Abandoned Children

Often we forget how many children there are out there without a home and without love. These children are often forgotten about and have serious mental health issues as they grow up. No child should ever feel useless or hated. So, in dedication to the "abandoned" children, I am writing this book, in hopes to raise awareness of the forever growing rate of orphans.

Phoebe

    The sweat my on palms and the back of my legs was beginning to get more than a little uncomfortable. My skirt, though assigned to me from the orphanage, was too big around the waist and too short. I wondered what girl had worn it before me and if she knew just how short it was when she sat down. I had my bag on my lap, there was no force on earth that could convince me to move it. The train had most of us on it. The abandoned children, as our headmistress reminded us so often. We were unloved, unwanted and a waste of space, yet, somehow, some one had chosen us. I knew it was just another home that wasn’t really “home”. It was a waiting place until we were old enough to be assigned to a factory or, dare I say it… adopted. A girl like me was never going to get adopted, but sometimes I would dream of a young couple to walk into headmistress Matilda’s office and tell her they wanted a girl older than 14, with brown hair, dull eyes and as thin as a fence post.

    I smiled to myself. Headmistress Matilda… she was an older woman with no patience and repeatedly told us games, drawing and anything we read that wasn’t educational was only for children who are loved. I wondered what she was like at our age, but I couldn’t. All I saw was her gray hair, stern eyes and pursed lips without a touch of lipstick. In fact, she didn’t allow us to wear make-up, ribbons in our hair and flowers were prohibited. I had lived there ever since my mother asked me to wait at the post office while she got herself a pack of cigarettes. She never came back and I had waited there until a kind postal worker took me to the police station. I didn’t remember much of my mother, except she smoked constantly and wore white dresses and a hat with a red flower on it. I didn’t even remember her face. I had been so young when she left me. According to headmistress, I was three. I shook the memory and focused my attention to wiping my hands on my bag. In the seat beside me sat Helen, a girl about three times my size, who was constantly talking. For the whole trip Helen had managed to tell me her life story and what she thought about everyone that happened to pass us by.

    “Oh! And have you seen Alice’s dress? It’s positively sinful! Look at the way it hangs on her! Why, she looks like a girl playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes!” Helen spouted off without even taking a breath. I looked at Alice, she was as thin as I was, and the dress had been given to her in haste for the journey. She was a kind girl, but very quiet, almost eerily so. It was no wonder why she had gotten adopted. She was only five and Helen was right, she did look like she was playing dress-up. It made her look so adorable that any potential parents would jump for the chance to take her home. Her long blond hair and bright eyes, without a single freckle made her the kind of girl you wanted to see on a bottle of sunscreen lotion or even the little cakes they sell in plastic packages. I opened my mouth to say this, but Helen started up again, “Oh! I would die in that skirt of yours! Aren’t you afraid someone will see up it? Or it will fall right off! Why are you so thin? Didn’t they feed you at your group home? Well, in any case, I hear that the train has free sodas, or pop, for us. Why do they call it soda? Or pop for that matter… I have never heard it go POP! Or even SODA!” She giggled at her own wit and continued without waiting for an answer to any of her questions.

    Sure enough, a train conductor came by and gave us all sodas. They were in glass bottles, each one was ginger ale or orange soda, depending on whatever we asked for. Helen looked at me after she drank half of hers in a single swig. “What did you say your name was again? I must have forgotten.” I smiled, she had never even bothered to ask, or if she had, she didn’t pause to hear it. “My name is-” A sudden scream was heard and we saw the other girls jump up. “A mouse! A mouse!” They screeched. Helen leaped up, screaming too. I walked over to the scene and saw the poor little creature. It was tiny, no bigger than a spool of thread. The girls were screaming and the train’s employees were trying to calm everyone down. I took off my scarf and scooped up the creature. I hurried and told the train employee I needed the little girls’ room. They directed me to it immediately, happy that one girl wasn’t screaming about a mouse they couldn’t find.