The Girl With No Name

Carolina

Catherine woke up abruptly, her eyes shooting open. What had she just dreamed about? She couldn’t remember. But it had scared her. She didn’t make any noise, just continued to lie in bed, breathing evenly, in and out, slowly.
   Catherine looked around. The sun was just about coming up, so at least it was almost time to get up. She looked around the room. There were at least twenty bunk beds with kids peacefully sleeping resting in them. All of them were orphans, like her. She couldn’t believe there were so many. She’d never understood. Some of them, their parents had been killed, others, their parents had just left them here. Like me, she thought.
   She was sleeping on the bottom bunk of the bunk bed that she shared with her about-a-year-older brother, James. The orphanage had told Catherine that her parents had had him first, and when they had her, they couldn’t afford it, so they gave her to the orphanage. But then, her parents had died in a car crash, and he came here. James was snoring, which is what probably had probably woke her up, most of the time it was. He’d never listen when she told him that he snored. Stubborn as a mule he was. However, she felt happy to have a brother, but she would never tell James that.
   She suddenly heard shouting. Listening intently, she tried to hear what they were saying.
   “Yeah, that’s right, run!” Catherine heard someone shout, probably one of the people who cooked, it sounded like one of them. “Little coward! Run away and save your little behind! And don’t come back, you little rascal!” The cook sounded real mad. Someone probably tried to take something from the kitchen.
  Then, she heard shouting from somewhere else, somewhere more distant.
   “Go on! Go wake them up!” This was more faint then the other shouting she had heard before, and it sounded like one of the people who took care of the orphanage. Catherine heard someone running up the stairs. “And no slips or mistakes this time!”
   Catherine looked around to see who was missing. She noticed Carolina wasn’t there; she probably woke up early, as usual, and the biggest trouble maker here, Joe, wasn’t there either.
   The door burst open and Carolina burst in and exclaimed, “Wake up! Come on everyone!”
   As people started to get up,   Joe walked in silently, not attracting any attention to himself, and walked secretly to his bottom bunk, and slipping under his coverts, he pretended to just wake up. However, Catherine noticed him, and she smiled, shaking her head. Joe was a year younger than her, with curly, pitch black hair and green mischievous eyes. He got away with everything. She was sometimes jealous of him, ‘cause when she tried to bend the rules a bit, she usually got caught.
   James was still snoring loudly as kids got out of their beds. Catherine sighed, and went up the ladder to wake him. Putting her mouth near his ear, she shouted, “Get up sleepy head! And stop snoring before I get a fairy to turn your head into one of a donkey’s!”
   That did the trick, and as Catherine scrambled down the ladder as fast as she could, James sat up so quickly he bumped his head on the roof. Catherine muffled her laugh as James muttered something incomprehensible under his breath.
   “Was that really necessary, Cath?” He said annoyed, his head hanging upside down from Catherine’s point of view.
   James was quite different from Catherine. He had crystal clear blue eyes, bluer than the sea. Catherine’s eyes were a warm chocolate brown; some people said that when she was mad or really happy, her eyes would turn red. Not bloodshot red, but red like a fire was burning in her eyes, sometimes a nice, warm fire, and sometimes a deadly, dangerous fire; although, they kept that to themselves. James had dirty blond hair that was cut in disarray, hanging to a bit above his shoulders, but now dangling down as he looked at Catherine. Catherine, on the other hand, had straight, reddish-brown hair that was a bit lower than shoulder length and bangs that she put to the left side of her forehead.
   Catherine looked up at him with innocent eyes, “Was what necessary?” She asked, bewilderment covering her voice like honey. It took her all her will not to laugh.
   James rolled his eyes and said, “You know what! Now, I’d better get going before the line gets too long.”
   He sat up on his bed and clambered down the stairs. Once at the bottom of the bunk bed, he got his clothes and left for the bathroom stalls. A lot of kids did the same, leaving the room. Soon there was no one else left except Caroline and Catherine.
   Carolina walked over and said, “Are you going?”
