08.22.08
Orphan fighter, pt. 9
A few days later, I got a call from Dale. He wanted me down at the office in an hour. I was annoyed. It was 2 PM, and I didn’t feel like getting out of bed yet. Still, I felt obligated to be there, so I fell out of bed and tidied up. 50 minutes later, I was at the office. Doris greeted me and said that Dale would be out soon. I didn’t feel much like talking, so I excused myself and loitered in the lobby.
“Hi, Jack, how are you today?” It was Dale.
“I’m all right, how ’bout you?”
“Good, good. The car’s ready, so let’s get going.”
I had a question. “Do we really need a car and all that?”
“It’s a bit of a drive, so it’ll give us some time to hammer out some details.”
“Ah, that’s fine.”
We got into the back of a black euro car and set out for lands unknown.
On the way, he explained how the operations at Dale’s worked. They kept the orphans in a house out in the country. Parents looking for kids would go to the main office to do all the paperwork and whatnot, and the kids that met their criteria would be bused in for meetings. It was cheaper to house the kids in the country than to rent out space in the city. I was being taken to the place where they kept the kids, and he wanted me to find a few kids who had the potential to be winners.
When we got to the place, I wasn’t surprised to see that it looked basically like a reformatory. It was complete with watch towers and high fences. Pretty cool, if you ask me. We had to pass through a security checkpoint before going in, and when we pulled up to the main building and got out of the car, there were security guards waiting to greet us. I took it orphaneering was serious business.
After we entered the main place, I was told that we would be going to the gym to meet some of the kids who were being considered for the vacant spot on the team. Before all that though, I had something important to do.
“Yo, where’s the bathroom in this place?”
The guard gave me some instructions, and I managed to get there just in time. I stepped over a few unconscious bodies and felt the relief spread through my body. It wasn’t until afterward that I realised that it was kind of strange that there were some dudes lying around, out cold and everything. I bent over to inspect one of them, but all I noticed was a sharp pain in the back of my head and the cold smelly floor rushing up to meet my face.