| ooo. bio |
[15 Dec 2009|05:09pm] |
It was Ellis' first day at a new school, the second school he had been to in the past year, when he was proposed with a question. As simple as it was, it was the only question anyone could ask that could help them understand the little boy with a runny nose and a Ninja Turtle lunch box standing in the back of the room. He could describe that very moment like it had happened only yesterday. The sound and tone of his teacher's voice when she asked him what he would like to be be when he grew up was, to this day, imprinted perfectly in his brain. He sat there meticulously picking the lint from the sleeves of his jacket, never once looking up, as he carefully considered his options. From the way he told the story it sounded as if time stood still around him for hours instead of the five minutes until he finally came up with something. He would become an astronaut and spend the rest of his life living in space. The way he would explain it was that even at a young age he knew that he was alone in the world despite what everyone else would tell him. At least in his fragile, developing mind he got that once he was in space it would be okay that he had no one to support him and that the only people he would ever need again were those few working in the command center. And most importantly, the second he stepped on or off of his ship all eyes would be on him, cheering him on as he made his journey be it to nowhere or Mars. His story about that faithful day during the spring of his first grade year is one of the few tales of his past that he would tell with a mix of pride and amusement. It was also one of the few that he felt that he could tell without feeling he would receive the pity he thought he would get.
The city streets of Baltimore was full of celebration the night Marie Michaels gave birth to youngest son, but while everyone else was celebrating the Orioles bringing the World Series trophy back to Maryland, Marie was in her hospital bed wondering what had compelled her to keep little Ellis. It was hard enough already to care for the four children she had at home and she knew damn well all the promises Ellis' father had made while she was pregnant were barely worth their weight in dirt. But there she was in the middle of Baltimore with no one else other than the child in her arms, the child that she knew she could not care for nor do anything about. She struggled with the few options she had left but ultimately she decided that she would simply take him home and pray that just maybe a better time would come their way. Those good times never did arrive. Marie found herself working every hour of the day almost as soon as she got home from the hospital and, just like she had expected, the father of her youngest son wanted nothing to do with him. If it was not for the help of the few people she had in her life chances were Marie would have been completely lost. Not that Ellis remembered or even knows of the sacrifices his birth mother made the moment he was born to make sure that, for better or worse, him and his siblings could have the little that they did. If you were to even ask him, he would just say that he had no memories of those first four years of his life. There was no recollection of the eldest of the four coming home from school to pick him and his other two siblings up from the neighbours apartment and making sure they were bathed and asleep before there mother came home. He didn't even have the slightest idea of how they lived on nothing but canned pasta and ramen noodles for weeks at a time. The only thing that he could really remember was the tiny room where there was nothing more than a giant bed and the little wooden blocks he spent all his time playing with.
It was only a matter of time until someone made the one call that meant Ellis would never get a chance to even begin forming the memories of the woman who was never dealt the best hand and just wanted to try to bluff her through life way in hopes of making her children's better. Just days before Orioles found itself back in the race to bring championship to the city, the four Michaels children were taken away from their mother and each other. Each one was sent to a different part of the city to start new lives, better lives with people who would love them like the social worker told them. The only part the social worker seemed to forget to mention was how chances were those same people would not be there for them forever. For the next seven years Ellis found himself living all over Maryland, never did he stay in one place for more than two years. Every time it looked like he was about to find himself a family, he was shipped off once again to try and start a new life with new people. Each time he would start to feel at home somewhere, the family that had taken him in would just say that they didn't have the money it would take to make him one of their own or that it simply wasn't the right time for them. And time was the last thing Ellis had anymore. He was on the verge of becoming a teenager and once you hit thirteen chances were that you were going to end up in the system forever. He knew all too well that no one ever wants to adopted the older kids. At least when a kid was young, he thought, a person could make sure they were not receiving broken goods, and whatever damage they may have had there would still time to fix it. But at his age, Ellis had become a lost cause. The fact that he was the quiet boy who mostly kept to himself would become irrelevant because no matter what he was, the few times he was to acted out he would simply be labeled another lost cause that no one could help.
