A/N: Just to cut down on confusion, all the stuff that takes place in Shelly's past will be done in italics.
It would be an understatement to say that life for five-year-old Shelly was a battlefield.
Food was always a chore to find. It usually meant climbing over a jungle gym of tabletops and counters to find the correct cabinets, and by the time the search was necessary, she was always too weak to do it efficiently.
There was a bathtub, but Shelly had never been in it. Probably because it was always filled with a hot, grainy brown substance she didn't in any way want to touch. It wasn't long before Shelly had been able to link the awful looking stuff with the way her mom and her mom's boyfriend behaved while they were lying in filth on the living room floor. Sometimes there was a lot of raucous giggling and talk that didn't make sense, and other times the pair was as still as death, eyes focused on things Shelly couldn't see for herself. The beautiful, white teeth she'd seen in her mother's old photographs seemed to be falling out one by one, and the woman often had no idea who Shelly was. The young girl had learned long ago that talking was pointless when her mother got like that. It simply meant it was time to start hoarding up food, because she could only guess when she might be remembered again.
Her mom's boyfriend Carl frightened her beyond words. He had often come into her room and fed her small amounts of the crusty brown stuff, causing her to feel frighteningly strange, and many times cause her to wake up later not remembering where she was or what had happened while she was "asleep." More often than not, she'd wake up feeling enormous amounts of pain.
One day, Carl came into her room yet again, rousting her from her sleep. Shelly didn't want anymore of the brown stuff in her mouth, and for the first time, she managed to evade Carl's grasp and head for the door. As weak as she was from not having eaten in days, she was still a lot faster than the stinking, staggering monster who set off after her, running into random pieces of furniture and cursing people or objects Shelly couldn't see.
The woods behind the old camper they lived in seemed to be her best bet. She ran, part stumbling, into the thickest part of them, looking behind her every so often to make sure Carl wasn't there. It was then that Shelly realized she had run so far into the woods that she could no longer see the light from the florescent bulb hanging down from the tin awning.
Shelly stood for a long while, afraid of how far she had gone and what worse things might be waiting for her here. She didn't know how anyone would ever find her or who would even bother to look, but still, she sat down where she was, and waited.
She fell in and out of sleep until daylight. It was a slender streak of sun that woke her as it rested its gentle warmth on Shelly's blonde, bowed head. Blinking her eyes and pulling herself up by pressing her hands against the tree behind her, she looked around.
Thankfully, the forest looked only half as scary as it had the night before, and even though she still had no idea how to get back home, she was more hopeful at least. Picking a random direction, Shelly began to walk.
As she walked along, carefully meandering through trees and stepping over fallen logs, she began to experience something very peculiar: a headache. She'd heard her mom and Carl mention them before, but she'd never had one herself. But now there was an undeniable throbbing in each of her temples that caused her to clench her teeth and squint against the random sunbeams that found their way through the trees.
It was when the pain was so severe she began to feel lightheaded, that she saw it: a small wooden house, perhaps even smaller than Carl's camper, off in the distance. As Shelly walked slowly and carefully forward to get a better look, she was able to see a stone fireplace. The first thing that came to her mind was a gingerbread house, perhaps because she was hungry, and then she recalled seeing little homes like this on the black and white TV in her mother's room.
As her headache strangely abated, there was a scent that wafted on the breeze toward her, one so heavenly it made both her eyes and mouth water. What could be cooking in that house that smelled so wonderful?
"Girl?"
Shelly jumped and scrambled around to the other side of the tree she was holding to. When she peered out again, she saw a boy who couldn't be much more than her age, a brown hat perched atop a tousled mess of brown hair. He wore clothes as ragged as hers almost, that looked to be a little too big for him. For every step he took forward, Shelly took one backward.
"Hey Girl! Don't be scared," he called out to her.
Shelly wanted nothing more than to run away, but she found herself lingering, curious about the house in the woods and wondering if she might be given something to eat there. Finally she stopped taking steps back, and allowed the friendly boy to reach her. "John Henry Cushman, at yer service!" He held out a hand to her in greeting.
Something about him had Shelly smiling for the first time in a long while.
Just as she'd guessed, John Henry lived in the little house in the woods with both a mom and a dad, two older brothers, and a big sister. They didn't have a car, lights that turned on, or a sink for water to come out of; but there was plenty of good food that John Henry's mom and sister had spent all day cooking. She was welcomed immediately, fed, bathed, and put to bed on a warm feather mattress in what they called a "loft" with John Henry's sister, Carrie Beth. Even though she didn't know who these people were or why they lived a life so different from her own, Shelly felt as though she had stepped inside a very good dream, and wasn't at all ready to go back to the camper with the little lightbulb hanging outside.
Shelly decided that if the nice people would let her, she would stay awhile.
