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At Parker’s next foster home she had 4 other “siblings”. After 3 days she ran away to find Danny, in the middle of a thunderstorm. The second oldest kid from the house, a 12-year-old boy named Travis, found her curled up under the play structure of a park 3 neighborhoods over, it was sometime around 3am the next morning. He lay down in the sand next to her.
“They don’t know you’re gone yet.” He said to the soaking wet little girl.
“I need to find Danny.”
Travis smiled. “You’re not going to find him under a slide. Come out, we’ll get you dried off. We can find our foster siblings again when we’re older, but we’ve got to survive first.”
“How did you find me?”
Travis shrugged. “I just looked.”
“Maybe you should be a cop”
He laughed. “Yeah, right.”
For 4 months Travis taught her how to survive. How to steal extra food when “parents” were skimpy, how to stay out of the way when the liquor came out. He never could teach her how to buy favors from the other kids though, they found her disconcerting.
After that she ran off. If Travis had remembered her, he had so many younger sisters, one lost little girl was bound to get lost in the cracks, he might have found out that she went to juvi shortly after, then dropped off the grid after her release. But she never forgot the boy who taught her how to survive.