Chapter 1

This is the year 1950 and a whole new war just kicked off in a place called Korea.

It was a place hardly anybody on our block heard tell of in their entire life. I guess I was in that pack of uninformed people, but it didn’t bother me because I was a girl and they were not drafting girls into the military yet.

I am the person that this story is all about.

My name isn’t Alice and since my pa is probably still on the run down in Mississippi for deserting his post in a time of war from all the way back in 1945, I don’t believe I qualify as a true “Orphan”. About the only accurate part of the title is the word “Little”. I am truly little because I have been afflicted since birth with a genetic defect that causes my body to mature at a much slower rate than normal. I won’t burden you with the scientific term for my scrambled genes; just suffice it to know that whatever age I am in real world terms, I will appear to be about half that age on the outside to all concerned parties.

I was born in 1932 right in the midst of the “Depression”.

Let me confess right up front I don’t know much about my pa except he was called up into the Army shortly after Pearl Harbor in 1941 and we never saw neither hide nor hair of him after that time. Of course, I was only nine at the time and my pa was a truck driver that spent almost all his days on the road to earn enough to pay the rent and cost of raising three children back in New York City.

When my ma and pa found out about my genetic issues, they were of a mind to turn me into the church for some other family to wrestle with my problem. My grandmother put the “kibosh” on that in a hurry because she tended to favor me above her other grandchildren and let everyone in the family know exactly how she felt.

I knew it was difficult for my sister and brother to go to school with a sister that was in a higher grade than them but looked like she belonged in kindergarten.

At the time my father disappeared for good on a troop train out of Pennsylvania station for the hinterlands of Texas in early 1942, I was a whopping ten years old and looked like a five year old not yet ready for school of any kind. That was the story of my life and looking back on it now I can see how confusing it really was.

The war progressed in that inexorable way that all wars follow to the ultimate conclusion with a winner and a loser and in this case our country turned out to be the big winner. Everyone was a happy as a lark back there in 1945 like we had all won the lottery.

It was confirmed to us that instead of being “MIA”, or missing in action like we all thought our pa had been reported, the actual circumstances were that he had escaped military confinement and disappeared into the countryside in a country called “The Philippines” at a time when chaos was the ruler of the roost. It was probably a good move on his part since they was charging him with some sort of murderous mayhem with regard to Japanese prisoners of war and his rank of private after nearly four years in combat gave you a good idea of how the Army considered his military value. Us kids was relieved in a way because he was always free and easy with his heavy black belt and even ma got taken into the bedroom sometimes to receive a husbandly “correction”.

In that conclusion of the war year, I turned thirteen and suddenly started to see boys in a different light. Up until that time, I considered them mostly a “pain in the ass” and I am not talking the bend over and grab your ankles variety. I was not much to look at in comparison to the other blossoming roses in my eighth grade class. Most of the other girls already had nice handfuls of round boobs to fool around with real nipples that stuck out like little buttons waiting to be opened or closed. I didn’t have anything in that department but I didn’t mind because it allowed me to run the fastest without being thrown off balance by all that female flesh. I was still climbing the four flights of stairs to my ma’s apartment almost ten times each day and my legs and tiny backside was tight and toned without a single ounce of baby fat to make jokes about.

My closest girlfriend Sue gave me daily reports on how the boys were starting to paw at her ass cheeks and her boobs on the bus, in the cloakroom and even right in class when the nun was standing at the blackboard with her back to us. The only one that they never messed with behind her back was Sister Regina because it was rumored she was touched by the angels and had “eyes in the back of her head”. It was strange how rumors seemed to have a life of their own and no matter what you did to speak the truth; it didn’t make any difference because some people wanted to believe the lie just because it made someone else look bad.

When it came time for us to go to the gym, I was totally embarrassed because my skinny legs and hips looked like I had just escaped from one of those Nazi camps where they put the Jewish people because they didn’t like them. My face was not that bad except my nose was a bit turned up and earned me the nickname of “stuck-up Sallie”. Sallie was my real name and not Alice but after the events of the summer of 1950, I generally accepted that my name was Alice Doe and that I was an orphan under the care of the Metropolitan Social Services Division of City Planning.