Besides Heather’s failed attempts at having another child, Ella heard the truth to a question that had been nagging at her from day one. Why Ella? The answer had been so simple she wanted to slap herself. It was Ella, or it was nothing.

The wait to adopt an infant was years. Ella didn’t know if Heather just had the world’s worst luck, or the stars were just aligning themselves in a way to keep Heather from having a baby at any and all cost, but every match had seemed to fall through at the last minute. Whether it was the agency deciding another family was a better fit after months of planning, or a mother deciding, after holding her newborn baby, to not give it up for adoption afterall. It was one disappointment after another.

Heather’s plan had then been to foster a baby instead, that was until she learned it was not a permanent placement. The thought of getting attached, and then having to say good-bye quickly put a stop to that idea. She had almost given up on the idea of raising any more kids when she had come across a picture online of an adorable, albeit sickly, looking five or six year old girl sitting alone in the hospital. A phone call later revealed that Ella hadn’t been a kindergartener at all, but nearly a ten year old!

Heather wasn’t looking to take in an older child, she already had one teenager and that was enough. She was about to turn her down, but the woman on the phone kept insisting she come down and meet her. “She is just the sweetest thing! She’s just so quiet and shy!”

The first trip, Heather had driven down by herself. She was shocked by what she saw. She was so tiny! Were they sure she was really ten? If she hadn’t been led in by Rose, she would have assumed she had walked into the wrong room.

“She’s had a hard life.” Rose had told her after their visit. “Her mother died in the middle of her treatments and she’s been alone ever since. Now that she’s in remission, we’ve done all we can for her. What she really needs now is a family.”

That had been the first time Ella had learned the truth. Ella hadn’t been chosen over all the other kids. She was the only kid. A part of her felt like she should feel hurt, but deep down she had known it to be the truth all along. She really had been the last doll, broken and alone, sitting on an otherwise empty toy shelf.

Another thing Ella had learned was the true motivation behind the sudden push of getting rid of her bucket. It wasn’t that Heather thought Ella was ready, it was that Danielle was still pissed and Susan had seemed to have taken her side. According to Susan, Danielle had every right to be upset. Not only had she lost her room, but she had been expected to put up with the sight and smell of someone using her space as a restroom. The bucket had to be moved. Instead of moving it, Heather had taken it upon herself to wean Ella off of it. This had been met with a scolding both Ella and Danielle had secretly relished.

The only people Ella fully opened up with were Jasmine and Kaylee. If Ella had known everything she shared was being put in her file and sent to Heather, Ella may not have trusted her so much. As for Kaylee, It had taken time, but she had opened up about why she was so upset. It had apparently not been the first time parents had tried to separate her from their children. Adults seemed to see her as an infectious disease there to ruin their babies innocence. Kaylee had pointed out that the kids in question, whose parents worried for their innocence, had never been all that innocent to begin with. They had just seen her as a scapegoat.

The girls had quickly made up, and soon the two were connected at the hip. Kaylee had always lent her an ear, or in Ella’s case eyes, when Ella needed to vent her frustrations, whether it be schoolwork, homelife, or Brian’s ever growing taunts at her. If there was one drawback to befriending Kaylee, it was it that it had put her on Brian’s radar.

“Worth it.” Ella had said one afternoon when Kaylee had apologized for the upteenth time for drawing a target on her back. If there was one thing Kaylee seemed to do more than tic, it was to apologize. It hadn’t taken long at all for Ella to notice Kaylee wasn’t nearly as confident as she had pretended to be on day one. By day three, she was certain that her story about making money by purposefully shouting obscenities at Mrs. Garcia had been nothing but a lie. Kaylee shrank at the woman’s mere presence, and the times she did shout, her words were accompanied by such complex movements, Ella had a hard time believing those had been purposeful.

After prodding her day after day, Kaylee finally cracked and the truth had come out. She had never faked her tics, not even once. The rumor had been spread by none other than Brian.

