Page 79 - Grade 10 cornice

She had appeared in front of him to play with him again, but had gone back to “wake up”

as she called it, and now Julio was sitting there with one of his confused brothers.

Julio blinked once. Then twice. It all felt too real to be an imaginary friend. Going

down the memory lane, he remembered the last farewell that he had bid to her. Confused,
yet determined, he grabbed the drawing for any clue at all. For a while, he flipped it

around and over, then he saw it. A misspelled address written in a squiggly handwriting

at the bottom of the page.

Needless to say, Julio soon found himself on a train to Texas, the place that had been

scribbled on his drawing, the place which would probably answer the questions that had
been stored in his head since his childhood. Soon after, he stood in front of an old house,

feeling moronic. The brown wooden house had some planks falling off, looking lonely

and empty. The grass in the yard was an overgrown jungle. That place seemed familiar.

He recognized that place as the orphanage he was adopted from. Disappointed and overly
frustrated, he was about to turn away and head back to the train station when he heard

it. That voice that haunted him in his dreams, yet colored his childhood, that sweet sound

that felt like heaven to his ears was coming from a silhouette behind him.

“Took you long enough.”

-Sampada Puri