Mer!

Chapter Two (The Orphanage)

The social worker was nice. She was even nicer when she learned that I had already packed all my shit up and was ready to go within minutes. Before I hauled my suitcase out to the car, I stopped at the doorframe and took one last look around the home where I'd been born and gained and lost everything. But I didn't look too long. I knew I couldn't. If I looked too deeply, I felt like I wouldn't be able to leave, and I had to leave; I wasn't a part of that world anymore.

I was taken to a "halfway home" about an hour outside of New Orleans. On the car ride, I didn't talk much, but neither did I cry. I leaned my head in the corner of the backseat and the window, and I thought about things.

I thought about how much time I spent in my imagination, that imagination feels more real than reality itself, and how reality, unpredictable and uncontrolled, can feel more like a dream. And I thought about how every moment in reality feels like a permanent state of being, how I can't imagine any sort of change. But then big capital-T-Things come around and shatter this permanence, and then it shatters who I am, too. My definition.

I was on the couch watching TV, and then I was an Orphan.

People in real life didn't become orphans—or just not me.

Despite every sad thing that had happened before, with Mom, I still felt the same: that my life was too insignificant for Things to happen to me. People won the lottery, and people died in car crashes, and people fell in love, and people got cancer, and people became orphans, but I was nothing sparkling or special for fate to single me out among all the odds. I was assured that I was immune to fate's touch, and then I was an Orphan. My new definition.

"We'll be there soon," the social worker told me over the muffled roar of the highway. I met her gaze in the rearview mirror. "I think you'll fit in well. There are good kids at this place."

"Perfect. I've always wanted to go to summer camp," I joked. She didn't laugh. "Sorry."

The halfway home was a converted Sunday school building behind a Baptist church. The classrooms and prayer rooms had been converted into tiny dorms, and the walls were covered in faded floral paper that reminded me of nursing homes—the difference, of course, being that nursing homes were leading up to death, and this orphanage-that-wasn't-called-an-orphanage existed in its aftermath.

My roommate was a gangly Dominican boy named Bobby. He and I never struck that diamond vein of friendship, but I'd be the first to admit that he was one of the most remarkable people I had ever met.

The first thing I knew about him was that he read, all the time, all sorts of things from comics to chemistry textbooks. When I was first led into our room, he was lounging on the top bunk, one boney leg slung over the edge, reading a battered edition of National Geographic. He turned his head to assess me with a very intelligent set of bespectacled eyes. "New kid. Huh. Bienvenidos." And he turned back to his reading.

"Hi," I responded. The worker had left, and I stood there quietly. It became clear that he wasn't going to start any kind of conversation, so I hesitantly set to unpacking the important things from my suitcase. (The woman, though, I left in there, secure.)

But when I finished settling in, he turned his head to me again. "Done?" I nodded. "Lovely." He tossed the magazine ingloriously on the mattress and hopped right off, landing lightly in front of me. "I'll take you on the grand tour d'orphelinat."

That was another thing—Bobby's eloquence. He spoke like poetry; not in that every sentence was beautiful, but that every word he spoke was tenderly selected to convey exactly what he wanted to say. He punctuated words by saying them in another language. He said things out of nowhere that cut to the core with pure truth.