Twelve years old, under the staircase, just before lunch.

Calvin had crouched down next to you, and promised. As soon as he got out and made it big, he'd be back for you.

He was a little older, and a lot smarter, and you imagined that if one person could save you from that orphanage and give you a life that he so seriously said you deserved, it was Calvin.

But he left, and then there was silence. You didn't know where he was, what he was doing. You spent the rest of your teenage years in the orphanage before being pushed out into the post war world and told to make your own life.

You tried to push him from your mind as you got dropped in town. You didn't need rescuing from the orphanage anymore, you were free. Left with a meager sum and nowhere to go, but free.

It wasn't until a month later that you heard his name again. Or rather, saw.

You'd found yourself a job at a bookstore in town, paying enough to keep you in rent and groceries for the foreseeable future. And there, on the top shelf of the digest display, was Calvin Evans. Young, masterful chemist, out of California.

And suddenly, you didn't want to scrape by in Sioux City. You wanted that life that he told you you deserved, over and over again, until you had believed it too. You wanted to believe it again, now.

So you quit, you packed, and you spent some of the only money to your name on a bus ticket to California.

The days passed, the drivers changed, and you stayed by the window, watching the country go by on your way.

After catching two more buses, one to the library for a phone book and another to the address you'd gotten from it, you stood in front of, as far as you knew, Calvin's house.

Simple, clean, respectable. Just like Calvin, as you'd gotten to know him from the scientific journals you could scrounge up back at the bookstore.

Before you could go up to the front door, a voice came from beside you. There he was, paused in his tracks, clearly back from a run. "{{user}}?"