Annie: (big sigh) Yeah, I just keep seeing the look on Nancy’s face when they told her at the next supervised visit that it was all over.
Me: I was told that “look” was a gunslinger’s stare, followed by an impressive meltdown.
Annie: Yeah, but there was a second right before that. She was whipped.
Me: I don’t know, Annie. You can see that look, you can dream that look, you can believe it was all on you. We both know how hard it is to outthink your feelings, but we also know there was no way Nancy was going to get it together to be your mom. You just got a bad draw, honey. What else you got?
Annie: You know, war with Pop.
Me: I thought we decided that’s a battle, not a war. Come on, Annie, one year and you’re on your own. Off to college, calling your own shots. Just hold it together.
Impression: Conflicted, which I see as normal for her age and time of life. The intensity comes from her history. Her swagger and trepidation will both get tested.
Emily Palmer, M.A.
ChapterTwo
So here comes summer between junior and senior year and Hannah, Mariah, and Leah (I know, a lot of h’s) and I are making our way through the massive Hoopfest crowd, looking for our court. Hoopfest is the largest three-on-three street b-ball tournament in the country. We’ve played together every year since we were ten and we’ve won our age group every time but once . . . when we came in second. After this year we go our separate ways.
Hannah and Leah are small and quick, I’m about middle, and Mariah owns the paint. You play three with one sub, so we can go big or small. A few other teams will give us a run, but in the end, we rule.
“Let’s get through today undefeated,” Leah says. “It’s going to be in the high nineties, like our shoes could melt. We’ve had to come up through the losers bracket three years in a row.” She frowns at me. Leah knows my “Losers Bracket” strategy and the reasons behind it, and she is not a fan, probably because we always win, but I seldom see any Boots. But she’s my best friend, so most years she tolerates it; but it is hot. Leah’s real sport is swimming—though it could be any sport she chooses—and Simone Manuel and Cullen Jones aside, she’s well aware she could count the other top-notch black swimming studs on one partially amputated hand. Her plan, along with her younger sister, is to blow that trickle into a river.
“I know,” Hannah says now, “we play three extra games when that happens; just one year I want to win straight through. We could die in this heat.”
So we blow our first game on a missed short jumper by me, followed by shoddy defense. This girl I could spot ten points in a one-on-one game to eleven and beat ten times out of ten drives around me and lays one in to end it. She snags the ball as it comes through the net and flips it to me in a take that gesture that will cost her big when we see them again coming up through the losers bracket.
My teammates are scary quiet as we throw half-drunk Gatorade bottles into our workout bags. Leah takes me aside and whispers, “Un means ‘no’; defeat means ‘loss.’ What do you get when you put them together?”
I shrug. “Slow start.”
“Uh-huh. Hoopfest has emergency room statistics about days like these.”
“But think how much better we’ll all feel when we come all the way back and win it,” I say. “I mean, what feels better than, like, pressure?”
“Flu, acne, your period . . .”
“Okay, I get it.”
She gives me her look.
Mariah squints and points at me. “You do know there’s something wrong with you, right?”
I assure her I do.
Here’s why the losers bracket. After the shoot-out between Nancy and Mrs. Granger, my hopscotching between homes was done. The Howards told Mr. Novotny they’d keep me until I was grown if and only if social services stopped bouncing me in and out like a bolo ball. They didn’t adopt because that would have let the state off the hook if they decided to bail on me when I turned into Lizzie Borden at thirteen, which many experts told them was not only possible but likely. (I’m seventeen and it hasn’t happened yet, but I’m not making any promises.) At any rate, they wrote up a long-term foster care agreement, which puts me permanently with the Howards until I’m eighteen, or until Pop Howard kills me.
So I didn’t get the parents I want, but I got the ones I need. A childhood with the Boots does not lead one to Yale or Stanford or U-Dub or even Spokane Community. It leads to the corner of McDonald’s and Walmart. Plus, certain times when Nancy and I get around each other, we fight from the time we’re within earshot until one of us irritates the other so bad somebody uses the c-word; which is crazy because when I can’t see her or Sheila or any of their lunatic entourage, I get really, really anxious. It’s like when you go to IHOP and order the chocolate chip pancakes with Hershey’s Syrup and a cup of hot cocoa; you know it’s bad for you, but do you change your order to the omelet? You do not. So when I asked Mr. Novotny if we could have sporadic, supervised visits, he smiled, brushed his hands together, and said, “When your mom’s rights were terminated, she became a nonentity to me. Non. Over. Finished. Done. Free at last.”
There’s a restraining order on Nancy for the Howards’ place because she has stalker in her DNA. Having Nancy lurking in a neighborhood like ours
