. So, she stood tall, she looked at her own face and summoned every ounce of bravery laced with rage and indignance that she could.  Tomorrow her mother would come home with bags of groceries.  Tomorrow her parents would leave for the tavern, spending much of their payday funds on drowning in their own sad stories. Tomorrow she would leave.

She looked at her swollen lip and the fingerprints on her arms, flowering purple, growing larger even now, and she thought of his sweaty, red face and she thought of her mother barely looking up from the television and probably only feeling relief that it was not her he was raging at, and she thought of his dead eyes and the smell of alcohol and the rage in her was overpowering.  Her tiny hands were balled into fists and without thinking about it, one clenched fist shot out into the mirror, and it cracked but did not shatter and what she failed to see was the frost in the corners and the ice along the cracks.  It was probably that ice that kept her from slicing her knuckles open, but she had turned away from the mirror and did not see.  By the time her mother came into that bathroom the ice had melted away and shards of glass had fallen into the bathroom sink, but she assumed it was the age and disrepair of the bathroom that had caused the damage.  The woman had sighed and thrown away the larger pieces and paid the rest no mind, thinking later she would have her girl clean the rest of the strange mess of wet shattered glass later.

Our girl promised herself as she walked out of that mildewy bathroom that tomorrow she would be brave.  She promised herself that tomorrow, she would leave them.  And she was true to her promise.  She did leave.  But before she left, even though she knew it was not wise, she smashed all the dinner plates onto the floor, she knocked over every chair, and she slashed the furniture with Mr. William Henry.  He’d had to live there for years too so she supposed he deserved his own revenge.  She very seriously considered getting the can of gasoline from the shed and lighting the whole hated place on fire.  But no, they would surely come looking for her then, and not just her mother and her stepfather but the law as well.  And, more importantly, she would not endanger the woods behind her house and the beautiful trees who had always loved her. She had broken all she could and that would have to be enough.  Let them live out the rest of their miserable years here in this ruined mess she imagined they would barely care to clean up.  She was going to be free.

That was the day, at twelve years old, she set out into a world she believed hated her with Mr. William Henry, her only friend now that she was leaving the woods behind her, tucked into his soft leather case, and safely hidden in the inner lining of her baggy, black jeans.  She carried an old, pink backpack with ponies on it, the same one she had been given secondhand when she first started school at the age of five, and while it was a bit dusty from being hidden under the floorboard of her old room, it was not in terrible shape.  It was good enough to carry her toothbrush, a change of clothes, clean underwear, a few hair ties, and all her stolen cash.  She filled a duffle bag that belonged to her stepfather with as many non-perishable food items as she could fit and this she slung over her shoulder as she walked out the front door for the last time, thinking she would burn the bag when the food was gone and never think of the man again.

She went to her woods first.  She knew it was not a logical thing to do.  She knew she should leave as fast as she could.  But those woods had loved her for so many years and she did need to say goodbye.  She could sense their sadness as soon as she stepped into the trees.  She saw their branches bend towards her, and she knew she was not imagining it.

I have to go, she said, and they said nothing but their rustled and brushed against her cheeks though there was no wind that night.  Thank you.  For everything, she told them and then she ran.  She ran as fast as she could away from them because she was afraid if she did not she would lose her courage and stay.  She hoped they would understand.

With a map she had pilfered from the local pharmacy, she had planned her route.  She would steal the car from the old lady who lived just few blocks away from her.  Her stolen map was already waiting for her, right in the glovebox where she had placed it in preparation for the flight she had known was coming soon. This lady, Agnes Kelly, was well into her eighties.  Her car sat parked in her garage and was only driven on Mondays when Agnes drove a few blocks to the grocery store.  If she was lucky, this deaf old lady would not hear her take the car from the garage that she had already broken into and already discovered that the keys were always left in the car. She had originally discovered this when Agnes, with narrowed and suspicious eyes, had said to her that she needed to do something about her hair, that she needed to keep her filthy feet off her lawn, that she was a shameful girl and the whole town knew it.  If she was lucky, this wretched and miserable old bat, would not even notice her car was missing until Monday when she went to pick up her groceries.

