CLOUD

"Cloud? Tell me more about that."

I tell her about how I watch my mother die as the flames engulf her every time I'm alone with my thoughts and close my eyes. I've already said too much, and I don't want to talk about it anymore, so I say nothing.

She sighs, as she always does. Leaning towards me, pressing her long thin fingers on my knee. "This is a safe place," she tells me, flashing a yellowing grin. She asks me if I'm making friends, and I wonder if she has any. She tells me children experience a lot, and some are not able to cope or grow from it, and that's where I'm at now. I wonder what she was like as a child. I imagine her psychoanalyzing everyone she knows. I imagine her telling her mother it's a safe space as she cries because they grew up poor. She shares these insignificant details of her childhood with me. This is a bonding method to build rapport. She hopes I'll understand that all children experience pain and heartbreak.

For a moment, I wonder if she's right, but then I smell my mother's burning flesh and hear her piercing screams. I see Zack's body convulse and drop to the ground as blood spatters like a fountain, the pop of gunshots still echoing. I watch as my next-door neighbor blames me for her parent's death and tells me she hates me because I'm the one who found her father. She calls me a parasite and tells me people can't help but die when they're near me, and I wonder if she's right.

Marle sighs again, leaning back she checks the clock behind her and clicks her tongue.

"Well, that's all our time for today. Go make some friends."

I've been in group homes since I was fourteen. I'm government property, until I'm eighteen, as no legal adult can claim me. Two separate foster homes. Four foster parents. They all sent me back and said I make them nervous, and they would rather not have me around their children. This doesn't bother me. Watching their perfect lives, I feel like destroying it all. I don't like feeling violent. So, a pretty young woman comes to talk to me back at the group home. She's wearing a pantsuit, and her perfume smells expensive—another hand on the knee and a light squeeze.

"There's a facility nearby. You would only have one roommate," she tells me. I grab my bag and walk out the door, curling up in the front seat of her car. I have one photo of my mother, it's singed at the top left corner, ironically burning into bits of her hair. They weren't able to salvage much from the fire. I think a few kitchen knives and bathroom toiletries. The police handed me the burnt photo and a medal I had won for placing first in a spelling bee. He smiled at me as if a burnt photo and a crappy medal were adequate replacements for my mother and our home. She's in her twenties in the picture, and she's beautiful. A mess of matching platinum blonde hair sits next to her. Our cheeks pressed together. Her eyes have disappeared from smiling so wide. I miss her, and I hate it when I miss her because I can't remember where we were in the photo or who took it. All I can remember is the smell of burning flesh, and I feel sick. I know it wasn't my father who took the photo. Mom said he died before I was born. He didn't even know I existed; she tells me. She never tells me how he died, and I stop asking. I suppose he could still be alive for all I know, and I wonder if he knew about me if he would let me stay with him. I wonder if I look more like him or mom.

AERITH

The bangles on both wrists cover most of the cuts, but the longest still pokes out beneath. Damaged goods, my foster brother would say to me as he groped me in my bed late at night. A worthless orphan that no one will ever love, he says. His mouth smells and tastes like cigarettes as he buries his tongue in my mouth. Your parents probably killed themselves on purpose, just to get away from you, he says.

Elmyra asks how we're all feeling in our girls' group meeting. Clara says she ate an apple for breakfast, and we all clap and congratulate her. Her lips are chapped, and her knuckles scraped from driving her fingers down her throat over the toilet. Denise tells us she spoke with her mother on Sunday, and they hugged and cried because her father is in jail for tax evasion and won't be able to touch either of them again. She cries as the girls next to her rub her back and kiss her head.

When everyone looks at me, I tell them I feel great. I'm happy and excited for the future. I hear a few scoffs and suppressed chuckles as Elmyra tells me that's a great attitude. After group, Denise and her friend Margot shove me hard and tell me I'm fake and pathetic. They tell me I don't belong here, and I smile at the thought of not belonging here with these people.

Clara is my roommate. She promises not to tell anyone what really happened to me, and I promise not to tell anyone that she hides her breakfast under her bed.

"Did coke make you really skinny?" She asks me during one of our first conversations, as she juts out her bony chin in the mirror, examining it for fat.

I shrug and tell her I think so, but it's an expensive diet. I never paid for it with money. But my foster brothers' friends tell me it's expensive as they hold a vial out of my reach, unzipping their pants and forcing my head down between their legs. I don't tell Clara this. I don't tell anyone this. Because it makes me sick that it was my choice to drop to my knees, and I feel sicker when I think about how I would quickly do it again if a vial were being held in front of me now.

