The First Night

The first thing she saw when she woke up was darkness. It was so dark. Something inside her was yelling, screaming at her to wake up.

But she was just so tired. 

She twisted around on her bed, trying to move around the spring that poked through the material. 

Her eyes shot open. Her bed didn't have a spring loose. This wasn't her bed. It smelled terrible, like sweat and something else, something she didn't know. 

She looked around and found a small light source. There was a crack in the top of the wall, letting light in. It was faint, the glow of a faraway street lamp. The faint glow let her see an outline of the room. It was the size of a closet, barely big enough for the matress. She reached her hand out and touched the wall. It was stone, or concrete, like her classroom wall was. 

She looked around the room further and saw eyes watching her. They weren't her brother's whickey eyes or her father's crystal blue (the same shade she had). They weren't Scotty's either. These were dark brown, barely a shade away from being black. It was like her mother's coffee before she added milk to it. 

The comparison to her mother sent a fresh stab of pain through her. She had barely lost her mother three months ago. How was her brother going to handle this? How was her dad? How was she when she didn't know where she was with unfamiliar eyes watching her?

The eyes moved forward. They were moving closer. She backed up into the wall. The eyes outlined a head of wild, unruly hair, a head and shoulders. When they saw her terrified look, they moved back slightly. The faint light hit their face, letting her see their features. It was a boy, a year older then her. He had brown skin like one of the boys from her school. 

"Hey, it's okay," he whispered. "No one is going to hurt you." He spoke softly, consoling her. His voice was strange, his vowels sounded different. He spoke like he had spoken a different version of English then her. 

"W-who are you?" she asked, failing to keep the tremor from her voice. "Where am I? Where's my family?" 

"I do not know where your family is," he said. He sat down in the light so she could see his face. "My name is Marcel Sanchez. And right now, you are in Boston." 

"Boston?" she asked. She didn't know where Boston was. Just that it wasn't in California. 

Marcel nodded. "Where are you from?" he asked. 

"Beacon Hills," she told him. "I-I-I don't understand. Why am I here?" 

"They need someone to help with the work," he explained. 

"They?" she asked him. 

"We call them the Dealers." His voice was quiet. Like if he spoke their name they might appear. "They take us, make us create drugs, very bad stuff." 

"Who is us?" she had calmed down a little but she still wanted to know everything. She wanted answers. 

"The kids they take. There are six others. I was told to explain everything to you." 

"So tell me," she prompted. "Tell me everything." 

He sighed and sat on the corner of the bed. She eyed the distance but didn't move away. "They wake us in the morning. They make us work in these kitchens when none of us should be close to those things. We make crystals and grow plants they can be affected by." 

"Why us? Why take us?" she whispered. Even in the dark she saw the empathy in his eyes. The understanding he felt. He was the first. He knew how she was feeling. 

"We were easy to grab in the second," he said. "Someone who looked like no one." 

"I'm not no one," she protested. "I have a brother who taught me Go-Fish. And-and my dad's the sheriff. He won't stop till he finds me. I know it." Her throat got a lump. Suddenly it was like she couldn't speak. A burning sensation pressed into her eyes. "I-I want my daddy." 

She dragged her legs up and cried into her knees. She vaguely wondered what they did with her backpack. She liked that backpack. That just made her cry more. She cried for her brother, who would probably be so worried for her. Her dad, who just lost his wife and now had a missing daughter. She cried for Scotty, who was always so nice to her. She cried for all of them. 

She felt Marcel shift closer. He tentatively put his arm around her shoulder. She let him. Her hands shook. 

"I was not saying you are no one," he said. "I am saying they thought you were. I know you are not no one. You matter. To your brother, your daddy. You matter to me too." 

She wiped her tears slightly before she croaked out, "You don't even know my name." 

"That doesn't matter," he denied. "I miss my papa too. And my mama. But each day I'm alive, each day I'm closer to see them again. You need to have hope. Otherwise you won't survive." 

She felt her old life slipping away. She grabbed her necklace, clutched the metal in her palm. She hummed the old lullaby her mom used to sing to her. Marcel let her cry and hum and hiccup.