She had ignored the old lady at the time of her grievance, her plan being to take Mr. William Henry to her tires later, but as she poked around in the garage that night another plan had taken shape.  The woman was suspicious of her, and she knew slashing her tires would only increase her suspicion of her.  She decided not to draw the notice.  Yet.  She decided to delay her revenge on Agnes.  The half-senile old grouch was afraid she would lose her keys so she left them in the car thinking her garage was safely locked, but locks could not keep our girl out, so now she had a getaway car.  She congratulated herself for convincing her lazy mother to teach her how to drive when she was ten so she could run errands for her.  In a small town, the children of farmers learned to drive early, and no one said a thing about it. Driving, she knew, was a skill that could help her both escape and survive and so, while her mother only gave her one driving lesson, she had practiced on her own.  She was an expert behind the wheel now and just tall enough to be able to see over the steering wheel.  So just as soon as she finished saying goodbye to the woods, she slunk unnoticed in the dark of night to Agnes Kelly’s garage, and she quietly drove away in Agnes Kelly’s car. And luck came through for our girl that night, for the miserable old woman slept through the break-in, snored through the car starting up in the garage, and when the garage door opened and then closed again, she only rolled over in her sleep, slightly disturbed but never fully waking in her deafness.

The next town over was about thirty miles away.  It was not a huge city a kid could disappear into, but it did have a bus stop.  She parked Agnes’s car a few blocks away from the bus stop.  She used Mr. William Henry to do in the tires, then she rummaged through the car and pocketed the five dollar bill she found in the middle console and put on the rather large black sunglasses she had discovered in a compartment above the rearview mirror.  The glasses were out of fashion, but she knew nothing of style.  She only knew that their huge frames kept her face hidden in the brightness of the dawning morning.  And she felt no remorse for the sunglasses, the cash, or the car and its tires.  It was no less than Agnes deserved.  The old curmudgeon would eventually get her car back and insurance would fix her tires so really it was only going to be an inconvenient week for Agnes.  But for our girl, it was the week she would be free and finally away from that tiny pocket of the world that hated her so much.  She bought a bus ticket to the nearest big city and figured she could be completely anonymous there.  At least she told herself she wanted to be anonymous there, but what she really wanted, deep down in the recesses of her broken heart, was to find a friend there. And as the bus pulled away, carrying her out into the world she felt a light-hearted excitement to be on this adventure, she felt a curiosity about what the world would show her, and for the first time in her life, she allowed a few hopes and dreams to creep into her visions of what the future might possibly hold for her.

CHAPTER TWO

She spent the years bouncing from city to city, staying in homeless shelters, sleeping in parks, stealing her meals, and meeting other children like her, out on their own, forgotten, unloved and unwanted. She had not exactly found what she was looking for, she did not know exactly what she was looking for, but she had left that horrible house and she was surviving. She was not, however, thriving.  She had made no friends.  She did not know how.  She had filled her world with other broken children like herself, which, though oftentimes we befriend those most like us, it does not always work that way for the broken.  She had never learned how to reach out, how to open herself up to others.  She did not know how to speak to other children, and though in the city, they did not find her quite so strange as the country folks had, they still found something about her odd. Our girl never stayed long in one place, but she could not have said why.  They had simply never felt right, and she had felt a longing, a pull to leave, a need to find a place that was right. Sometimes, our girl might have even said that a feeling of foreboding, of danger had chased her right out of the city she had been trying to make hers.

Then one day she remembered the woods behind the house she grew up in and how safe and protected those trees had made her feel.  She remembered how it almost seemed as if those trees were speaking to her, telling her she was loved, even though no people in her life had ever made her feel that way. In the large cities she was anonymous, she had remained lost now for over two years.  At fourteen years old, she was fully on her own, and had proven to herself that she had been right to leave, that she was capable and brave and that she needed no one.  But she now realized she needed to find a place where she could be in the woods, smell the fresh air, be embraced by the trees, to feel the kinship she missed from her old woods.  She had impressed other kids on the street with her criminal abilities, but that was all.  No one loved her.  No one hit her, no one abused her, but still, no one loved her.  She thought, maybe, if she could disappear into the woods and feel loved by the trees again, that might help the emptiness she had been trying to ignore for so long.