At thirteen his life had become nothing more than counting down the hours until his eighteenth birthday when he would finally be free of the constant back-and-forth between foster homes. It was then that he also happened to cross the paths of the Hayes. A family friend of the people he had been staying with, the Hayes clan were everything he had dreamed about since a child. They were the type of family that he would have loved to imagine his actual one was like. There was a love and admiration among them that actually left Ellis wondering if it was possible for them to even be like that all the time. Not that it mattered if what he saw while they were visiting was just for show, all he knew was he wanted what they had. And he voiced that want the second he got a chance to. He had never opened up to anyone like he did that last night before the family went back to their Georgia home. As they sat there on the front porch he spilled every detail of his life thus far to Mrs. Hayes. He told her about how every morning he woke up hoping that it would be the day when someone finally told him he was going to stick around for longer than a few months and how deep down he knew, or thought he knew, it all came down to the fact that the only reason people stopped short of adopting him was that their check from the government would stop coming. As cynical as it was, it really was the only explanation he could come up with; that when it came down to it people's love of money was more important than love for a child that wasn't theirs.
Something he said that night must have clicked with Ally Hayes because from that moment not a week went by that she didn't call to check up on how Ellis was doing. And she made it known that if he ever had a problem that she and her husband were just a phone call away. Ellis didn't quite understand why they had so much interest in his life, after all no one had shown so much before them. To be frank he just thought it was their way of being nice, that they were just trying to make whatever time he had left before he moved on to his next family as comfortable as possible. What he didn't know, and wouldn't find out until much later, was on the warm spring evening they spent together Ally Hayes saw something in him that reminded her so much of herself when she was his age. Sure their stories we very different, but in the end it all came down to longing for the same thing: someone there to just want and love them in the purest form possible. As the leaves began to change colours and baseball fans began to once again prepare for four long months without their favorite sport, Ellis would finally realize what all those months of calls from the Hayes' actually meant. The small living room of the Maryland home was full of balloons and streamers, the music blasting as Ellis and his friends ran around the house in celebration of his fourteenth birthday in hope of making the best of what he had already been told would be his last before he had to relocate yet again. He had no idea when the day would come, but he knew that whenever anyone brought up the subject that the day was sooner rather than later. Of course, he was not expecting that the day would only be a little over a month away. It was while they had all gathered around the birthday cake that the big announcement was made: Jordan and Ally had been working on adopting him and finally give him the family he had longed for.
It was the middle of December when Ellis took his first step into the Hayes house hold. The every inch of every room was covered in decorations for the winter holidays. If he hadn't been brought home from the airport by the Hayes' themselves he would have been sure that he had accidentally walked onto the set of the next Home Alone movie and Macaulay Culkin was just up the stairs planning his next attack. Never in his life had Ellis felt so at home in his life like he did when he made the trek to New York, it was almost as if these people were the blood family that he had left so long ago. And that was a feeling that would last forever. Sure he would wake up every now and then wondering when exactly the Hayes would take back everything they had given him. He would speculate just when he'd have to pack up what little he had brought with him and move on to the next home. No matter how many times the Hayes would reassure him that that would never be the case, even through his years in college he was always anticipating a call to let him know that, just like so many before them, that they no longer had to care for or about him since he wasn't theirs to begin with. But each and every time he started to doubt them, he was given that simple reminder that he was a son, a brother, and, most importantly, a Hayes despite it not being by blood.
Ellis was never the sort who liked to talk about his life and most people only knew the most basic facts about his history. It was the way that he liked to live his life. Sure, since he came to be a member of the Hayes family he learned to let people in and let them be a part of his life. He learned that he could not go on forever never growing close to anyone out of the fear that they would leave him. But with all they had taught him, he just felt safer when there was no one else he had to rely on, the same people who would only to let him down when he needed them the most. Be it that the person was a friend or lover, he constantly saw that outside of the four walls of his house people would still be all the things he knew growing up. And as long as he didn't go out of his way to have more people than needed involved in his life, not only could he save himself from being hurt, but he could also be whatever he wanted. After all, no one would even know enough about him to call him a liar every time he pretended that he was funnier, smarter, and just an over all better person than he actually was.
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