“From what I heard, he had been caught reaching into my desk.” Kaylee explained. “I always had my lunch money in it. He got caught trying to steal, but he said he wasn’t taking money, he was giving it to me as payment for calling Mrs. Garcia a-well, I don’t remember the actual thing, but they started getting suspicious as to why I always had money.”

Don’t you always buy stuff from the vending machines here though? Ella had asked.

“Yeah, but apparently they never noticed before. I have this thing called echo-lala, or echo-something, it makes me repeat what I hear. Brian told the other kids that if they repeated stuff a bunch of times, I’d say it too. They started making a game out of it. They’d follow me around repeating crude things over and over until I ticced it. It got to the point when I’d get stressed, out they would come, and well, Mrs. Garcia stresses me out.” Kaylee said with a shrug of her shoulders. “She’d walk by, and my brain would decide, ‘now would be the perfect time to hit the playback button’.”

Didn’t you tell anyone?

“I didn’t understand that I couldn’t control it at the time. It was still kind of new to me then. I didn’t used to be like this a few years ago.”

Me neither. What happened?

“I don’t really know. I don’t remember being like this back in Texas.” Kaylee explained as they sat on a pair of open swings and gently rocked back and forth. “We moved here, I went to a new school, and then a couple weeks in… I don’t know. It felt like something was inside me trying to get out. I had to move. I had to yell. If I didn’t it would just keep getting worse until I thought I was gonna blow up or something. It started with movements, then noises, and then I was yelling whole words and phrases out of the blue! I started yelling words I had never said in my life! I must have spent a whole month grounded and in detention before we finally figured it out.”

Were you scared?

“A little bit. I think I was more angry since no one believed me.”

How did you end up here?

“I got kicked out of my old school. I kind of… kicked a guy in the nuts for picking on me. Worth every bit of trouble I got into for that.” They both giggled at that. “What about you? Who was that guy you drew in your book and why were they freaking out about it?”

It’s just a dream.

“Must be one scary dream to make you scream like that.” Ella cocked her head to the side in confusion. “On your first day, you fell asleep and started screaming, ‘MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY!’ We were surprised because they said you didn’t talk.”

I do sometimes, it’s just hard. Heather makes me talk at home. It’s just faster if I write it.

“Who is Heather?”

My foster mom. She’s kind of like a mom, but…

“Wouldn’t calling her mom be easier than Heather? Like at home since she makes you talk. If you needed to get her attention.”

Ella shook her head. She’s not my mom.

Despite having lived with them for a few months, the thought of calling them “mom” and “dad” had never crossed her mind. Everything still felt so temporary. She felt like she was intruding on their family, and she was the outsider. Except for Danielle that was. They had pretty quickly fallen into the roles of sisters by going out of their way to annoy each other whenever humanly possible. When Danielle made the room smell like nail polish remover and left her toenail clippings on Ella’s side of the room, Ella retaliated by losing a few colored pencil shavings in Danielle’s bed sheets.

Maybe that’s why Ella liked her so much. It didn’t feel like Danielle walked on eggshells around her.

They sat in silence for a moment before Kaylee asked the question that seemed to be on everyone’s mind since she came here. “Why are you scared of the bathroom?”

She thought of giving her typical answer, a shrug of the shoulders and nothing more, but she liked Kaylee. She pondered how best to explain.

It hurts my chest. I can’t breathe and everything kind of starts to go black. Besides, these are way comfier.

Ella jumped up and landed back down on her butt for emphasis. Kaylee giggled. She hadn’t been thrilled about being reintroduced to diapers again, but they had quickly grown on her. They almost never leaked like the pull-ups always had, and they didn’t immediately become super uncomfortable to remind her of her indiscretion.

The doctor said I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“What’s that?” Kaylee asked, plopping down next to her in the sand.

