"Little girl! Little girl, can you hear me?!"
I blink up at the man in the coveralls. He looks scared. I wonder why.
"Just don't move, don't move! Ohmygod SOMEBODY CALL 911!"
He dashes off, leaving me under the dumpster. As the sleep clears from my eyes and mind, I look down at my stomach, feeling a pressure. Oh. The dumpster is on my stomach. How did that happen? Ouch, that hurts!
As the repetitive beep beep beep of the trash truck's backup signal echoes through the brick alley, I try to piece together what happened. I'd fallen asleep behind the McDonald's dumpster, like usual, after eating my fill of cold fries and apple pies out of it. Did I mistake the day for garbage pickup? I must have, because this man in coveralls and his loud truck should not be here.
When he hefted the dumpster's contents into his truck's cavernous maw, I must have turned in my sleep. When he set the heavy metal box down, it was on top of me. I'm almost positive he didn't mean to do it.
The two metal prongs from the truck's lifter thread the channels under the dumpster, and with a mechanical jerk, the dumpster lifts off me.
Tears spring to my eyes as my fractured bones grind. There's wetness across my belly from where the metal bit deep. The tears don't have time to fall before the grinding stops, and the pain goes away.
"Little girl! Stay right there, don't move!" the coveralls man appears next to me again, dialing on his phone. "I need an ambulance, please, hurry..."
I sit up and scoot backwards, out from under the hovering dumpster. Glancing around the crouched man, I wonder if I can run around him before he catches me. Oh, but I'm so tired... I want to sleep some more.
A white box with bright flashing red lights and a screeching siren comes to the end of the alley. The coveralls man is still talking to me, and holding my hand, for some reason. I'm too tired to fight it. "How are you sitting up?" he babbles. His hand is shaking in mine. "You shouldn't be alive, you shouldn't be moving..."
A man and a woman in black pants with lots of pockets run over from the white box, carrying heavy bags and a thin tank on wheels. They shove the coveralls man aside and run gloved hands all over my body, asking me stupid questions.
When they can't find anything wrong, they guide me to sit on the rough metal step at the back of the white box. They put a mask with holes to my face, and it hisses tasteless air from the thin tank on wheels. They seem at a loss to do anything more. Through the plastic mask that fogs with my breath, I eye the crowd that has gathered around the alley entrance suspiciously. I don't like people, much less people watching me. But I can't summon the strength to snarl.
"She's covered in blood! I saw the dumpster fall on her!" the coveralls man is babbling confusedly to the black-pants man and a police officer ten feet away.
"Well, she's not got a scratch on her," the black pants man declares, glancing over his shoulder at me. "The blood's clearly fresh enough to be hers. I just don't understand it."
I swing my dirty bare feet off the back off the white box, waiting for my energy to come back so I can run away.
The woman in black pants comes around the corner of the white box, and she startles me. I hate that she saw me flinch, but she only looks at me with soft eyes, her hands upraised. My eyes land on the candy bar in one of them, and go wide.
"Here, you look hungry," she says gently, putting the bar on the rough step next to me. Her hand has scarcely left it before I'm snatching it up, ripping the mask off my face and the wrapper from the food. I inhale the sweet, chewy bar with barely a chew.
She is watching me carefully. "What's your name, little girl?"
I swallow the last bite of the candy and lick the wrapper, wishing there was more. It helps, though. I feel my energy slowly coming back.
"Do you know your name?" asks the woman in black pants again.
It seems important. I should know my name. Doesn't everyone have a name? Even as I consider, the words whisper up into my head, from somewhere deep in my mind.
"Moira Kerr," I reply, finally. My voice sounds strangely young, but I'm proud that it doesn't shake.
With a friendly smile, she reaches up to tuck a strand of dirty, lank blonde hair behind my ear. "Nice to meet you, Moira."
I pick up some words over the next few days: Social Services. Foster homes. Foster families.
Over time, they all come to mean something.
One of my foster families has six other children that Mama - she makes us call her that - didn't give birth to. We children play on the dirt lot surrounding the long, skinny metal house that we all live in. I think it's called a mobile home, but it never goes anywhere.
I don't talk as much as the other six children. They tease me for it, and it makes me angry.
"Slow poke, bad joke! Slow poke, bad joke!" they chant, running in circles around me and dodging my tiny fists.
