Capítulo 2: Chapter 1
1997
Ren always liked watching the embers float off the wicks of the candles Mrs. Barbon set out each night. The other kids in the home always complained about their light being too bright. Something about it fascinated Ren, though. He was ten and the glowing scarlet hues grasped tight on his grasp every night. He sat in the rough cot on his side and stared up toward it on the table two cots away. He reached out his hand and grasped the afterimage of the flame. Like a spirit in the night haunting its ephemeral presence—the light billowed from behind his fingers and shimmered a fading orange while shading the front of his fist in darkness.
Fire was always an attractive substance. It was a close friend that spent half the year on some other doorstep in New York. The cold was so frequent a visitor that anytime the warm came close, it was kept safe as much as possible. It wasn't unusual for some of the children to start secret fires in the corners of their bunks to kindle a relationship with the warmth. All of these attempts would be stamped out just like their fires.
Ironically enough, the kid who was discovered to be the origin of the flame would be tasked with some ridiculous chore out in the cold—whether it be shoveling or plowing—it didn't matter what kind of temperature it was outside. That was the kind of hold Mrs. Barbon had held over the Misguided and Otherwise Parentally Challenged Kids at Fox River.
Ren was one of these unfortunate firebrands one March afternoon. He wasn't the only child caught that day for being a firebrand. Ren and a boy his age named Azzy both were apprehended during the day's cleanup time for their pyro antics. Before that day, the two boys didn't so much as talk to one another—they seemed to belong to different crowds inside the orphanage, but after the day Mrs. Barbon made them sweep off the roof of the building...well, you wouldn't be able to separate them.
The two boys defiantly shoveled the snow off the edge onto the ground below—every push like an act against Mrs. Barbon herself. At first they were quiet, but when Azzy nearly tripped, the first thing Ren could do was belt out a laugh. Azzy was scared for a second, but then turned on Ren and told him off for not going to catch him.
"What would I have been able to do, anyway?" Ren asked, leaning with the broom by his side. "You're taller than me. You'd have pulled me down with you. I just took the probability of what was going to be the best outcome."
"You don't even know what half of those words mean," Azzy said, breathing heavily.
"I sorta do," the words hid the actuality of the situation. Ren knew quite a bit from reading, but first and foremost he knew not to reveal how much you knew with any new encounter. Playing things smart was how you avoided getting yourself hurt.
"Just copying from the older kids. Not even yourself," he said.
"Well you're one to talk! You copied me and started your own fire! If you didn't do that then I wouldn't have gotten caught."
"What do you mean?" Azzy asked.
Ren brushed one pile off the roof and turned to him. "I was doing mine under the vent. The smoke was going to leave through there and where it went would have been out of the room. You were doing yours by your cot. Lucky you didn't set your blanket on fire."
"I wasn't going to burn my blanket! I just...wanted to get warm like you, you know."
"Yeah, well, do it like that without thinking again and you might burn the whole place down."
"I'm not going to do something stupid like that," Azzy said, brushing his pile off. The snow flies off the top and the two boys hear a screech that echoes into the snowy night. They look over the edge and see Mrs. Barbon staring daggers up at them with the fresh coat of snow across her head and shoulders.
The two boys started cackling at the top of their lungs. Others around them recalled the two boys laughing all night long, even in the silence of the darkness.
From that day forward, the two boys were seen back to back like brothers. To Mrs. Barbon's detriment, their mischievousness only seemed to multiply within each other. For Ren, a new flavor of explosiveness was added onto his already more careful nature, and for Azzy, a level of control was added to his chaos. The two boys were the perfect thorn in Mrs. Barbon's side.
One day in the summer the boys were wandering around the streets around upper Glenn, and they saw the local game shop was displaying something that caught both of their eyes — the new GameBoy packaged with...something called Pokémon.
On the display were two creatures—one was an orange dragon with a large yellow stomach, arms that ended in clawed fists and two wings that sprouted out from the back. There was a fierce, determined look and it captured Ren's gaze completely. On the other side, Azzy was staring at the creature that was a large tortoise, bipedal with large features that also ended in claws with two cannons coming out of extended slots in the rear of its shell.
"Woahh" the boys said in unison.
"You thinkin' what I'm thinking?" Azzy asked, a grin forming on his face.
"No, we're not stealing it." Ren knew the boy enough now that mischief was his first answer to problems like this.
"Aw, what? Think of it like...borrowing. We can return it when we're finished."
"No, Kevin in there's a nice guy. I like going in there. If we did anything like that I wouldn't be able to go in anymore."
Azzy sighed. "I guess not. Well, okay, what if I—"
"No." Ren said, still looking up at the display. "Know how much one of those would cost him to replace?"
"Bout how much it would cost for us to actually get one."
"Well, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we split it. You know, shared it?"
"But you see there?" He pointed up at the two monsters, "You can only choose one."
"And? We'd obviously be picking the dragon?" Ren said, matter of fact.
"Uh, I don't think we would?" The challenge in his eyes was clear enough. It was as much of a declaration as it was a clarification.
"Well, it seems we'd have to have some sort of challenge in order to decide who will choose," Ren says.
"It seems so."
The tension hung in the air like an old storm cloud. Neither of the two budged. The door opened beside Azzy and he was drawn out of his trance first. He turned to see a kid a few years older than the both of them walking out with a pack of trading cards in his hand. "Well, I guess it wouldn't really be right to decide here and now. We should later, though? If you really wanted to pool together."
Ren still stared at him for a moment longer, his face turned slowly into a smirk. "Yeah, I still want to. A plan sounds like a perfect idea."
Status de energia semanal
-- Ranking de
Poder 
-- Pedra de
Poder