Something bad happened, but I don’t remember what. The bathroom triggers some kind of episode. All I know is I woke up in the hospital unable to talk and found out my mom died. I’m not really sure what that has to do with the bathroom though. I lived there for a couple years before Heather brought me here.

“That’s…that’s insane! I’m sorry! I hate the hospital! It must have been horrible to live there.”

Ella shrugged. Some of the things were. The sickness. The loneliness. All the nights she woke up alone crying for her mother, only to remember she was gone. A lump formed in her throat. She didn’t like thinking about that time. She referred to them as “the first three”. They were the first three months after her mother died. When she woke up sick from the chemo, there were no hands to comfort her. No words of encouragement or hope, only the incessant beeping of machines.

Then Ella remembered something else; something darker than just loneliness. Her own mortality. At one point she had been told the chemo wasn’t working. She was supposed to have died.

She couldn’t remember the conversation, but she remembered the room she was in, with the medical textbooks in the bookshelf and the framed diplomas on the wall. Her mother was wailing and yet, Ella couldn’t stop staring at those diplomas, with the fancy cursive writing. What an odd thing to be so transfixed with when you were being told you had six months left to live. Why had somebody gotten an award from something called Dartmouth? What in the hell kind of a sport was that?

Ella laid down in the sand and stared up at the clouds. She had come such a long way from then. She had beaten the odds. She had beaten cancer.

A single tear escaped the corner of her left eye, racing down past her ear and into the sand. She hadn’t been alone. Not really.

A different memory played in her mind’s eye. The one and only time Rose had been really

mad at her.

Rose had been trying to get her to eat, but Ella kept refusing. Her body kept rejecting everything it received.

“You need to eat something, Ella!” Rose had been trying to spoon feed her applesauce after seeing the untouched meal for the third time that day. Ella just sat there, motionless, staring at the wall lost in her grief. Rose let out a defeated sigh and dropped the spoon. “You need your strength to get better. Don’t you want to get better?”

Just let me die.

That’s when Ella suddenly found herself inches from Rose’s face, her note crumpled is Rose’s clenched fist. There was a look in her eye’s Ella had never seen before that scared her more than an incoming phlebotomist pushing their cart into her room.

“Now you listen to me, little girl! You are not going to die! No, look at me!” She grabbed Ella’s face in her hand as she tried to look away and forced Ella to meet her eyes. “You are going to wake up tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and you are going to keep fighting. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be fun, but you are going to get better!”

The next thing Ella knew, she was being scooped up in a single sweep of Rose’s arm and set back down on Rose’s lap as she sat on her bed. Ella let her face fall on the woman’s shoulder, no longer able to contain the emotional storm that had been brewing inside her for days. She bawled into the woman’s scrubs as Rose gently rocked her back and forth, occasionally stopping to rub the top of Ella’s bald head. With every fallen tear, drip of snot and anguished wail, she could feel the terror, rage, and numbness slowly ebbing away. Ever so faintly she could feel a new emotion she hadn’t felt in months. Peace.

“We’re going to get through this, Ella, you’re not alone.” Rose whispered, before kissing the top of her head and laying the now half asleep girl in bed.

Ella’s heart ached at the memory. She knew Rose was just doing her job, but there was a certain…closeness she had felt with Rose that wasn’t there with Heather. No matter how many times Ella got in Heather’s lap, or wrapped her arms around her, she always felt so far away, no matter how physically close they were.

There was something else about that evening, hadn’t there been? Hadn’t Rose turned away a late night visitor? She had been mostly asleep at that point, but she had the vaguest sliver of a memory of a man standing in her doorway holding a vase of flowers. The vase had been there sitting on a table next to her when she woke up with a handwritten note.

It’s going to get better now.

She had originally thought they had been from Rose, but now she wasn’t so sure. What did it matter? It had been over a year ago. Who cared who they were from? But still… Something nagged at the back of her mind. Something about those words seemed so familiar.

It came to her all at once. She knew where she had heard those words! She let out an audible gasp and shot up to a sitting position. Her dream!