So, she left yet another city, but this time she looked for a place to go where the woods were close.  The place she chose was not huge, not like Los Angeles or New York, but it was big enough.  She had been to both of those places, and she had been fine there for a bit, but eventually she had fled both. Those places were loud, polluted, bright, and she never felt like she could breathe there.  She never felt at ease. She wondered if maybe this new place she had found could be a permanent place for her.  A place she could hide in forever.  A home.  Something in her in all these years of being transient had begun to long for something more permanent.  All she was really looking for was a city with a forest to slip away to, and maybe one or two people to love her.  She was looking for a home, although she could not have put that into words for any person who had cared to ask it of her.  She was looking for a place to finish her growing up in, a place that could be hers, a place where a life could be built by a girl who did not know how to build a life.

She watched a man park his car and she watched that same man yell at the hungry homeless person who had asked for change.  When that man disappeared into the bank he had parked in front of, she opened his car with the keys she had quietly slipped out of his pocket as he fed his parking meter and she drove away in his car.  She was careful to drive the speed limit, careful to draw no attention, as she moved down the highway with the comfortable air conditioning that made the hot sun that poured in through the tinted windows feel soft and welcome.  As the cool, comfortable car of the rich man glided down the highway she was feeling optimistic and looking forward to getting lost in the woods again. When she arrived at the place she had marked on her map, she bought herself lunch with money she had found in the man’s car and then she deserted the car.  She did not even ruin his tires as she sometimes liked to do because her mood was too good. And when she found the woods, they were beautiful.

She spent three days camping under the stars before she decided she wanted a good shower, hot food and maybe, just maybe to talk to people. She bid farewell to the piney scent, but she was not sad to leave these trees.  They did not love her, or speak to her, as her old woods had.  They had been kind, they had given her a good rest, but she had not really found what she was looking for. These woods, this lovely little pine filled piece of the earth, had given to her only what it gives to everyone who wanders among its trees- peaceful moments, breaths of fresh air, a reset from the busy city, a quiet music of chirping and swaying.  It was good.  She had loved it all.  But it had not been her woods.  Had she imagined it, the love her woods had given her?  She did not think so, but it had been so long ago, and she had been so young. She left to go explore the city, thinking she would come back here, even though these trees were not hers, because it really was a lovely place to be.

Shelters for cast off children existed in every city, and it did not take her long to find this city’s roof for its unwanted children. It was a funny place with so many people who cared about the children who walked through its doors, but there was so little any of them could do to help.  Most youth shelters were like that, full of people who cared, who wanted to help, but what could they really do beyond giving them a roof for a night or two?  Instead, these caring adults would focus on the one or two really good ones.  There were always those few kids who seemed to be able to take advantage of services offered and become something more, but it was always only a few, and she, herself, had never been one of them.  It was a path that always eluded her.  She could never let her guard down enough to trust the adults.  She was never willing to let them see into her, how smart she was, how capable she was.  She was driven by her need to stay anonymous.  She could not let them begin to wonder where she had come from. She could not let herself be found by her mother and stepfather any more than she could let her heart be disappointed by these new adults, and so she had always remained aloof from any adult who had tried to help her.

This particular shelter had beds that pulled down out of the walls at night.  Staff would fold up and roll away the tables and stack up the chairs so that the room where they had done their schoolwork, eaten their breakfast, lunch and dinner in, played cards or watched movies in, now became one giant bedroom.  They would all pull their hideaway beds down from the walls once the room was emptied and prepare to sleep.  Both the mattress and the pillows were covered in plastic, but they were allowed to put soft sheets and blankets over the top.  Everything was old and donated.  Threadbare and unwanted.  But it was clean.  She would cocoon herself in and think how she had never slept in blankets this clean and cozy when she was younger.

