I went back home to my parents. My head hurt from all the strenuous tests. For a while I was contempt to be back in my sheltered world but that boy kept coming back to me. Not finding Joey Bismillah on a regular search engine I started hacking. Joey was another child prodigy like me. He disappeared at the age of fifteen. Then I found him again in some government program. It was like he was sold to the government. I went deeper and found his name again in another file. It was attached to another file. Julienne Franklin. A picture of the boy shot up on the screen but before I could react I was being hacked by another hacker. I managed to save a bit of the nameless boys file to a disk before redirecting the hacker to some computer in Germany.
The file had next to nothing. It stated his parents and his measurements at birth. There was no name. I deleted the empty space beneath and stored the disk in a drawer.
After that incident I began paying more attention. There is nothing like loosing your innocence. It leaves you empty.
Eventually men in black suits began appearing, having adult time meetings with my parents. I wired the living room and one day coming home from the park I saw the black cars in the driveway. I ran up to my room. Throwing my soccer ball to the floor I reached under my pillow and adjusted the speaker.
"I don't know honey that's a lot of money"
"It will be like sending her to boarding school"
"George! It would be like selling her. We can't do this to her. We are not doing this to her."
The sound of them bickering led to the first decision I made on my own. I ran away. With a back pack full of supplies I looked around my childhood room. On my bed I saw my first blanket. It was my security blanket. A pang went through my body. I stuff it into my bag. I climbed down the tree outside my window. The lowest branch was far from the ground and when I jumped I lost my balance and stumbled to the ground. My hip was throbbing.