Lost and Found
Chapter 1: At That Age
I had clearly made a mistake trying to talk about what was happening to me. Why did I think Matthew would be helpful? Especially after he called in his wife, Elaine? She was supposed to 'help explain'. Some explanation. This was just embarrassing.
"Look, Evan, you're fourteen years old. Your body is starting to change. I know you think I can't possible understand what you're going through, but I was a teenaged boy once too." Matthew said. I fidgeted in my chair at the dinner table and looked away. He'd said that same sentence a lot in the past hour or so. "It's something everyone goes through. It's an awkward time for a boy or a girl, as I'm sure Elaine and I could tell you."
"If you guys are going to start telling stories that are only going to make this worse than it already is, I'm leaving." I pushed myself away from the table and hurried upstairs to my room, ignoring the halfhearted protests from Elaine and Matthew. I slammed the door before grabbing one of my secret notebooks and flopping down on my bed.
I didn't open it right away, wondering not for the first time why my real parents have never tried to find me. If you haven't guessed by now, I'm a foster kid. Elaine and Matthew are my fifth set of foster parents. He's a chef(yes, great food!), she's a dentist(no, teeth scrapings and cavity fillings!), and both of them are pretty nice people. But I knew Matthew was wrong about what was happening to me. How could he possibly know what I was going through? Only one person knew, and that was my kitten, Pendant. Who, right now, has decided my shoulder is his napping place.
"You don't care, do you?" I ask the purring engine that is the only friend that comes with me when I get moved to another house. "Not as long as I let you use me as a bed." I opened my notebook, not expecting any kind of answer from Pendant, and looked at the noes I had written down. Not notes you pass to people in class or notes to remember something, but notes to one of the songs I've written. I looked at it and couldn't understand why I'd written a song that felt like it had something missing. An extra C note? A slower crescendo? A quicker one? I didn't know.
I shoved the notebook under a pillow when I heard a knock at the door.
"Evan? Can I come in?" Elaine called from the hallway. I told her she could and she opened the door. Without closing it(I suspected Matthew was in the hall and listening) she walked over to my bed and sat down next to me, reaching over to scratch Pendant behind the ears before she spoke again. "I know that conversation could have gone better, but you have to understand that the last time either of us had a talk like that.. well, we were kids talking to our parents and it was just as uncomfortable for us then too."
"I know that, Elaine. It's just that.. well, it's not like I've got any friends my age that are going through the same thing, you know?" I'm pretty sure that's the answer she wanted because, though she tried to hide it, she relaxed a bit. "I'll get over it." I lied. She reached over and messed up my hair, something she knew annoyed me but did it anyway.
"It's not as bad as it seems right now." She told me. "It gets better. You'll probably get a girlfriend when school starts up again in the fall. Or a boyfriend."
"Elaine!" I feigned shock at what she had said. She likes to mess with me. "I like girls. You know that."
"I don't know," She teased me as she stood up to leave. "I've caught you looking around before."
"I've only been on the look-out for competition. After all, I don't want to get into any fights while I'm here. People might think I'm a dangerous kid with cavities and cravings for barbecue sushi!" I teased right back. She laughed, scratched behind Pendant's ears one more time, and left. She even closed the door behind her, allowing me to pull my notebook out again. I like them both, especially since they understand stuff like privacy and boundaries.
The notes were still there, of course, and they were still missing something, but I didn't want to think about and flipped through the pages so I could look at a song that didn't have anything missing, but caused me just as much confusion. It was the first one that revealed how different I was after all. It had words to go with the notes, and I looked at Pendant as I hummed the song.
Pendant's gray fur turned bright red, and the patch of white below his neck(his namesake) became dark blue. You've got three guesses why Matthew doesn't know what I'm talking about and the first two don't count. I want to say that it's magic, but I live in a world of science where magic tricks are just tricks. But the change in fur color always lasts a long time, unless I hum the song again and I've used the song to do other things too, like cleaning dirt off of my clothes or making little objects move around. So maybe it is magic.
I changed Pendant's fur back to it's normal colors and put him on my pillow so I could change into my pajamas. I kept no secrets in my dreams, and I always heard the most wonderful music playing. Sometimes, when the dreams were really vivid, the music was coming from me...