Every three nights they had to strip their beds and let the staff bleach the plastic coverings on their beds and then they would be given new sheets.  She hated the bleach.  She also hated the sickly-sweet chemical smell of the mop solution that was used on the floors every night once all the children had gotten into to bed.  She could never fall asleep while a staff member pushed a mop around the room and watched them as they slept.  But it was easy enough to get to the woods in this city, so she would disappear there for a few days when she needed to get out. She had grown so used to her solitude she did not know how else to be.  She would leave for a few days and tell Mr. William Henry all her thoughts, her hopes, and let him and only him into the deepest recesses of her heart. Then she would return to the shelter when her food ran out and she wanted a shower, abiding the bleach and chemical smells for as long as she could before she would disappear again.

In this city, in this shelter, however, she found something she had not before in any other place she had been. The kids here were a bit less hostile toward her.  They talked to her.  They taught her how to play cards and they invited her into their mischiefs.  She had never done mischief with anyone but Mr. William Henry before now. So, she would come back from whatever place in the trees she had found and eat and shower and for the first time really engage with other people.  The kids who called this place home had stories and so she would listen.  And their stories would break her heart because she had lived them.  Their stories would fill her with sadness because these stories had ruined these perfectly good children.  So, she would get angry.  That is when things would get broken.  Rules and dishes and car windows and such.  And her friends, at least she hoped they were her friends, would break rules and windows and such with her.  Something about things shattering that were not tiny pieces of her soul felt good.  When the shards of glass fell around our girl and the fragments did not belong to her heart but were simply shiny, sharp pieces of the world that had never loved her, then her heart felt a bit stronger, if only for a moment. She understood these other children, possibly her friends, as they made mischief and broke things. If the world wants to break you, why not break it back.  And isn’t it better to break things than children anyway?

Her favorite new friend was a tall blond girl, with a sweetly freckled nose, and a loud voice.  Her name was Emma.  She wore only black, sometimes even painting her lips black, and one day she showed up with her blond hair dyed black to match her clothes and her painted lips. The first day our girl had arrived at the shelter, Emma had introduced herself.  She had even invited our girl to sit at her table for the dinner that was being served.  Spaghetti.  The noodles had been too soft and there had been no meatballs, but our girl had not cared.  Someone had invited her to sit beside her.  It was the best dinner she had ever eaten.

She was not their leader.  No one looked up to her.  Oftentimes they could not remember her name. But she did listen.  And after she listened to them, she fell into mischief with them, which is of course, how she ultimately got kicked out of the only place she had ever felt she might belong.  They said she was a danger.  They said she could not come back.  They said throwing dishes against a wall one night was the last straw.  She was out of control.  She needed to leave, and she would not be allowed to return.

But they had let Emma’s father come for her, a man she knew was only going to do her harm once he got her home.  They had not protected the poor girl, and that was supposed to be their job.  So, she did get angry, and she did throw things against a wall.  They might not care, they might say it was out of their hands, but she cared, and she simply could not understand how humans could harden their hearts so to children, could let them go to harm because a law or rule said it was what should happen.  They should all know better. They should all do better. And this was not her first offense.  No, this was not the first time she simply could not contain the rage she felt at the fate of the children around her. For unlike the hearty farmer’s children she had grown up with, who had been given everything, but still could not love the strange girl in their midst, these children had been given nothing, just as she had been, and while they had trouble loving anyone, at least it was not only her they singled out.  They had been ruined, and she knew how that felt.  So, she raged, and she threw things, because the unfairness of the world was too much for her to take.

They could forgive her no more and she could no longer come back and sleep in their hide-away beds and use their shower stalls and wear their donated clothes and eat their donated food. That is what happens when you get too angry.  She had not meant to lose control.  But how could they just let Emma be taken by that horrible man.  They had said it was outside their control, but they knew.  They knew what would happen to her.  Then they had told her they had to contact her parents, and if they could not reach her parents, they had to contact CPS, and they wanted her to tell them how to contact her parents because she was losing control.  She was too much.

