The Orphans (Orphans Trilogy Book 1) (8 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Come on, Sanchez.
Open the email already,” insisted one of the offensive linemen from the Winchester Academy football team. He and a handful of the other varsity football players had gathered in the dorm room of their quarterback, JP Sanchez. That was what his teammates called him when they were feeling formal; however, most of the time they were not, and opted for either JP or Sanchez.

JP was seated in his desk chair while the others were gathered behind him, jockeying for positions on all sides and peering over his perfectly spiked hair as they attempted to get a better look at his computer screen.

Like any great quarterback, JP had complete control of this huddle. “All right, all right,” he said. “Just calm the hell down.”

The others heeded JP’s direction and calmly got in formation so that they could bear witness as JP opened the email. All of their jaws promptly dropped as they gaped at the image before them.

“Man, I can’t believe he actually sent that,” the fullback chuckled. “I’m seeing it, and I still don’t believe it.”

“Yeah, well, believe it,” JP said.

Earlier in the week, a freshman football player who was playing for the scout team picked off one of JP’s passes. While the interception was enough to draw unwanted attention from JP and the other varsity players, it was what the freshman did after the interception that really rubbed them the wrong way. Instead of just handing the ball back, as was usually done in practice, the kid returned the pick for a touchdown and hot-dogged it in the end zone.

The varsity players, JP in particular, determined that there was no way they were going to let this cocky kid get away with such a brash display of disrespect. They decided that they needed to teach him a lesson.

JP came up with the plan. He sent the kid a message from a fake email account, using the name of a girl whom he had dated the year before. It was a textbook catfish. And when the kid replied enthusiastically, JP knew he had him hooked. All JP had to do was reel him in. He responded, attaching one of the suggestive cell phone pics that his ex-girlfriend had texted him. He told the frosh that he was a “cutie with manly muscles” and should return the favor.

The kid did exactly that and then some, sending a picture of himself in nothing but his tighty-whiteys, posing like he was competing in the lightest weight division of the worst bodybuilding contest ever.

“Look at him trying to flex,” the wide receiver said. “What a scrawny punk.”

The lineman laughed. “You don’t have much room to talk. You’re pretty scrawny yourself.”

The comment started a shoving match.

“I’ll show you scrawny,” the wide receiver said. He tried and failed to get the upper hand in their little squabble.

“Keep it coming. You’re doing a great job of it,” the lineman snarled before putting the much smaller wide receiver in a full nelson headlock.

JP easily broke up the petty quarrel. In spite of being built like the average quarterback, he was anything but that. In the beginning of the season, he had tested out as the strongest and fastest player on the football team. It was something that would have been unimaginable only a couple years earlier.

“You guys are a bunch of clowns,” JP said. “You both need to chill out. We’ve got important decisions to make. We gotta decide what we do next. We can’t let something so amazing”—he gestured to the computer screen—“just go to waste.”

“I say we make T-shirts,” the fullback said, excited by his own idea. “We can have it say ‘Mr. Puniverse’ on the top and then give him a fake crown.”

“I’d wear that every day,” the wide receiver said, “and twice on Sunday.”

“I like the T-shirt idea,” the lineman said. “And I’m down to do that eventually, but right now, I think we gotta dream bigger. We gotta see how far he’s willing to go.”

JP’s cell phone buzzed. He gave the message a quick once-over. By the time he finished reading, his enthusiasm for plotting their next move had noticeably waned. “I like both ideas,” JP said. “But we’re gonna have to figure it out later.”

“What?” the wide receiver shot back. “Why?”

“Yeah. What was the message?” the fullback asked.

“It was a reminder that I need to study for tomorrow’s Physics test,” JP said.

“You gotta be kidding me,” the lineman groaned. “You don’t need to study. You already know you’re getting an A on it. If anything, I’m the one who should be studying.”

“Yeah, you’re right. You should be studying. Consider it a reminder for both of us,” JP said with a grin. “Now all of you get the heck out of here.” He gave his teammates friendly shoves out of the room. “And don’t worry, the picture isn’t going anywhere. Except to a custom T-shirt company.”

“Yeah, yeah. Later, Sanchez,” they all said as they exited.

As soon as they were all gone, JP shut the door to his dorm room. He sat back down at his computer and logged out of the fake email account. He retrieved his Physics book from his desk, rapped his fingers on the cover for a second, and then put the textbook down. His attention shifted back to his computer. He opened a new browser, went to The Message Bored website, and typed something into the search bar.

JP had a secret that none of his boarding school buddies knew. He was different. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was not from old Chicago money. Every student at the elite institution knew exactly how each other’s families had made their fortunes, and their approximate net worth, rounded to the nearest million. The fact that JP happened to be one of the only students on academic scholarship was as evident as his obvious physical differences. While there was no concealing his darker hair and skin tone, within those features was where his secret hid.

