Hey guys! I'm so sorry I didn't put this up sooner but my internet was playing up and I had tons of assignments and test cause it's the end of term. I am almost on holidays though so I should be able to update much more often :)
It had been 3 years. 3 years since she ran away from home. Nearly 3 years since she had snuck out of hospital. Nearly 3 years since the doctor told her... she didn't want to think about that, she couldn't think about that. She couldn't afford to waste time thinking about something that might happen. She had to focus on what she was doing. One wrong move and she would get caught, and if she got caught, it would all be over. She shook her head to clear it and continued to weave through the crowds of people. She grabbed the wallet out of a woman's back pocket and grabbed a purse that was hanging off of a chair.
So far she was doing well but she thought that she should still try to grab at least one more wallet, just to be safe. She saw a bike leaning against a wall just outside a shop. It had a small bag in its basket, she took a quick look around and when she made sure no one was looking, she grabbed it. She thought she had gotten away with it until she heard someone yell "HEY STOP THAT GIRL!". She looked back and saw an angry woman running towards her. Annabeth broke into a run. She was a decent runner so before she knew it she was out of sight of the woman and all she could hear were her angry screams.
Annabeth eventually slowed to a walk. She weaved through the streets of New York city. She had gotten good at navigating them since she had decided to stay there after she escaped from the hospital. After walking for about half an hour she got back to the refrigerator box that she called home. She didn't mind it at all, in fact she liked living by herself. Over the past 3 years she had learned to look after herself, to do anything it took to make sure she survived… even if sometimes those things were bad. Yes, even though Annabeth was only 10 years old she had done some bad things. She had stolen from a lot of people, but the way she saw it, she had no choice. It was steal or die and she really didn't want to die, at least not yet anyway.
Lying down in her fridge box, Annabeth turned the first handbag up-side down. A wallet, a notebook, a lipstick, a pen and a muesli bar fell out. She grabbed the muesli bar and stuffed it into her mouth. It was one of the fancy organic ones so it tasted kind of dodgy but she continued to much on it anyway, she couldn't afford to be picky with her food anymore. She pushed the lipstick and notebook away and grabbed the wallet. She opened it and emptied it out onto the ground and counted up the money; $50.25. She stuffed it into a small bag that she kept important things in. The credit cards were of no use to her as the owners would probably cancel them as soon as they realised they were missing, besides, she looked too young to be using a credit card anyway. She moved on to the wallet that she took from someone's pocket, in it there was $20.00 and some Pokémon cards. She shoved the money into her bag along with the cards, she didn't really need them but she wanted to keep them anyway. She moved on to the final bag, the one that had almost got her caught. She tipped it upside down and let everything fall out. There were a set of car keys, a water bottle, a wallet, a phone and tons of lolly wrappers. She tossed the keys to the side, put the water bottle in the back of her box where she already had several other bottles and shoved all the lolly wrappers back into the bag.
She picked up the wallet and pulled out $78.40 which she shoved in her bag, she also pulled out tons of coupons for pretty much anything you could imagine. She had a look through them and put the ones she could use in her bag and put the rest back into the wallet. In one of the card pockets was something that Annabeth had been searching for, for months. A library card. The library was a 7-minute walk from Annabeth's box and she sometimes sat in there for hours reading. She couldn't borrow any books out though because she didn't have a library card and she couldn't get a library card because she was only 10, she needed a parent to sign it and she had a serious lack of parents at the moment.
She slipped her library card into her copy of Matilda so that it wouldn't get lost. She then picked up the phone and turned it on. Of course it was password protected, it had one of those pattern locks, but they were easy to crack. She turned the phone off and held it so that the light reflected off the screen and showed the smudge marks from where the person's fingers had been. She could clearly see the shape of a 'N' on the screen so she switched the phone back on and tried it. Sure enough, the phone unlocked. She swiped through the different screens until she came to a screen loaded with games. She had a look through them and eventually decided on Candy Crush. She lay back in her box and started playing and before she knew it, it was dark outside. She looked at the time, it was 12:00am so she turned off the phone and curled up into a little ball. She ignored the shouting and yelling outside, she had gotten used to it but it still scared her a little bit. As she was falling asleep she decided that the next day, she would go to the library and finally borrow out the book that she had been reading.
