The Orphans (Orphans Trilogy Book 1) (15 page)

“Uh, I don’t know.”

“Anyone else care to answer?”

The other orphans contemplated Malika’s question for a moment before Naomi broke the silence. “I guess it depends,” she said. “Is he happy?”

Malika nodded, pleased. “That is the correct question to ask. Without that answer, it is impossible to determine whether he is successful or not. For happiness is the only legitimate gauge of success. The beauty of true happiness is that it does not require comparison, nor does it come at the expense of others. Either you are happy or you are not. If you can find happiness in every moment of your life, you are successful. So I ask you, Charlie Kim: Are you successful? Do you live happiness?”

Charlie didn’t need long to think about it. He was happy at times, like when he achieved one of the goals in his plan, but he couldn’t say that he was happy in every moment, or even most moments, of his life. “No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. Because a lot of the stuff I do doesn’t make me happy. I guess I’ve always figured that I’ll have time to be happy later on, after I have everything I want.”

“Stop wanting. Stop delaying joy. Start finding happiness, from this moment forward. Everything that gets in the way of that, let it go.” Malika paused for a second to let her words sink in and then spoke to the group. “All of you must let go of your notions of success or failure. Think only of happiness, and find it in every moment.”

The others nodded in agreement, taking more from Malika’s message than Charlie had.

“Let it go, Charlie,” Malika instructed him.

“Okay,” Charlie said, but it was apparent that he wasn’t completely sold. In spite of his hang-up, Charlie closed his eyes, and did as he had been told.

A minute later, Charlie reopened his eyes, but he was even less satisfied than before he had closed them. While Malika’s advice seemed so helpful to Naomi and JP, it hadn’t brought him the sense of relief he had hoped for or expected.

Malika noted Charlie’s discontented look. “That might not be enough for you now,” she said, “but in time, you will fully grasp the power of those words and their meaning. All right, who is next?

Eddie turned to Antony; it was between the two of them.

“It’s all you,” Antony said.

“Fine. I’ll go,” Eddie said. “I guess what keeps me from loving myself is that … I don’t know.” He chuckled to himself. “It’s kinda funny, I just said I don’t know.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, I guess I feel dumb sometimes, or a lot of the time. Actually, all of the time.”

“And what makes you feel that way?”

“School. Other people. Pretty much anything that could. I feel like it’s harder for me to remember things, or learn stuff, or even pay attention.”

“And have you ever committed yourself to learning?”

“A little bit, yeah. I’ve tried to.”

“You have tried, but you chose to quit instead of truly committing. You have resorted to jokes and pretended that you do not care, but in reality, you care very much.”

“Well … yeah. You pretty much nailed it.” Eddie chewed the corner of his lip and nodded.

“Your intelligence has never been your limitation,” Malika said. “It is your feelings of doubt that hold you back. No one’s intelligence is fixed. In fact, the human brain grows most when you fail and continue to persevere. But you must embrace the challenges instead of shying away from them. You must push through instead of succumbing.”

Eddie nodded with resolve.

Malika continued, “Know that anything you truly want to learn, you can. It might not come as fast as it does to others, but do not worry about that. It will come if you truly desire it and are committed to doing the necessary work.”

Eddie closed his eyes and let go of his long-held feelings of inadequacy.

“And one more thing,” Malika added after Eddie opened his eyes. “Humor can be a great medicine, but it is a terrible mask.”

“I’ll file that one away,” Eddie said with a smirk as he tapped his temple.

All eyes turned to Antony, the last to go. He averted their gaze, took a deep breath, exhaled, and prepared to tell them his biggest obstacle to loving himself. It was something that he had never told another person, something that he always knew in the back of his head, something that he had never even fully admitted to himself.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The other orphans
took some time to digest what Antony had told them. None of them had expected him to reveal what he had.

After a moment, Eddie broke the silence. “I should have known,” he said. “That’s obviously why you’re so jacked.”

“What are you talking about?” Charlie said.

“I can’t be the only person that knows that all gay people are ripped.”

“All gay people aren’t anything,” Naomi said.

“They’re all gay, aren’t they?” Eddie said.

“Well, besides that.”

“Will everyone just be quiet?” Antony said. The heaviness in his voice made it clear that he was still very much struggling to accept his own admission. “I don’t know for sure if I actually am gay or not.”

