Lost (Chapter 1)

The earliest memory I have was waking up in an old cot with about twenty other kids staring at me.
“Are you new here?” They would keep asking.
I looked around, seeing I was in a circular shaped room. I slowly got up and out of the cot. My feet hit the carpeted floor.
“Where am I?” I demanded groggily.
“Gregory Horrison’s Institute for Parentally Challenged Boys.” A new voice, sharp as a sword, cut through the air.
I looked around to see a tall, stern looking woman looking at me like I was garbage.
“You have a lot to explaining to do, young man. What is your name?”
My memory was blank.
“I… I don’t think I know.” I answered unsurely.
The woman looked as though she didn’t believe me and obviously didn’t even care about me at all. The other children however, shouted in protest.
“You must have a name! You have to remember!”
I shook my head wearily and slumped back onto the cot. The woman stopped before the doorway and said,
“You’re going to have to find a new home soon, boy; this Institute certainly doesn’t need more riffraff off the streets.” She then exited the room.
Off the streets? I had no memory recollection of any events before this. I couldn’t even remember my name. I stayed the same up until where I am now, struggling to keep alive in New York City, in the dark. All I know is that I exist but there may as well be no record of me on the earth. I checked everywhere. I didn’t even have a social security number. And so I ask myself everyday mentally and physically,
“Who am I?”
My days in the orphanage were not pleasant. I soon found the woman to be Ms. Stern, Dean of the children in the Institute. This not did not help me one bit for the fact that she hated me most of all. Every day, I would be forced to work twice as hard as the other students in all of our chores to earn my stay there. I would stay in my small room, all the way up at the top of the tower that was the Institute and stare out the lone window complimented with red drapes on the left side of the wall. It was a few years before my life became changed forever.
I had now memorized every single crack in my floor, every dent in the wall, every crevice in the wood surrounding my cot. I would remember this room for the rest of my life. When I went down for breakfast that day, I was talking with my friend, Robert.
“So is it weird? Not remembering anything?” He had asked me.
“Nah you kind of get used to it.” Was my not to believable reply.
“How about your parents?”
“My what?”
“You know… mom and dad?”
It was the first time I had heard anything like this. I had known no parents my entire life. The idea that I even had some was foreign and strange to me. It was that conversation that really made me thinking about them. Had they left me here on the streets on purpose, or had they lost me?
“No, I don’t think I have any parents.” I said to Robert and partly, even, to myself.
No matter how much I tried to forget about the idea, however, I just could not. I had been offered some small ray of hope of finally leaving this place and I wasn’t about to give up on it just yet. After breakfast, I approached Ms. Stern.
“Ms. Stern?”
“Yes child?” Her reply had always been the same over the years.
“Do I have any parents?”
She sighed like I was wasting her time and snapped, “We found you on the street. What do you think? How would we have any record of your parents?”
It was at that moment I decided that if no one was going to help me, I would help myself. I would search for my parents.