He didn't say anything else for a good hour. 

But when he did, it was something she didn't understand. She looked up at him, her necklace still in her hand. "What did you say?" She asked.

"I said something in Spanish," he explained. "I am from Mexico and I learned how to speak Spanish before I learned English."

"What did you say?" She repeated.

"I was praying," he told her. "I asked God to let your daddy and your brother know that you would be safe with me."

She wiped her nose with her t-shirt collar. "My daddy doesn't believe in God," she said.

He shrugged. "He works in mysterious ways."

She smiled. Despite the circumstances, the despair that sat deep in her heart, she smiled. "I'm Vic," she said.

She was able to see a small tug of his lips in the glow of the streetlight that spilled through the crack. "It is good to meet you, Vic. Do you want to meet the others?"

She took a breath, tightened her hold on her necklace. Then she let it go, let the wire hit against her collarbones. She nodded. "Let's go."

Marcel kept a hand on her shoulder as he helped her stand up. He led her to the door, then into a big room. It looked like a warehouse she would see in a superhero with Mischief. Moonlight and the glow from the street lamps came in through the big windows along the wall. Marcel led her to a side room with a big metal door. He knocked on the door in a pattern.

Two slow knocks, three quick ones.

The door opened. Vic couldn't see who opened it. Marcel led her inside. The door closed behind her.

A light was turned on. Vic closed her eyes. The sudden brightness was a polar opposite from the shadows of the small room and the big room. She opened her eyes a little and blinked away tears. Her irises adjusted and she took in the room.

It was the same size as the last one, and looked like it too. Concrete bricks, smelled like mold and something else that burned her nose.

Her focus wasn't on the room, but the people in it.

There were six of them. Seven if she included Marcel. They were all thin, tired looking and hair tangled and uncared for. They all looked sad. 

The one that looked the hardest was a blonde girl with hard, dark eyes. She stood behind a younger girl that had pale skin and dark hair. She couldn't have been more then six. The young girl held the hand of a boy with olive skin and darker hair. He looked uncomfortable with the girl holding his hand but he didn't say anything. He had to be the same age. A boy of seven stood next to the other one. He had darker skin then Marcel but just a few shades with curly black hair. Behind the two boys stood a girl with fiery red hair and freckles, her eyes were caramel brown and soft. The last boy stood tall with multiple shades of brown hair and forest green eyes that reminded her of the soccer field from her school. The blonde, red head and tall boy all had to be her brother's age (ten). 

"The blonde is Marie," Marcel whispered beside her. "She's from southern France and doesn't understand English that well. So talk slowly around her. The younger girl is Angeliki, she's from Crete, it's a city in Greece. She doesn't understand English well either but she's teaching us Greek. The boy beside her is Gabrial. He's from Japan and he's deaf. He can read lips but talk slowly around him too. The boy beside Gabrial is Rico, he's from Brazil and pretty quiet. The redhead is Dakota. She's from Montana. The tall one is Rufus, he's from Canada." 

Her eyes followed each intoduction to the person. She felt like they were burning holes into her. But she didn't show it. She kept her chin up and stared Marie dead in the eye. If she could get past the blonde, she had a feeling she could get past all of them. 

Suddenly, Marie smiled, a new light in her eyes. "I like her," the girl said. There was a way she spoke, like she wanted to speak another version of speech. But hers was different from Marcel. The way she spoke her r's and vowels. She would later learn that the term for it was 'accent.' Vic decided she liked how she spoke. 

Gabrial stepped forward and did something with his hands. He raised his right hand to his forehead and moved it outward from his face. He dropped it when it got a few inches out.  

"Gabrial says hello," Marcel said. 

Vic copied his actions. His eyes lit up. "Can you teach me to do that?" she asked him. She spoke each word slowly, so he might understand. 

He made a fist. He brought it up then down. 

"Does that mean yes?" she asked. 

He repeated the action. She smiled and he smiled at her. The others moved forward. She let herself get pulled into introductions. 

There was a feeling they brought with them, a comfort. The understanding that they had all been where she had.

They weren't going to let her go through it alone.

She was okay with that.