His secret, which JP had kept closely guarded for all of his teen life, was that he was an orphan.

JP hit enter on his keyboard. All of the popular posts with “orphan” in the title flashed on his screen. He scrolled through the results page. His eyes lit up when he read:
looking for orphans
. JP clicked the link, digested the post, and then hit reply.

In his response, JP disclosed what he deemed to be the pertinent details from his background. How he’d been adopted just before his first birthday. How his adoptive parents had let him know the truth when he was in sixth grade. And how, during the summer before his sophomore year of high school, he had tricked the adoption agency into releasing the names of his biological parents.

JP wrote that after searching for his parents online and coming up empty-handed, he had set out to track them down. Armed with their names and the information from his birth certificate, JP hopped a bus to the small South Texas town where he was born. There he discovered that his parents had both died of heart attacks shortly after he was born. Even more disturbing than the news of their deaths was the fact that everywhere he went, not one person could remember anything about his parents. All his information indicated that they had spent their whole lives in this town, and yet it was almost as if they had never existed.

Eventually, JP located his paternal grandmother. But even she hardly remembered that she ever had a son. The only thing she could remember was the terrible nightmares she had about JP’s father and mother right after their deaths. The nightmares sounded exactly like the ones that were mentioned in the post. The thought of such dreams still haunted him.

JP wrapped up his response:
you’re looking for or
phans, you’ve found one. i’m all ears. jp sanchez.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T
he automatic doorbell
at The Local Blend coffee shop and Internet cafe rang as sixteen-year-old Naomi Friedman entered. She stopped in the doorway and swept the room with her eyes. To the casual observer, it would have appeared as if she was just searching for a friend. In actuality, she was making sure that there weren’t any police officers or people who might recognize her. Over the past six months, she had just about perfected this discreet surveillance tactic.

Naomi quickly determined that the coast was clear and approached the college-aged barista behind the counter. “Coffee. Black,” she said before the barista could even say hello or ask for her order.

“Wow. Aggressive,” he replied. “Can I get your name?”

“You need my name for a black coffee?”

“Sure. For that, too,” he said with a flirtatious grin.

Naomi was accustomed to all kinds of unwanted advances. She had expected them to stop when she went on the run, but they didn’t. If anything, they picked up. It turned out that her well-worn clothes just made her seem more approachable. Additionally, her curly, dark brown hair had a way of hiding the fact that she hadn’t showered for days, and her lack of makeup simply accentuated a natural beauty that only others could see. Naomi dismissed all of her suitors in similar fashion, with a simple but powerful rolling of her eyes.

Naomi used the same move on the barista, but he was too busy grabbing a cup and pen to notice her gesture. “So, what should I put?” he asked, the grin returning to his face.

Naomi rolled her eyes again, that time more for herself. “Roxanne,” she replied. She never used her real name. Not since she had first been on the run. Instead, she cycled through the alphabet like the World Meteorological Organization does with hurricanes. At her next stop, she might be Sarah or Sadie, but definitely not Samantha. She would never use—much less say—the name Samantha.

“Roxanne. Nice,” the barista said as he scribbled it on her cup. “And just so you know, you don’t have to put on the red light.”

Naomi glared at him. “Excuse me?”

The barista nervously stumbled over his words. “You know, like the song? By Sting? Well, really, The Police. I just assumed you got that a lot.”

“That’s actually the first time.”

“Oh,” the barista said, at a loss.

“I’m kidding,” Naomi said after watching him squirm for long enough.

The barista’s face went flush as he let go of all of his nervous energy. He smiled and shook his head. “You really had me going. That was a good one. You know, you got a toughness to you.”

“Thanks, I think.”

“Trust me, it’s a compliment. I dig it.” He winked and then grabbed her order. As he handed Naomi her cup of coffee, he added, “I don’t know if you saw any of the posters, but we got an open mic here tonight.”

Whatever the barista said next, Naomi tuned out. In the security mirror behind the counter, she had spotted a bald, middle-aged man in a blue suit approaching from the back of the cafe and concentrated her attention. It wasn’t his choice of suit or lack of hair that had put her on edge; it was the gold badge hanging from his belt and the protrusion on his right hip—most likely his government-issued firearm.

Naomi couldn’t believe it. She had seen the man during her earlier surveillance but had completely glossed over him. While she was adept at identifying police officers and social workers, she was still working on
fbi
agents, who were much better at blending in with the regular working stiffs.

Naomi’s breath shortened as she watched him make his way in the mirror. Ten feet away. Nine feet. Eight feet. She felt the warmth of her coffee in her hand. It gave her an idea. Right before he was about to grab her, she would heave her scalding hot coffee in his face and make a run for it. She wasn’t excited about injuring a man who was merely doing his job, but she was more concerned with her own pain than with the pain of others.