   Catherine looked up at Carolina and swung her legs of the bottom bunk. Carolina was a very pretty girl. She had emerald green eyes and wavy, brown hair that reached just above her shoulders, with bangs square on her forehead. She had freckles that stretched from the edge of her right cheek to the edge of her left cheek in a strip, running over her nose like a river. She had a natural prettiness to her, she never wore any make-up, and she seemed very fragile.
   “Yeah, I am. But…I wanted to ask you something,” Catherine said, already regretting her decision, and now trying to phrase her thought in an appropriate way. Carolina was one of Catherine’s friends, and she didn’t want to upset her. Carolina sat down on Catherine’s bottom bunk.
   “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. You know what? Forget it. Forget I ever mentioned this,” Catherine decided.
   “No, it’s okay. What is it?” Carolina inquired.
   Catherine sighed and asked, “How did you end up here?” She held her breath.
   Carolina went rigid, and even though her body was still here, her mind was somewhere else.
   “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, you know. I’ll just go now, let’s forget this ever happened, okay?” Catherine hurriedly said, not sure what came out of her mouth. Catherine scrambled out of bed and grabbed her clothes from a secret drawer built into the bunk bed.
   As Catherine got up, Carolina touched her shoulder. Catherine looked up with questioning eyes.
   “No, wait. I’ll tell you. I need to get this out, and if I don’t do this now, I don’t know when. I know it may seem childish that I act this way over what I’m about to explain but….” She breathed in deeply. Catherine put her clothes on the bed and sat down next to Carolina.
   “I was the oldest sibling of the three in my family. I had a younger sister and brother, whom were twins. They were about two years younger than me, and I loved them very much. My parents were nice people with generous hearts. You could say that we were…rich, well at least to some people, but we weren’t spoiled….” Carolina stopped for a while before continuing.
   “One day, we went on a vacation to the south, but I forget exactly where. It was my second time going on a plane to go on vacation somewhere far like the south. I was about four, my sister and brother two years old. I was very excited….
   “I won’t bore you with details, so I’ll get right to the point. We were in the plane, and, to tell you the truth, I didn’t like being in the air. I much preferred to stay on the ground, but I knew it would take too long if we didn’t fly. I was very uncomfortable, so I tried to go to sleep, but no matter what, I couldn’t. I had a feeling something bad was going to happen. And then, something did.
   “The plane….Something went wrong with one of the engines, and we were crash landing. A weird and crazy part of me felt happy that we were finally going to land, but the normal, sane part of me was worried out of her wits and I didn’t know what to do. Other children were crying, including my sister and brother, people were shouting, trying to get out….” She stopped, an unreadable expression on her face, and for a couple of seconds, there was complete silence as both girls were lost in their own thoughts.
   Carolina abruptly remembered where she was, and came out of her daydream. “I didn’t see what the others were doing. I was only able to look out the window, see the ground rushing up to meet us. My mom grabbed my arm, waking me out of my…daydream, I guess you would call it. This part is a bit fuzzy. Everything was happening so fast. And then…it came. It was a terrible crash. I was jostled around and lost consciousness. I don’t know how long it was before I woke up, but I don’t think it was more than a couple of minutes. I got up and looked everywhere for my family….” Carolina paused and Catherine looked up at her. Her eyes were misted over. Carolina found her voice and continued.
   “I found my parents. They were…dead,” Carolina seemed to be choking on sobs.
  In between her sobs that she was trying to stifle she continued, “I looked for other survivors for the next ten minutes, in reality looking for my younger siblings, but a deep in my heart I knew they were gone. I found some survivors and they went to their business. I cried for a while, but then, after fifteen minutes, we saw a helicopter coming towards the plane crash. They came and rescue us. They brought me to this orphanage. So…that’s how I ended up here.”
   The room was very quiet. “Thank you for telling me,” Catherine whispered.
   “I wouldn’t have trusted anyone else,” Carolina answered smiling at Catherine. “Now let’s go.”
  “Not even James?” Catherine knew Carolina and James were good friends, even though Carolina was a year older than James, making her two years older than Catherine.
  “Not even James,” Carolina answered, getting up.
   She grabbed her clothes and walked to the door. There, she stopped and turned around and asked, “You coming?”
  “Yeah, just wait a sec. You go ahead,” Catherine responded.
  "K. See you later," Carolina said as she left.
  “See you later.”