“Is this true?” Malika said.

Antony shook his head and sighed in frustration. “No. I mean, I know I am. I’ve known since as long I can remember. I just don’t want to be. I never have.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know,” Antony said. “I guess it’s ‘cause, like, everybody always wants to put people into different buckets, you know? The last thing I want is another bucket to be thrown in. I just want to be my own person.”

“The two are not mutually exclusive,” Malika said. “You are and always will be your own person. While your sexuality is a part of that person, it plays no more of a role in defining you than the color of your skin, your gender, or any other inherited trait that the human world attempts to divide you with. That is to say, it plays no role unless you make the choice to let it define you. Others will surely make that mistake, but it means nothing unless you choose to do the same.”

“I guess you’re right,” Antony said, slowly coming around.

“Yes, I am.” Malika turned to the rest of the group. “This holds true for all of you: nothing about who you are, at your core, should ever be a source of shame. Each of you was made in God’s image. Therefore, any rejection of yourself is a rejection of God.”

“I definitely wasn’t trying to do that.”

“Then don’t. Accept and love yourself for who you are.”

“I will,” Antony said with a smile. He closed his eyes, let go of his denial, and took the first giant step toward loving his divine self.

“You have all moved in the direction of believing in yourselves, but that was only just the beginning,” Malika said. She flicked her wand and swept her hands downward. The flaming dome vanished instantly, while the blaze that had disappeared from the campfire returned in a flash of light and smoke. “Like an iceberg, most of it still lies beneath. Now that you have identified the tip, you must uncover the rest. You must go out into the woods on your own, and search deep inside yourself to find every last negative emotion and judgment that is holding you back, and one by one, let them go. Until they are all gone.”

All of the orphans began their march into different corners of the woods. All except for Charlie, who held back from the rest of the group.

“What’s next?” Charlie asked Malika as soon as everyone else was out of earshot. “Like, after this, what do we do for step three?”

“Do not concern yourself with what is next,” Malika said. She rested her hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “Focus on what is. When what is next becomes what is, then you can focus on it.”

It wasn’t the answer Charlie had wanted, but he knew that it was all that he was going to get. Instead of pushing her further, Charlie simply nodded, then chose the direction that none of the other orphans were heading in and began his journey into the forest.

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Charlie wandered deep into the woods for well over a half hour before he found an old incense cedar that had fallen and split to make the perfect seat and backrest. He parked himself on the cinnamon-colored tree trunk and leaned back to get comfortable.

Charlie didn’t take even a second to consider the picturesque view of the expansive valley beyond the trees and the sparkling river that cut through it. He didn’t have the time to waste. He needed to get right to work. He retrieved his notebook from his pocket and skimmed his list of failures. None of his listed failures had a particular monetary value attached to them, and they all had made him unhappy, so Charlie figured that they were still suitable to be used for their motivational purposes.

After reading over his list a couple times, Charlie flipped to the front of his notebook and added his new goal:
find
happiness
.

“Find happiness,” Charlie said to himself. He echoed the words a handful of times, hoping it would help them settle into his consciousness, build his confidence in their power, and magically alter his perspective; however, it didn’t. It only had the opposite effect. The more Charlie repeated the words, the more unreasonable they sounded, and the more his thoughts drifted away from his intention of finding happiness toward something else.

Charlie didn’t doubt that Malika knew what she was talking about and agreed that her words sounded great in theory. But even so, he couldn’t fathom how he could possibly be happy. Focusing on what was and not what was next, like Malika had encouraged him to do, didn’t help, either. It only made him think of everything he was up against. At that very moment, his parents’ souls were trapped in some Beast, Terry and his men were most likely scouring everywhere for them, and an attack on Heaven was possible at any second. That was what
was
. How was he supposed to find happiness in that? It was completely unrealistic.

As if all of his issues weren’t enough to keep him from finding happiness, Charlie recalled how he hadn’t received half of the attention he had hoped to get from Naomi. All that he had received was the knowledge that if there was going to be any competition for Naomi’s affection, JP appeared to have a significant head start.

Charlie shook his head and pocketed his notebook. He scraped chunks of bark from the tree trunk with the heels of his shoes as his frustrations compounded. “Find happiness,” he repeated with each thrust.

