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But it was like it all disappeared when she was close. When she was looking how she looked. When she was taking care of me. When she was bringing up all that history we shared.

I don’t think I ever told her this, but I was watching out the window when those child services people brought her to the building.

I knew a thing or two about those people. I’d been hauled out of my parent’s place twice by that point. Though, clearly, the state kept giving me back, giving my parents another chance.

Though, honestly, my parents probably would have been just fine with me never being there. It’s not like they bothered with me anyway.

Some of my earliest memories were of being alone in the apartment for what had to have been a weekend when I was no older than four. I’d been surviving on crackers and water from the tap.

Though, I probably preferred being alone and hungry to having them around. Then with their loud voices and their hands quick to strike out in anger.

Slapping and hitting were just a normal part of my life. When I cried. When I wet the bed. When I inconvenienced them in any sort of way. When I came out of my room when they simply didn’t want to see me.

It was all that “early education” of theirs that got me taken away when I had just started kindergarten, when I went to school dirty and hungry and with some bruises. When asked about it, I told them the truth.

My dad did it.

So off I went.

To some crowded foster home who also didn’t give a fuck about me, but in their own unique way. Until, a couple short months later, I was back home. And grateful to be. Because even if my parents were shitheads, at least they were familiar.

The next time I was taken away, I was eight. And the nosy neighbor next door noticed I was alone in the apartment for a long weekend while my parents were on a bender.

I went away.

My parents went to rehab, were deemed suitable, and then I was home once again. But this time in a different part of the apartment building, away from the nosy neighbor, where we would stay.

It was from that apartment window that I saw Ama for the first time.

I remember thinking how small she was. Short, slight, with her long, dark hair, and her big, scared eyes, she looked like what she was in our neighborhood.

A target.

All the girls got picked on. The boys were assholes with no one to put them in their place. So if the girls weren’t tough, they tended to get teased and pushed around.

I was young too, of course, but I’d been raised harder. I grew up on the mindset that you had to get tough, had to learn to look out for yourself. That was how you learned not to take shit from anyone.

I always loved watching the girls finally get sick of it, cock back, and break some bully’s nose.

I’d seen a lot of fights in my short life, but there was just something about a pissed off girl. She wanted to rip your throat out with her teeth.

I’d sort of been expecting the new girl to react the same way. To take a little bullying before she decided that she had to fight back.

But then I’d watched as she crumpled to the ground, crying over the books that weren’t even hers.

I don’t know what happened.

I just flew at the fuckers.

I don’t think I’d ever felt protective before. It didn’t fit in with my lifestyle. To survive, I needed to think of myself first.

But after that day, Ama tended to be first on my mind. Because, somehow, even that young, I didn’t want her to have to be like me. To fight. To get hard. To become a product of the environment.

She was different.

Smart.

Determined.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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