Akilli's Black Parade

Today’s my first day at Evergreen Orphanage in Long Island, New York. It’s in kind of a weird, isolated location. Woods surround the sprawling grounds of the orphanage, but if you go the half mile or so through the woods to where they end (I’m not too good with compass directions), you will hit an old, run-down industrial part of town, but the orphanage itself is in the woods.

Ever since I got here, the other kids have been trying to scare me and the other new arrivals with stories about the woods I just told you about, and they’ve been giving all us new kids the evil eye. They all look tough, in a wild, unruly, Lost-Boys-from-Peter-Pan kind of way, but I’m not scared of them since most them are considerably younger than me, and the ones who are about my age look scrawny and weak.

I’ve kinda been in shock ever since the accident. The funeral was when it really sunk in for me that my parents are dead and gone and I’m never going to see them again. As for all the court hearings and everything that led up to my placement here at Evergreen, I went through it all in kind of a numb, half-asleep state, like a robot. But I know that sometime soon the numbness will wear off and I’ll wake up to the nightmare of realization and everything will hit me all at once like a tidal wave. For right now though, I’m comfortably numb.