It had just been a plate against a wall, a plate she simply had to launch when she thought of her poor friend and when she thought of her wicked stepfather and the last time he had caused those purple bruises to bloom across her face and arms, and her vacant mother who had done nothing to stop it, and how that was what Emma was going back to.  No one was injured or even really scared when she had thrown her plate.  The ugly gray dish did not even break as all the dishes in the place were made of plastic to keep the children safe.  But a girl could try, couldn’t she? They always said they had to contact your family, but she would always leave when they tried to force her to give them that information.  Now she had to leave when she did not actually want to for not even breaking anything. She had thought she had found belonging here, for the first time in her poor life, and now she had to leave.  And her friend had been sent away too.  A poor girl with sad blue eyes named Emma was headed back home with the father she had run from, and she would suffer.  She would suffer for running.  Suffer at the hands of a man who was supposed to be her protector in this wild world. She knew that suffering, she had lived it, and she could not bear the thought of Emma living it again after going through so much to escape it.

She had looked hopefully at the children she had begun to think of as friends pleading with her eyes for them to say something.  Anything at all.  Even just ‘goodbye.’  Emma was gone.  Emma, who had invited her to sit at their dinner table, who had been the first to invite her out into the streets with them, who had shown her their card games, and shown her on her very first night how their pull-down beds worked.  Did the other children not care what had happened to Emma?  Did they not care what was happening to her right now?  Maybe one of them would leave with her, proving themselves to really and truly be her friend, Emma’s friend.  But not one even looked up as she was escorted to the door.  Not even one of those mischief makers who had all thrown a plate or two themselves even looked up to meet her eyes.  And it came to her that they were just looking out for themselves.  She realized they needed to keep this roof over their heads.  And she knew, deep in her broken heart, that they had no real love for her, or for Emma.  She thought of all the street urchins in her books, the ones who were not the heroes of the story, the ones who did not make it out alive or who never found that better life and she realized that is who she was.  The world hated her, and it always would and thinking she had found belonging and having it snatched away from her did something to her already broken heart that she had no words to describe.

Now what?  She was only fourteen. Over two years on the run.  Where to go now?  She could not go back to where she came from.  She would die before she went back there.  Not that dark, evil place that smelled of smoke and torment. Never again. She could sleep outside.  She could never go back inside another building ever again.  She could be warm and happy alone somewhere in the trees.  But she did need to eat, and she would like to wash. And maybe, she did not like to admit it, but maybe, she longed for companionship.  Someone she could love and who would love her back.  Some of those other children, she had thought, were her friends.  The closest she had ever had to a friend, anyway.  She had gotten a taste for what it felt like to begin to belong somewhere, but they had let her down anyway.  Knowing she would never be loved, she would never belong, losing that tiny bit of hope inside of her that had kept her from imploding all these years was simply too much.  The thought of starting over in another new place was simply too much.

As she began to walk away from the shelter where she had been forcefully escorted from and left standing just outside the front door, her throat felt tight, and her eyes felt hot, but she refused.  She refused to cry.  But then someone from a car yelled ‘get a job’ and she wondered ‘how?’  because at fourteen what jobs could she possibly get?  And if she was hated and unlovable would there ever be a ‘job’ for her or any kind of place for her in this world at all?  Stealing, thieving, always hiding, eking out your existence was exhausting and faced with that being your forever was a crushing, devastating thing.  Her tears came.  Unwanted they came and they fell hotly down her face and since they were coming anyway, she did not bother wiping them away.

It is possible that God gave us tears so that all of the things we bottle up inside ourselves can come out and we can begin to heal from the wounds inflicted upon us.  But what did our girl know of God and tears? It is hard to carry all the things in our hearts that the world sometimes gives us, even for those of us with easy lives, beautiful lives, blessed lives.  It is a wonder we are ashamed to cry, it is a mystery why we try to hold them back, because we all have need to do it, to let those tears heal us. Once you’ve let all your woes leak from your bleeding heart out into the open air it is so very much easier to keep moving forward. But when you belong nowhere and the world has given you no beauty with your pain, no love with your heartache, and so many knocks it’s a wonder you are still standing, when there is just so much bottled up inside you, maybe tears are not a strong enough balm for healing. There was so much buried there in the corners of our girl’s heart she had long forgotten.