"Stop it!" I yell. They ignore me, so I leap at the biggest boy and push him to the dusty ground. My fists land on his mouth and nose, and soon he's bleeding. Why isn't he punching me back?
When the chanting stops, I can think again. The boy under me isn't hitting me back, and that makes me pause, feeling strangely guilty. He's crying and holding his injured face.
I feel bad for hitting him, now. Really bad. My fists fall loose. "Don't cry," I say. If he keeps crying, I might cry. I feel the tears threatening to spill. "Let me fix it," I beg, prying his hand off his face.
When I touch his mouth, smearing the bright red blood, the bust in his lip seals up. His nose stops leaking red. When I pull my hands back, he's looking up at me with both fear and... thanks?
"Moira!" roars Mama, stomping up behind me. She jerks me off the boy by the upper arm, swinging me around. "What are you doing?!"
"Helping him!" I roar back, clawing at her too-tight grip.
Mama smacks my backside hard a few times, but I don't understand why. I hurt the boy, but I fixed him. "But I fixed him!" I shout, struggling. "I fixed him!"
When it's discovered that the boy is no longer bleeding, the other children, Mama, and my foster father (who makes us call him Papa) all look at me strangely. Mama and Papa yell most of the night, and in the morning, Mama makes a phone call while Papa smokes on the front step.
The next day, I'm driven to a new foster family. This one has a real house, a dog named Max, and only three children. I'm the only foster child, and the other three children don't like me because of it. They're all bigger than me, and they pull my hair when Mom and Dad aren't looking.
The dog gets hit by a car on our street. The car keeps going. I see it happen because I'm outside, avoiding the other children. By the time the foster family comes outside, the dog is wagging his tail and licking my face. He's still covered in blood, and I can see a tire track across his fixed ribs.
Mother and Father don't yell, but their whispers in the kitchen are almost worse. The other three children look at me smugly, but they are too scared to pull my hair any more.
The next day, I get put with another foster family: just a man and a woman with a desperate, sad look in their eyes. I don't fix anyone else for a long, long time. I can't help that I fix myself without meaning to. It just happens. I hide it better, now.
I learn about toothbrushes, and braiding hair, and how clothes get washed every day. I learn how to eat more slowly, and chew with my mouth closed, and how to make toast in the toaster. The toaster always shocks me when it spits the bread out, crispy and golden.
The man and the woman get less sad over time. When they tuck me into a soft, warm bed (that is mine, I don't have to share), they say the same four words, "I love you, Moira."
After a while, I figure out what 'love' means, and after even longer, I start to love them back.
When I go to school on a big yellow bus with other loud children, I learn numbers and words. I like words very much. Slowly, I start to speak more, make better words.
Months pass. I only heal myself a couple of times: a paper cut, a twisted ankle.
A year passes. I make some friends, get a bike for Christmas. I fall off the bike and break my arm, but no one sees it and the break is gone in a minute.
The couple finally have their own child, and one day, I get moved to another foster family. For the first time, I cry when I have to leave. I do it at night, into a pillow, and it hurts in a way I can't heal, no matter how hard I try.
I guess they didn't have enough love for both me and the new baby.
More years pass, more families let me go for different reasons. Somehow, I stay in the same school. I get taller, less skinny, smarter and smarter with every book I read. My favorite class is Health, where we learn about the skeleton's bones and muscle groups and which organ does what. When I learn that there are jobs for people who like fixing people, a quiet, trembling candle of hope and want springs up in my heart.
The best ones are called doctors. They get helped by nurses. People like the man and woman in black pants I met in the alley that day are called paramedics.
I'm quiet unless spoken to, always with my head in a book. Sometimes those books are medical textbooks I find for nickels at yard sales, and pay for with coins I find in the gutter. I touch the illustrations of pink muscles, and yellow, purple, or green organs, and white bones with wonder.
Something clicks inside my head. The next time I get hurt, it's by a snag of barbed wire that rips my arm open pretty deep. This time, when I close my eyes, I can see the illustrations of the books brought to life, etched behind my eyelids like doodles in the margins of my friends' notebooks.
I get a job at the library. I meet a boy there, who's staying with his uncle for the school year. It's the happiest I've ever been.
Then the boy moves away. My foster family kicks me out like trash the day I turn eighteen. School ends. My dream fades to nothing because college is so completely out of my reach.
