In the long, echoing hallways of an old state-run children’s home, people had called him Limp since he was little. Sometimes quiet, withdrawn Alex felt with a sharp bitterness that the nickname had replaced his real last name for good. “Hey, Limp, move out of the way and quit slowing us down!” the older boys would yell as they played soccer in the dusty back lot.
The old leather ball kept thudding off toward the chain-link fence buried in weeds. “Go get it, come on, use those legs,” lanky Nick Zayler would say with a smirk, knowing full well Alex couldn’t keep his footing on the uneven ground. “Man, Limp, you’re no help to anybody,” he’d add, every time, just to get a rise out of him.
Alex would say nothing, just lower his blond head with its stubborn cowlicks sticking every which way. Deep in the pockets of his faded gym shorts, he clenched his thin fists until his knuckles went white. The hurt sat in his throat like a stone, but he had long ago made himself a promise: he would not give those boys the satisfaction of hearing him break.
He had already forgotten how to cry over the daily jabs. Instead, he would turn away from the noisy crowd and limp off into the back of the neglected old park. The kids called him Limp for a simple reason: one of his legs had been shorter than the other since birth.
That was also the reason he had ended up inside the cold walls of the institution. Eleven years earlier, when doctors told his mother that her baby had been born with a permanent disability, she signed the papers and left him there. Alex found that out by accident one day when a staff member asked him to carry a stack of case files to the nurse’s office.
The gray-haired nurse, always in a hurry, handed him the folders and rushed off to answer a ringing phone in the hallway. It never crossed her mind that the quiet boy would open one. But when Alex saw his own last name on a file, he opened it with shaking hands and slowly read the official statement in which his mother gave him up.
Most kids in crowded foster institutions spend years hoping their parents will come back. That day, the boy with the sad gray eyes stopped waiting for good. And after that, he stopped crying into his pillow at night too….