Naomi hadn’t been as lucky as Eddie Harper. When her parents passed away, there was nowhere for her to go. At the tender age of nine, she was placed into foster care.

The first three years couldn’t have gone better. Her foster family was nurturing and supportive. They helped her get through the sudden loss of her parents as much as anyone could. They also taught her how to love and trust again, two skills she had lost along with her parents.

Unfortunately, the recession hit her foster family harder than most. When Naomi’s foster father lost his job, the family was unable to take care of her financially, and Naomi was thrown back into the system. The day she was taken from her foster family’s home was the second saddest day of her life. Naomi felt like she had lost her parents all over again.

If her first family was the epitome of how a foster family should be, her second was exactly how they should not be. Naomi’s new foster parents, Carl and Samantha—hence her aversion to the name Samantha—seemed only to be in it for the paycheck. They had taken in so many kids that they were living off the state money alone. It was like they were running a business, one that would have failed horribly if not for the steady stream of subsidies.

All of the children were underclothed and underfed. Even worse was the verbal abuse the children were forced to endure at the hands of their foster parents.

Naomi weathered the violent storm for as long as she could before deciding she had to escape. But her stay cost her more than just time. The open and loving little girl who had walked through the front door only four years earlier sneaked out of the second-story window in the middle of the night a hardened teenager. A shell of her former self. Never to return.

In her six months on the lam, Naomi had hopped from town to town in northern New Jersey, sleeping in residential construction sites and anywhere else she could find. It had worked well for the summer and up to that point in the fall, but winter wasn’t too far away. She would need a new strategy. But she would worry about that later. At that moment, her top priority was dealing with the advancing
fbi
agent.

Five feet. Four feet. Naomi’s fingers tightened around the cup. The muscles in Naomi’s arm contracted. She was like a tightly coiled spring, ready to release, to toss, to run.

Just as Naomi was about to jerk her arm over her shoulder, the
fbi
agent made a hard right for the exit. She watched him continue out the door. It wasn’t until the store bell rang again that her muscles relaxed, and she heard the barista, who hadn’t stopped talking. “Yeah, I’m probably gonna play some of my original songs,” the barista said.

“Huh?” Naomi said, forgetting where they had left off.

“At the open mic. My stuff is kinda like boy band pop, but with a hard rock edge to it.”

“Cool. Good luck with that.”

“That was actually my way of inviting you.”

“I know,” Naomi said. She slapped exact change for the coffee on the counter, and then started for the wall of computers. She watched through the store window as the
fbi
agent hopped in his car and drove off.

The barista called after Naomi, “If you come, I’ll buy you another black coffee. Maybe even one of our tasty scones.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said without looking back, but there was no way she was going to attend the open mic. Even if she wanted to, which she didn’t, she couldn’t take that risk. She rarely went to the same place twice, and definitely not in the same day. That would be asking to get caught, asking to be returned to her evil foster parents.

Naomi continued to the computer stations and took the first open seat. While she wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, just in case the
fbi
agent came back, there was something she needed to do before she left.

Naomi had a ritual she performed once a week. First, she would do an Internet search of her name, just to make sure that there were no new stories or missing persons reports about her. There weren’t. For the most part, they had stopped after the first couple weeks, but it never hurt to check. Next, she would do an Internet search of her parents. It was the only way she could remember their faces and anything about them.

Howard and Amy Friedman had run a small, privately funded medical research lab. They focused their efforts on cures for what they considered to be two of the most debilitating and demoralizing diseases: Alzheimer’s and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as
als
, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Naomi’s favorite article about her parents was a touching, in-depth interview that not only talked about how they were weeks away from trials on their Alzheimer’s cure, but also told the story of how they met and fell in love at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and how blessed they were to have such a darling, precocious daughter. Naomi smiled every time she read it. It was usually the only time during any given week that she would smile.

Listed just below her favorite article in the search results was Naomi’s least favorite article: Howard and Amy’s double obituary. Naomi never clicked the link. The short synopsis was reminder enough. They had both died from heart attacks. The publishing dates on the two articles were just a few days apart. They were also only a few days, plus seven years, from that day’s date.

The anniversary of her parents’ deaths was always a tough time of year for Naomi, especially since she had left her first foster home. She needed someone to talk to, but not just anyone. And definitely not the barista. She needed someone who could relate to what she’d been through.

Naomi went to The Message Bored homepage and did a search for teens whose parents had died of heart attacks. She scrolled through three pages of results before she came across the post that—just like her—was seeking orphans.

After her initial shock dissipated, Naomi hit reply.