One of his friends who only insisted on grabbing my boobs and taking photos of them told me I could be pretty if I wasn't trash. He tells me I'm beautiful when I'm completely naked in his backseat underneath his camera lens. I smile as I hear the shutter click over and over. If anyone ever found those photographs, he would be in prison for possession of child pornography. His mouth is on my neck as I take a bump off his car keys and moan loudly, so he doesn't charge me for the vial we share in his car.

I don't remember my father. He was killed when I was a baby, my mother used to tell me. My mother was beautiful. Really beautiful. So beautiful she had caught the attention of a man she didn't even know. He broke into our home and shot my father in the back. My mother tells me she remembers watching him gasp and bleed out on our kitchen floor. He points the gun at me, and my mother screams. I start crying, and he comes to hold me in his arms and tells me I'm his precious girl. My mother begs and pleads that she'll do anything. He brought us to an old bunker where we lived until I was eleven. The man would take my mother away every morning, and I would cry in our tiny shared room on our small twin bed. He said we had to help each other because my mother and I were special, and we could lead him to 'The Promised Land.' He never explained what The Promised Land was. My mom told me he was very ill, as she cradled my head against her chest until we fell asleep. He always called me his precious girl and gave me candy before leading my mother out of our room. One morning my mother shakes me awake and tells me I need to be very quiet and do everything she says. I tell her I'm scared because she's frantic and she tells me I need to be brave. The sunlight bit at my eyes and skin as we crawled up a small stairway. The fresh air was overwhelming as we hurried down a small street, and I hear tires screeching behind us. He jumps out of the car and yells at my mother. He tells me to come with him and that he loves us more than anyone will ever love us. My mother pushes me aside and runs towards the man as he shoots her in the neck. I watch her gasp and bleed out on the ground, just as she had watched my father do. The man tells me he loves me, and I'm his precious little girl as he presses the barrel of the gun to his temple. I wake up in a hospital. I ask the nurse where my clothes are, and she tells me I wet myself, which is normal for a situation like this, and I ask her how normal this situation is. She smiles sadly and sneaks me candy.

My grandmother picked me up and held me all the way to her car. She tells me my grandfather died searching for us, and there's a special seat in hell for that bad man who did this to us. But I think about the candy and how he told me I was beautiful and precious. I loved living with my grandmother. We would garden all day and do puzzles together at night. She taught me everything there was to know about flowers. When I would wake up screaming, my sheets soaked with sweat and urine, my grandmother would rush through my door and hold me tight until I stopped crying. She would help me wash in the tub and change my sheets and tell me how important I was and how brave I was. I lived with her for two years until one afternoon, I stood in her doorway and asked if I could go to a movie with some friends. She was sitting up facing away from me, so I repeated myself, and she never answered. I called the police and watched as they carried her out in the ambulance.

CLOUD

My roommate's name is Ryder. He reminds me of Zack, but he's much shorter, much shorter than me, and I'm only 5'8. He asks me what I'm in for like we're swapping prison stories. I tell him I'm not sure, I just think no one else wanted me. He nods and tells me he's addicted to heroin because he watched his best friend shoot himself in the mouth. I tell him I'm sorry as I unzip my backpack. I know he's watching me unpack because he comments that the closest mall and stores are twenty minutes away. He invites me to the dining hall with him and introduces me to his friends. I don't remember their names, but like Ryder, they ask why I'm here. Two of them were alcoholics, never able to process their parents' divorce. The girl had been molested by her father since she was eight and throws up everything she eats. She tells me I'm cute, too cute to be here, and she asks my name. I still don't remember what she told me her name was, and I can't stop thinking about her telling me I'm cute, because no one has ever told me that and it makes me uncomfortable.

The four of them laugh and joke about one of the teachers here as they copy each other's' homework before class. From Monday to Wednesday, we have classes from 9am to 12pm – math, science, and English. At 2:00pm, every day, for the first six weeks, I'm scheduled to see my personal therapist, Marle, for an hour. She tells me I have PTSD, and I mutter, 'no shit.' She tells me my emotions and reactions are normal. She touches my knee a lot and makes eye contact a lot, and it makes me uncomfortable, but I don't tell her this, because I'm sure she'll have an explanation for why it makes me uncomfortable. Three days a week, we're to attend group meetings – there are co-ed group meetings and single-sex group meetings. We're also encouraged to participate in seminars explaining how to deal with stress and how to lead 'normal' lives outside of here. Tuesday night, I'm in the dining hall sipping on a coffee and working on math homework, settled in a booth out of view. It's quiet, aside from the hums of the TVs and conversations around me. It sounds like someone's singing in the tunnel as the voice gets louder. She's singing "Piece of My Heart," both lead and backup vocals. She's no Janis, but it makes me smile anyway. She has thick, wild honey brown curls that reach her tailbone. She's wearing a dark red sweater that falls over her shoulder and white shorts. She's tall and thin, and her ears poke out from beneath her hair. No one turns to see where the sound is coming from, and I assume that's because this is a regular occurrence, but I'm still watching her when she glances over at me and smiles. I look down quickly, even though I know I've already been caught. She continues singing as the woman behind the coffee counter calls out, "Aerith," in a disciplinary tone. The girl continues, humming softly and waves at the woman who scolded her. I glance up with my eyes and see she's headed directly towards me. I try to act busy, focusing on my homework.