Within a week, I'm eating out of dumpsters again, washing up for work in Burger King bathrooms. I manage to keep my job, and find another bussing diner tables, but I can't make enough money to afford a place to stay.
When the librarian finds me sleeping between the stacks, she fires me.
When the diner owner finds me pawing through the leftovers on people's plates, he fires me, too.
I can't find another job. Weeks turn into months. Summer comes and goes. Autumn does the same.
I've seen other homeless people holding out paper cups to beg for money, and start to do it myself out of desperation.
Winter is chilling me down to the bone, and the cold brick wall I'm huddled against doesn't help. There's snow starting, soon to increase. Nobody has walked by me all day, and I hold my paper cup with fingers I can no longer feel.
I smell the woman before I look up: like a rainstorm after lightening, fresh and clean and powerful. She's not got on a coat, or anything resembling cold weather wear. She's got coffee skin and pure white hair that swallows the snow. "Here," she says gently and without judgment. She drops a twenty dollar bill into my cup, her eyes seeking mine under my filthy hoodie.
"Thank you, God bless you," I croak, as I've heard other homeless say. One of my foster families taught me about God. I wonder frequently if He hears me pray.
Our fingers brush as she gives me the money, and a bruise across her knuckles disappears like a stain under a damp cloth. In a blink, I can see the etch of her bones behind my eyelids, the three bruised ribs that my body heals in a second.
She stiffens, looking from her clean, healed hand to mine and back again. Her other hand goes to her fixed ribs in disbelief that is written all over her face.
I'm frozen with terror. What if she calls the police? What if she screams?
Instead, she crouches down in front of me with a full, honest laugh of delight. It's so real that it dissipates my fear, but I'm still basically suspicious. "Tell me, dear," she says, eyes sparkling. "What is your name?"
"Moira," I reply shortly. I quickly palm the bill, in case she changes her mind. I don't know how she's processed my freakishness so fast, but the change in how I'm usually treated for it disconcerts me.
"Moira," repeats the pretty woman with a smile. "It's nice to meet you. I'm Ororo."
"Stranger name than mine," I snort, getting to my feet to walk off.
Ororo rises gracefully, paces beside me as I try to distance myself. "Wait, please," she says. Something polite but authoritative resounds in her tone, and I find myself stopping. "You and I have something in common," she continues. "Can I show you my secret, as you've shown me yours?"
I stare at her. She doesn't look like a pervert: most of them are men. Something in common? The only thing I've had in common with anybody in my life is the number of limbs on our bodies. Ororo's proposition brings something sharp and desperate out of my shadow-clad soul: a need to identify with someone. "Okay," I reply evenly.
Ororo's eyes start to glow. She raises a hand, and the cold, whipping wind that has battered the street for hours calms to absolutely nothing. The snow ceases to fall like a switch was thrown in the heavens.
Wonder parts my lips as I stare up at the sky, awe compounding as I watch the clouds vanish above us at a wave of her hand.
"You're a mutant, like me," Ororo says, the glow fading and her hand dropping. 'Mutant' resounds in my chest like a gong, rings in my head like Notre Dame's bells. It finally makes sense, now; my incapacity to fit in with people. 'Like me' is a phrase I've never heard applied to me, and she does it with such warmth, not realizing the flay it affects on my heart.
"You were born special," she continues. She must be seeing the turmoil across my face, because she has an infinite gentleness that only snowballs the effect of her words. "I run a school for gifted youngsters like you."
I shamelessly perk up at the mention of the word 'school', before I can stop myself.
Ororo sees my interest before I can lock it down. "Won't you at least come in from the cold? Get a decent meal?"
I wish I could summon an argument, or the willpower to walk away. But my utterly empty stomach and the freeze biting my fingertips make the decision for me. I nod. As I wander after her, towards a Rolls Royce parked around the corner, I can't help but feel like this was meant to be. Somehow, this is a step in the right direction. I can feel it, all the way down to my regenerative bones.
"What do you teach at this... school?" I ask cautiously as she twists a key and dials the internal heat of the car up.
"Most everything," she replies. "To all ages of mutants, we are a haven of safety and learning. There's no need to hide what we are at the Institute."
I mull over this before asking, in a lower voice, "Do you teach medicine?"
Ororo glances at me as we pull away from the curb, a smile playing at her lips. "Yes."