Life Goes On

Chapter 1

     Chapter 1; The Move
 
     I walked up the steps to my new foster home for the first time. I searched for my brother’s hand, gripping it tightly as our foster parents opened the door for us. My brother was a year and a half older than me. He was a tall blonde with brown eyes. I was younger, and a girl. I was fifteen, short, blonde, and I had blue eyes. Sean was sixteen and a half. Mom had blue eyes, Dad had brown. That’s how it worked. My name was Alyssa, and my brother’s? Sean. Sean dropped my hand and walked into the house behind Robert and Jennifer, our foster parents.
     I grabbed Sean’s arm and held him back. “There’s no way I’ll ever call either one of them ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’.” I whispered as he shut the door to the huge house.
     Sean shrugged my arm off. “Yeah, well lighten up. This house is awesome! I’d say we’re lucky to be in the situation we’re now in.” I gave him a glare as he pushed past me. I couldn’t believe he’d said that. We weren’t lucky at all at this point in time.
     You’re probably wondering what happened to get us here in the first place. My parents were great people. My dad was into the war and protecting our country and all that stuff. His base was bombed and it collapsed over a year ago. After that, my mom went into depression and picked up smoking to rid of her sadness. After a few months, she developed sores in her mouth. White spots. She thought nothing of them, that maybe they were a sickness. That maybe they’d go away. She was wrong. Very wrong. More and more developed, but she felt she’d lost everything already and there was nothing more to lose. This all happened in a course of six months. Of course, Sean and I didn’t just sit there watching. We told her the sores were cancer when the first one appeared. She dismissed us and said we were wrong. We knew we were right since we took health classes. After the six months of numerous sores appearing, we took her to a doctor. He said she had less than five months, and there were too many spots to be removed and to get her to a hospital right then. I wasn’t quite sure why, you know, since they couldn’t do anything. She died four and a half months later of cancer.
     So that’s our story and situation, and you should now understand why we aren’t lucky at all. I chased after Sean, Robert and Jennifer. They were guiding us to our rooms. They already had two kids of their own, who were fourteen and sixteen. The guy was sixteen, the girl was fourteen. I’d never met them before. We walked over to a corner of the house with a silver door and buttons lining the wall. “Is this an..?” Sean began.
     “Elevator? Yes.” Robert cut him off. “Your rooms are upstairs. We have stairs, too, but we thought we’d show you this as well.” Sean and I nodded and faced forward, climbing onto the elevator as the doors opened.
     Sean was the first on the large elevator, gasping as he noticed the glass around us. “How tall is this place?!” he asked in amazement.
     “Eleven floors,” Jennifer bragged. “But hey, it’s now your house, too. Live it up.” She paused, then started to talk again, “We got a lot of stuff for your rooms. We asked our kids what kids your ages would like, and we filled it up. Feel free to bring some of the stuff from the moving trucks. The rooms are big enough for everything you’ve brought.”
     In amazement, I commented, “Thank you, Jennifer. What floor am I on? And Sean?”
     She swallowed before talking again. “You’ll be on floor eight while Sean’s on nine.”