His lips had been on hers. She had been lying on her back looking up at him. He was crying when her eyes made contact with his.

“It’s going to get better now, Ella! It’s all gonna get better!”

Why was he there? Why had he been kissing her? She knew she needed to tell someone this time… if only she could remember his name! He had been there that night! She was sure of it! All she had to do was ask him what happened and it would all make sense! She needed to find him!

She ignored all of Kaylee’s questions as she continued to rub her lips. She jotted down what she knew on a piece of paper and tore it out. She would give it to Jasmine later. Maybe she could help her find him.

“Ella, could you come here?” Mrs. Hernandez called from upstairs. Ella frowned. Was recess already over? She looked to Kaylee who shrugged and yelled something provocative about donut holes.

Ella brushed herself off before climbing the steps, mentally running through any and everything she could possibly be in trouble for. When she stepped inside, she was surprised to find a bouquet of flowers waiting for her on her desk along with a small Amazon box. Upon closer inspection, all the personal information had been crossed out with a black marker. She examined the flowers, multicolored roses surrounded by white Baby’s Breath. She picked up the card and read:

Happy Birthday, my little artist.

Her heartbeat with excitement. Her birthday wasn’t until tomorrow, but she was already getting gifts? She hadn’t had a real birthday in over two years! She eagerly opened the box and her mouth dropped as she pulled it out. It was a tablet specifically designed to plug into a computer to draw with. She couldn’t believe the school had gotten her this! It looked really expensive too!

“Th-thank you!” she managed to get out. Her wide smile faltered a little when they looked at her puzzled.

“A man dropped that off for you in front of the building a few minutes ago. He just rang the doorbell and left it.” said Mrs. Hernandez. “Next time, tell your foster dad he’s welcome to come in and leave it at the front desk so it doesn’t get stolen.”

Ella felt her stomach tighten as she shook her head. Charlie wasn’t even in the state today. He wouldn’t be back for three more days.”

They frowned when Ella explained in a note.

“Then who?…” Mrs. Hernandez said. “Wait here, I’m going to go talk to the front desk.”

Ella’s concerns quickly vanished as she opened up the tablet and began setting it up. She had almost forgotten about Mrs. Hernandez until she, followed by the lady that worked the front office, were in front of her desk.

“Ella, can you watch this video and tell me if you recognize this man?”

She looked up to find a cell phone in front of her, and video from a Ring doorbell security camera loading on the screen. She pressed play and watched as a familiar face bent down, dropped the items, and walked away without looking back. She had only seen his face for a split second, but that was all it had taken, before a name she had struggled to remember flashed through her mind. Coach Stanley Virtamin.

She no longer needed to find him. He had found her.

………………………………………………………………………………………………

Heather hung up the phone and sat on the couch too stunned to even process what had just happened. It had been Ella’s school and Ella had just passed them a note confirming all of their worst fears.

Her blood was boiling as she was beginning to let the words sink in. The school had informed her they had already called the police before reading her the contents of the note. One line kept replaying over and over in her head.

I was lying on my back and he was kissing me.

Every word was like a knife wound in her chest. She was lying on her back and he was kissing her. The 38 year old man was kissing an eight year old girl with leukemia on the mouth…

What if Ella’s mom hadn’t committed suicide after all?

Heather was seeing red as a new theory was beginning to take shape.

She had caught him molesting her daughter…

I was lying on my back

She stood up and screamed into the empty living room.

He was kissing me

All she could see was Danielle. If Danielle had gone through everything Ella had, wouldn’t she be just as screwed up?

“Ella… no wonder… the bathroom…had it happened there? Had it kept happening there?”

She threw her phone into the couch. He had followed her here!

He better pray the police catch him, because if she saw him. She’d kill him.

She picked up the phone again, took a deep breath and made one more phone call.

“Hi, Rose. It’s Heather. She remembers.”