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Hours later, all of the orphans returned to the church with high spirits and empty bellies—save for Charlie, who only had the empty belly and had to fake his enthusiasm.

With food on everyone’s minds, Eddie offered to go hunting with Charlie. Of course, he had ulterior motives. He had informed Charlie of his scheme just before attempting to execute it. The plan was to invite Naomi and Malika to join them. Then, once they were in the woods, he would suggest that they split up like they had that morning, only with their preferred pairings. Partial to plans, and this plan in particular, Charlie eagerly agreed.

Unfortunately for the two would-be Casanovas, both Malika and Naomi declined the invitations.

“You miss almost all of the shots you don’t take,” Eddie joked to Charlie as they, along with Antony, who volunteered in the girls’ place, ventured back into the forest.

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After an uneventful dinner, Malika encouraged all of the orphans to get as much sleep as possible. They all retreated inside the church.

“Wow,” Naomi said as she entered the surprisingly pristine chapel. “It looks way nicer.”

“I did a little cleaning when you were gone,” Malika said.

Really, Malika had just opened the front and back doors to the church. With a couple heavy flaps of her wings, she had sent all of the dust twirling out of the church in a massive gust of wind. She had also found a trunk filled with a bunch of old cloth alter covers in one of the closets.

Antony commented that the smell reminded him of his grandmother’s closet, and not in a good way. But it was all they had to work with. They made their own beds on the pews, using the alter covers as sheets. Once they were all set up, the only thing left was to put them to use.

“What are you doing?” JP said to Eddie as he started to wiggle out off his T-shirt.

“Uh, getting ready for bed,” Eddie replied, his shirt stuck around his shoulders.

“Don’t you think you should keep your clothes on? You know, given the company.”

“It’s cool. I talked to Antony. He said I’m not his type.”

“I heard that,” Antony said from across the room, where he was putting the finishing touches on his bed. “And what I said was I don’t really have a type yet.”

“Close enough,” Eddie said.

“I was talking about Naomi, anyway,” JP said.

“Thank you,” Naomi said to JP. “He’s right, Eddie. You can keep your clothes on.”

“Fine,” Eddie said as he pulled his shirt back over his head, “but if I lose all my leg hair from the chafing, I don’t wanna hear any comments.”

Antony finished making his bed and noticed that Charlie had already laid down a couple pews ahead of his. He had also noted that Charlie had been mostly quiet since halfway through their hunt. Antony sidled up to Charlie’s pew. “Hey, don’t worry about what happened tonight. You’ll get them next time.”

While Antony had had no problem picking off the squirrels, both Eddie and Charlie struggled. After a while, Eddie finally found his groove; however, Charlie never did. The more opportunities they gave Charlie to get his first squirrel, the worse he did. Eventually, Charlie just faked a stiff shoulder and let the others take over.

“I know,” Charlie sighed. His errant throws during their hunt were only one of the things on his mind, but there was much more than that bothering him.

Antony could sense that Charlie’s issues were deeper. “Are you still having the nightmares?”

“No.”

“Good,” Antony said. “Although sometimes, I’d almost take a nightmare if it meant I could hear my dad’s voice again.”

“Yeah.”

“But once we take care of the Beasts that killed our parents, I’m sure all that will come back.” He put his hand on Charlie’s shoulder.

“Uh huh,” Charlie said as he rolled onto his side away from Antony. That was the plan: to save their parents. But while they were just getting started, Charlie had already begun to doubt whether or not it was something he could even accomplish.

“All right,” Antony said. “Well, goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” Charlie replied.

“Lights out,” Eddie shouted just before the room went dark.

All the orphans tucked themselves into their beds.

In a few short minutes, they were all asleep—except for Charlie. He just stared at the moonlight passing through the stained-glass mural. As he absorbed the image of Saint Michael battling the Devil, he engaged in a battle of his own. He fought with his own mind, trying to suppress the swelling doubt and trying desperately to find happiness. But with each waking minute, his mind only advanced its position.

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A couple days passed, during which the orphans followed the same routine: breakfast and then into the woods; lunch and then back into the woods; dinner and then rest.

When Malika was satisfied with how the orphans seemed to be progressing, she surprised them. She didn’t send them off after breakfast as she had the days before. Instead, she told them to wait where they were.

“It’s time for your first test,” Malika informed the orphans, and then headed for the woods by herself.