Rumple stared at the tall, blonde haired boy with dismayed, impatiently shifting from foot to foot as he stood on the bench. He never seemed to stay in one place for very long. Rumple found him a little frightening. He calculated that if Victor was in grade two they were probably around the same age, but Rumple still looked like he belonged in kindergarten.
He didn't really belong in kindergarten though, he was just there because he'd never been to school before the past month. He'd never been around other children much. He noticed they tended to be unpredictable. School was strange. Everyone there seemed to know a lot about things he knew nothing about like, how to ask to go the washroom and when to wash your hands and what circle time was. Then there were the things he knew lots about that even the teachers seemed to be ignorant of.
"So what happened to you?" repeated Victor.
"I dunno," mumbled Rumple.
Victor scratched his head and looked confused.
"You don't know?"
Rumple turned away and pretended to play with his car. There were no cushions to hide in and he was all exposed sitting out on the bench like he was. He wanted desperately to run away, from Victor and his blasted curiosity but he couldn't.
He never ever told people want happened to him. Not even the people at the agency or Mummy Kate or Mummy Chris. It was hard to explain and there were parts he didn't understand, didn't have proper words for. It was so much easier just to mumble "I dunno" or "I forget."
But he hadn't forgotten. He still remembered. He still dreamed about it sometimes too, although not exactly like it happened. Versions of it.
He remembered living in the big old, broken down house with his father and all those other people. It wasn't a nice house. The toilet stunk and was broken half the time and it was very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer and he was always hungry. Everything smelled bad and was dirty in the big old house, including Rumple himself. Only Astrid ever bathed him, and that was only when she remembered and wasn't all sleepy from her "medicine." The adults, (and there were only adults, no other children), acted strange a lot of the time, except he didn't realize it, because that's how everybody around him was acting, including his dad.
Only just last week did it finally click in his head what kind of house he'd lived in with his dad all those years. It happened after he saw a snippet of the news that Mummy Kate was watching one day and there was a picture of a house like his old home, boarded up and broken windows, a sagging porch, peeling paint and an overgrown front yard. The police were taking people out of the house with handcuffs and the woman on the news program was saying something about a "crack house."
That was it, he realized then. He'd lived with his dad in a "crack house." That was why they had to take him away. Suddenly, he felt ashamed and terrified that someone at school might find out.
There were stairs in the house, he remembered, leading up to the room he sometimes shared with his father where he kept his toys. He had a lot less toys back then, but he remembered them all. He had a plastic dump truck with a red cab and a yellow back part and a few action figures, Rafael from Ninja Turtles and Spiderman. He liked to put Rafael and Spiderman in the dump truck and drive them around the house, up and down the stairs and into the rooms to explore around the other people's things when they were out. He was often alone and Rafael and Spiderman kept him company. He was good at pretending and making up stories for all of them, so he never felt too lonely or bored.
One time he was playing with his action figure friends on the stairs and Spiderman fell off the back of the dump truck. As Spiderman went tumbling off over the bannister, Rumple leaned over to catch him. Unfortunately, the wooden of the bannister was old and rotten. As Rumple leaned his full weight against it, the old bannister cracked and gave way, pitching the small boy along with it over the side. He landed on his right leg amidst a scattering of wood on the floor below.
At first he was too shocked to cry and then he couldn't stop crying. It hurt a lot, more than anything else he could ever remembered. Still, he remembered the worst of it was the fear he felt as soon as he realized what would happen when his father came home and saw the mess. However, Rumple knew how to protect himself. The only other person at home was passed out on the living room couch with a needle and hadn't woken up even from the sound of the bannister cracking right beside him. All Rumple had to do was pretend he had nothing to do with the mess and to do that he had to get as far away from it as possible so his father wouldn't associate him with it.
Rumple looked at the steps up to his room. They seemed so high and steep all of a sudden. Slowly, slowly, trying carefully to keep his hurt leg off the ground he dragged himself up to the second floor. It took him a long time but eventually he made his way to the bathroom. He ran the water and washed all the blood away and got some band-aids from a box and put them on. He thought that would make it all better, but his leg still hurt horribly when he walked on it, so much so that he saw black dots and stars in front of his eyes and felt like he was going to fall down when he touched his foot to the floor. It was a very disturbing sensation. He noticed his leg seemed to be bent funny too. He felt his stomach sink in his belly, because there was no way his father wouldn't notice that, but he knew he had to keep going. He crawled down the hall to the room he shared with his father and lay down on the mattress on the floor and pulled up all the blankets around him so that when his father came home he wouldn't notice what had happened. Hopefully, he'd be in one of those moods where he took medicine and fell right to sleep as soon as he hit the mattress.
Rumple thought miserably that he wished he had some medicine right now to make the pain in his leg and buttocks go away, but as long as he didn't move in certain ways he seemed to be okay. Maybe if one of the others came around they'd give him some if he asked nicely. The thought calmed him and he fell asleep.