"Heya," she says. Her voice is bright and gentle. She sits across from me in my booth. "I don't recognize you."

"Hm," I respond without looking up, "I get that a lot."

Her laugh is soft and genuine. "I doubt that," she says. She bites at a cheese stick she's holding and asks if I want any. I shake my head. She's beautiful, and she smells nice.

"I like your freckles," she tells me, "You don't see enough blonde-haired blue-eyed boys with just the right amount of freckles."

She doesn't look sad, and I wonder why that is, and I wonder how I look to her. She comes over to my side of the booth, sits down, and faces me. She presses her thumbs against my cheeks and asks if I would ever hurt her. When I tell her no, she asks if I want to see her naked, and I tell her maybe someday, if she wants me to. She cries and presses her face against my chest, and I sit there and let her do it because I'm not sure what else to do and because now I know she seems much sadder than the rest of us.

She tells me her name is Aerith, and she watched her mother die. We have this in common. I tell her my name is Cloud, and I watched my mother burn alive. She tells me she's sorry and that I'm beautiful. There are two dormitories – girls and boys. We're not supposed to be in the other dorms after curfew, but lots of times boys sneak out, or girls sneak in. I hear our bedroom door creak open one night and watch a sliver of light appear. The door closes softly as Aerith whispers it's just her. She climbs into my bed under the covers, and I say nothing. She kisses my neck, and I'm not sure how to react because I've never been kissed. I tell her this, and she says I'm sweet as she pulls at the strings of my pajama pants and slides her hand down my underwear. Her hand feels good on me. Really good. But I know she's not doing this because she cares about me. She's doing this because she thinks she has to, so I grab her hand and hold it in mine. Most nights, we fall asleep like this.

AERITH

Here's what I like about Cloud: he's quiet, and he listens. When I talk about sex, his cheeks turn pink, and he looks away and bites his lip. He listens as I tell him all about flowers, and he asks me to show him someday. He's pale. Paler than me, which I didn't think was possible. His eyes are an impossible hue of blue surrounded by light freckles. His hair is wild and wondrous. Soft blonde tendrils poking out in every direction, and I want to run my fingers through it. I show him the scars on my wrists, and he doesn't say anything. He just holds my wrists in both his hands and kisses them. I wonder what kind of sounds he would make as I'm blowing him and what he would feel like inside me. I tell Elmyra this during our private sessions, and she tells me I don't have to move so quickly. I tell her I don't feel like I am. I never loved my foster brother or any of his friends. I never even liked any of them. But I like Cloud. His voice is strong but soft, and his hands are gentle, and I laugh when he grazes me accidentally and apologizes for it. But Cloud is beautiful. He's broken now, but he'll be fixed, and he'll leave, and he'll find some beautiful woman to marry him. She'll have his beautiful babies, and he'll forget all about this place and all about me. I was just a strange time in his life. His beautiful wife will console him late at night as he tells her how he used to share a bed with a girl who was fucked up—a girl who was trash.

I nuzzle my face into his neck one night as his arm is loosely wrapped about me, his hand across my hip. He's snoring softly, and for a moment I wonder if I could have this. I wonder if I even deserve this. His hand twitches against my hip, and I think he must be dreaming. His breathing grows louder and shortens. He chokes himself awake and flings himself forward. When he realizes I'm still beside him, my arms wrapped about his torso, he apologizes. He looks embarrassed, and it makes me sad. Because someone as beautiful and perfect as Cloud should never feel those things. I tell him it's okay, and I kiss his arm and wrap my arms tighter around him and clasp my fingers together. Looking straight ahead, he asks me if I think he's a parasite. I kiss his arm again and think about how I want to hurt whoever would tell him something like that.

We've known each other for months now, and neither of us has seen the other naked. I tell Elmyra this, and she smiles and high-fives me. I gush about my crush on Cloud like were schoolgirls, and I feel happy. Truly happy. I tell her how I want him to kiss me, and I'm nervous he won't like me back. She tells me times up, and she's proud of me for doing so well today, and I remember where I am. I'm in therapy with my shrink in a home full of unwanted, unloved fucked up teenagers.