The meeting room where -=Elita=- sits is chilly, but welcoming; a nice coffee table covered in magazines and coloring pages, a few chairs and a couch, a lamp in the corner that softly lights up the room.
“He will be here in just a moment.”
“Thank you,” she says to the other woman, the head adoption coordinator.
The coordinator nods back a small ‘welcome’ when she turns to leave. Just for a moment, though, she stops, seemingly lost in a thought, then turns back to speak to Elita over her shoulder.
“I’ve known him since he was small.” She says. “Tobias….. he isn’t a bad bean. He’s just…… hurt.”
With that, she leaves, and the room is quiet until the sound of paw steps echo through the door a few minutes later. Elita smiles and stands, looking expectantly at the teen as he enters. He keeps to himself as you both exchange a soft hello to each other before sitting down.
“Hello. I’m excited to finally meet you Tobias. I hope you don’t mind me asking a few questions… There is only so much that I can learn from your papers and, well, I just want to know more about YOU., if that’s alright. I know you don’t care for talking that much so I’ll keep it short. Sound good?”
“I guess.”
“Well…. First of all, ‘Tobias’ isn’t your given name from what I’ve seen on your papers. Why do you not go by Angelo?”
“Easy, I don’t want it to be my name…. Angelo is what my mother wanted to call me. She told me that back when her and Dad were still together, she always wanted a kid, and when she finally had her first egg, she nicknamed it her ‘little angel’. She loved it so much that she decided that that was what she would name her first kid; Angela if it was a girl and Angelo if it was a boy. After Dad left and Mom took me here, I didn’t want that name anymore. It belonged to the son Mom wanted, and it wasn’t me. I had to choose something else and I was just reading one day and, there was a guy in the book, Tobias, and it was weird reading how he had problems with his parents too… Yet he is so confident and strong and talented.. He left them and became his own person. I saw that and suddenly I wanted that too… So I decided that his name would be my name too…”
“So… it sounds like some stuff happened. Do you not want to see them?”
“Not really…. All I really remember is that when I was born, Mom and Dad got into a huge fight. All I could really understand was Mom trying to reason with him or something, but all Dad kept saying was ‘He doesn’t look like me! He doesn’t look like me!’, which is true. I have my mom’s markings, but I look nothing like my dad….. I guess Mom didn’t love Dad as much as he thought, and it drove him insane. He left not long after and Mom took care of me on her own for a while but, looking back, I can tell she didn’t really want to. So she left me here…. I’m fine with it though… if I’ve learned anything Tobias in the book, it’s that families don’t need to be related by blood. He made his own family, and so will I.”
Both Elita and Tobias sit in silence, letting his answer hang in the air, though Elita knew it had to weigh a ton on the young bean in front of her. After a moment, she shifts in her chair, determined to lighten up the mood a little.
“Well, I know you’ve probably seen me in here several times over the past couple weeks and I was just wondering…. I’ve seen you sometimes with paint on your fur or colored pencils sticking out of your pouch. Do you like to make art?”
Tobias hides his face a little with his hair, slightly embarrassed looking, and shifts himself self consciously.
“I.. I do. It helps me sometimes… I guess, even though I say I don’t care, a little part of me does… And it hurts some seeing other kids, the younger ones, find families and…. I wonder why that isn’t me. When I’m by myself it’s really hard, and I just get the urge to put it on paper, you know? I think I’ve used up all the paint and colored pencils. But yeah, I do.”
Elita smiles encouragingly, glad that her guess was right.
“Do you draw with the other kids? Or do anything in particular with them?”
“Sometimes… The really young ones get on my nerves and pull my fur and stuff, but the older ones are alright I guess. Since I’m the oldest on here, I help look out for them and make sure they don’t hurt themselves. We go outside to the playground and I kinda teach some of them how to draw with chalk and play Four Squares and little stuff like that… I don’t mind them for the most part.”
“That sounds great. And I know the staff here appreciate the help. All I’ve heard them say is how helpful you are, watching out for the younger kids… You’d be great at it you know. Taking care of kids I mean… Have you ever thought about what you’d like to do? In the future?”
“I… I don’t really know. Haven’t thought about it much. I just see myself here, because I’ve been here so long… I guess if I had to choose, I’d like to make art for money. I mean, it’s what I do best and it’s easy for me to put my thoughts onto paper like that. But, I’d like to help other kids like me too. The ones without moms and dads. It’s tough when you try to do it by yourself, makes you go crazy sometimes… I remember getting so mad at them sometimes that I’d dye my fur just so I could look as different as I could from them. It never worked of course, the dye couldn’t stick to my fur, but you know what I mean. These kids need someone to look out for them since their parents don’t care. And I know how they feel.”
“That sounds like a great aspiration, Tobias.”
Tobias nods and mutters a thank you from beneath his bangs, embarrassed again. Then, as soon as it started, the meeting is over. He and Elita both stand and say good-bye before leaving, both feeling a similar kind of hope bloom in them.
-=Art Here=-

Having trouble with my computer so I apologize if anything is off/weird