Anxiety

Chapter Four: Anxiety

Many of the kids were rowdy and liked to play outside, and the ones with elemental powers enjoyed splashing other kids or setting things on fire. Gretchen and I had no powers, at least not yet. Mom didn't have any, but I'm not sure about dad. He got mad a lot, but he only seemed to have claws to hurt, no fire or anything.

Dad was a wolf humanoid — or oid, it's easier to say — which made us have fluffy dog paws instead of feet with skin like mom. There were a few times that dad had been nice, given me piggyback rides, read me stories, and once he even took us out for ice cream.

But most of the time he was just mad. His breath smelled bad too, and that's when mom was scared of him. I hid in the closet with my bear, listening to mom and dad arguing. Sometimes I heard mom screaming while dad hit her.

He only hit me once, he found me in the closet and beat me until mom threw him out. He didn't come back home after that. Gretchen always hid in the bathroom, I guess she figured out how to lock the door.

After nearly a year without seeing him, it's almost like a bad dream, like it never even happened. Almost like the fire, it doesn't seem real.

My favourite place to be was the room with the keyboard and I fiddled with it until I had something that sounded sort of like music. Not many kids were in that room, which was nice since when I was around the other kids I felt scared. I got shaky and felt sick, something Ms. Burns called anxiety attacks.

"Adam?" Ms. Burns called, startling me from my thoughts. I turned on the piano stool to see her.

"Yeah, Ms. Burns?" I asked, still slightly flustered.

"It's 9 o'clock, time for bed." She said with a kind smile. I hopped off the stool and headed upstairs to where mine and Gretchen's room was.

Our room felt lived in, our toys scattered around the room, most of hers filled with cuts and stitches. She liked to cut open toys and see what was inside. After she got bored with dolls that had the same old thing inside, she was interested in me. I still have scars from the cuts she gave me when we first got here about a month ago.

I climbed onto my bed after changing into my red pajamas and settled in with my teddy. His eyes were different colours because Ms. Burns used a blue button instead of a red one to replace the missing one. He still smelled like smoke.

Ms. Burns turned the lights off and left the door ajar as always, letting the light from the hallway and the chatter of the older kids seep into the room. I held my bear close, trying not to remember the flames that the smokey teddy still reeked of, and fell asleep as the voice in my mind comforted me in the same way it had been doing for the last month.

“I won’t let anything happen to us.”