Emma broke her arm for the first time when she was five. The way she remembered it, she had been climbing the tree in the yard of her foster family when she lost her grip and fell. Her foster parents felt so responsible that they hadn't been keeping a closer eye on the child that they decided that having Emma around was not a good idea and she went back to the orphanage.
The second time Emma broke her arm, she was seven. The foster family that took her in at that time already had three children of their own, so Emma fell under the radar. The way she remembered it, she was trying to pry a book down from the top shelf of the bookcase. The moment her foot hit the final shelf, she slipped and toppled over, landing awkwardly and in pain. She was removed from the home and she went back to the orphanage.
The third and fourth times that Emma broke her arm, she was nine. She could not remember how it happened, but the story was told, that unbeknownst to anyone, her newest foster father was a devil in disguise. He would work all day long (at his seat in the local bar) and come home at night to beat on his wife and anyone else who was in the way. In this case, that was Emma. As the story goes, a neighbor called police during an "unusually" loud disturbance and the cops arrived just as the monster was shoving Emma down a flight of stairs. The child threw her arms out to break her fall, and in the process, broke them both. After her short time in the hospital, Emma headed back to the orphanage.
The fifth time Emma broke her arm, she was sixteen. Having been in and out of more than a dozen more foster homes in the last seven years, Emma simply couldn't resign herself to spending the next few years living in the place where she had always come back to. She had no friends, she had no family. She had concrete walls, a metal framed bed and paper thin mattress. She had grown used to the crying that came at night from the little ones who still hadn't grown used to their surroundings. She wanted to escape, to go on her own. So, when everyone was at dinner, Emma snuck back to her bed, grabbed a small bag, which contained her belongings and climbed out onto the window sill. It wasn't that far a drop into to brush just below the window, so she tossed her bag first. When that landed, Emma took the opportunity and leaped. It wasn't until the very last moment that she realized the distance was further than she thought and she landed with a thud on the grass beside the brush. When she opened her eyes with a scream of pain, there was a group surrounding her, there to bring her back inside to live out the next two years within those walls, to save her. But they were no heroes. Superheroes didn't exist. If they did, Emma wouldn't be there in the first place. She wouldn't feel unloved and unwanted. She wouldn't have to watch children come and go as she sat and waited. Happiness was just a fairytale. Fairytales didn't exist either.
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