isn't it weird?

Five years ago...

He looked shrunken for a fifteen-year-old. His skin was scaly and dirty. He was taken into the administrative office and soon given a room. He was the new boy at the orphanage.

Sarah was a twenty-year-old volunteer at the orphanage. Despite just having been there for just a few weeks the children had become very fond of her. They trusted her and because of this, they told her what they never told anyone.

Sarah was horrified at what the children had to say. Some children had lost their parents but speculated that they knew which family member was irresponsible with evidence, others were brought up in abusive homes with animals for parents. The ones that shocked Sarah to the core had been the children who were victims of child trafficking. 

Sarah tried to bring them out of their shells and let them realise it was all over. She was a saviour to them. She liked to see the emotional change in them, they became a big happy family. Sarah got through to all of the children except one, Jonah.

Jonah had an unusual type of deadness in his eyes. He barely talked to the children at first but when he did it was a catastrophe.

                                        🎄🎄🎄🎄

"Has anyone seen Zoey?" Sarah asked the children one afternoon. 

They murmured something to one another then ten-year-old Cody stepped out. "She ran away." 

"What? Where did she go? When did she go?" Sarah was bewildered

"We don't know but we know why," Sandra spoke up too.

"Why?" Sarah asked hoping it was all a prank.

"They were coming to take her back there." 

Sarah knew Zoey's childhood filled with horror but knew the girl had come a long way and what the children were talking about.

"Who told her that?" Someone influenced her because all the children suddenly kept quiet and looked down.

"Is it true...is true you will take all of us back?"  Pablo spoke for the first time. The boy had been abused by his father in unspeakable ways. It had taken therapy and a lot of love to get him to improve at twelve he still had nightmares and slept with the light on.

Sarah took him in for a hug and stroked his brown curly hair. "Never, you will never go back there," Sarah assured.

"Don't lie to them." A chilling voice said. 

Sarah turned to find Jonah, a menacing look in his eyes.

"Even their parent didn't care." 

"Jonah you..." 

"Shut the fuck up, bitch."

"Jonah is bad language is not..."

"Is not what? Allowed? Then why have most of the children here been called that by the ones that were meant to protect them?"

"Where did you tell Zoey to go?" 

"What's all the ruckus about?" The administrator a blond stern-looking woman in her fifties asked as she walked into the room.

"Zoey's missing"

"What? I will call the boys to search for her."

"I am coming too." Sarah took one last look at Jonah who had a smirk on his lips.

                                          🎄🎄🎄🎄 

By evening Zoey had been found at the train station. Scared and sobbing. Sarah finally calmed her down and Zoey spilt the beans on what Jonah had told her.

"He said you would take me back." 

"And you believed him? Why? You barely know him." Sarah was confused.

"I wanted to do what you did with me."

"You wanted to change him?"

"Yes, make him happy I like you did for us."

"So what did you do?"

"I told him my story and he told me... his."

"His mother kept taking him back to them."  The nine-year-old continued. 

"To who?"

"I can't tell only he can." 

They had a conversation and it ended with Zoey promising she would never try what she did that day ever again. 

Now it was Jonah's turn. Sarah preferred not to tell the administrator for his sake, but talking to him was a battle on its own.

                                         🎄🎄🎄🎄

She had found him sitting on his bed which was in the far corner of the room which he shared with three other boys. The rest of the children were playing outside when she approached him. 

"Hey, Jonah." Sarah smiled.

The was no reply from him only a quick uninterested glance. 

She sat beside him only to find him biology textbook he has found in the library. He seemed genuinely fascinated by the chapter he was reading which was on reproduction.

"About today, why would you tell Zoey that? Why..."

"What did  I tell her?" He countered.

"That's what I would like to know. You know we are here to help you so you can tell me what's wrong."

"Isn't it weird?" He asked his gaze still fixated on the image in the book before him. 

"What!?" 

He used his index finger to trace the outline of the anatomy of a pregnant woman. His voice told of anger and hurt probably from abuse because without replying to Sarah's question he takes off his shirt revealing a map of scars. 

Sarah showed no reaction but studied the marks. It comprised of discolourations and lines that deformed the boy's already slight body. The big ones probably made heavy stick and the thinner but deeper ones by wires possibly household cables. He had been scalded too. It was the worst that she had ever seen. It surprised her because he ran away from his mother, not a human trafficking ring.

The children brought from those places were the ones with such extensive scarring and wounds. Would a mother really do this? Sarah thought.

"Isn't it weird a mother would hand over her child to abusers?"

"Jonah, they  can't hurt you anymore."

"You can't do anything, if a mother cannot protect her child from the world, how can a stranger promise such a luxury." His eyes were piercing.

"Did your mother do this to you?" She always hated the answers to the question but that was what she was here for.

"No, my mother gave me to monsters who did." His voice, calm.

"Where are they now?" Their conversation was now moving without a hiccup.

"They escaped when I ran away."  Jonah felt more at ease all of a sudden now that he had shown her his shame. She didn't react like the others. No overdue apologies or unnecessary hugs. A conversation with an adult ready to listen, unlike his mother who liked to daydream under a haze of weed.

"Your father?" His reports say that he has a  mother but no mention of a father.

"I don't have one."

"Anyone other than those people, your mother's side maybe?"  

"They are dead to me."

"Um." That was a little too resolute of a fifteen-year-old.

Sarah was careful with her questions, gently probing into the boy's mind. He also explained that the reason he had been trying to turn the children against the orphanage was that he had begged his mother not to take him back to his assailants. She never wavered and always sent him back to the monsters she liked to call caretakers.

Fortunately, with time he opened up to change and grew out of his gloom but a dark cloud of truth hovered above him that destroyed his newfound peace and led him to take a debilitating decision.

                                         🎄🎄🎄🎄

Sarah watched this all unfold and never actually moved on. The memory of the pale boy with sunken eyes and a wounded soul always haunted her dreams.