Chapter 7 Alicia's Dream

Jordan stood beside me, with a wet cloth hanging limply from his hands, a worried, and almost pained look on his face. He turned to me, and in a quiet voice, asked, “Is she okay?” Then he turned to Alicia, and looked her over once before hugging her tight, then going back to what he had been doing previously. I decided to spend a little time with Alicia; she reminded me of Destiny in the way she talked, and played, and I liked that. I would still have to get used to this family that didn’t really feel like my own. We talked a little about our excursion to Disney World. It’s not exciting enough to put into print, so I will only mention the important parts. Alicia brought up Disney princesses, and said that her favorite was Ariel, or the Little Mermaid. She said she liked Ariel because she was pretty and that she did what was right. I complimented her saying, “Well, then, Alicia, she’s a lot like you.” She giggled and gave me one of her baby dolls to play with. I actually hadn’t ever played with dolls; the Black’s had never given me any toys when I was younger, and the little they did give me had been Chris’s old He-Man figures or toy cars that had only two or three wheels.

Chapter 7 Alicia's Dream

I left the room, and just as I was about to go to the bathroom, I heard a scream. I ran to the source of where I thought the scream might be coming from, and saw Alicia sitting in the middle of the living room floor, staring at her finger. It was pulsating and gyrating quite rapidly; almost as though she were having a really bad muscle spasm. It nearly scared me, and must have scared her, but a minute after it had started, it stopped. I sat down next to her, and said, “Alicia, how did your finger do that?” She stared at me as though I had just asked her to stick her hand in the microwave. She continued to stare at me until she realized that it no longer hurt, and then she replied in a voice barely above a whisper, “I don’t know. I was playing with Tootsie,” she rubbed the back of the Lykes’s cat Tootsie’s head, “And all of a sudden my finger went cwazy.” I examined her finger, checking for any hint at all that something had gone wrong with it, but found nothing but her tiny little forefinger, intact and the same as it had always been, at least the same as it had always been over the few days I had known her.