They looked surprised to see me.
“What are you doing?” I asked, because I wasn’t sure where to start with them, talking-wise.
They were a lot younger than me, eleven or twelve, maybe, which seemed a little young to babysit a five-year-old. I wondered why the five-year-old wasn’t in kindergarten already, and then I wondered why having Roger home wasn’t good enough, and then I wondered what these two little girls had done that was so terrible that they had to end up in a foster home. I didn’t know at the time that it’s usually the parents doing something wrong. I know it now.
“We’re looking at the clouds to see what kind of shapes they look like,” one of them said.
Nobody said anything for a weird length of time, me included, and then the other girl said, “Who are you?”
“I’m the new foster kid. Didn’t anybody tell you I was coming?”
“Nope,” they both said, almost exactly at the same time.
I didn’t know what to say about that, so I lay down on my back in the long grass—a little ways away because they didn’t know me yet—to see what was so great about those clouds. They were kind of puffy, so I guess it didn’t seem impossible to make shapes out of them in your mind, but my mind didn’t really work that way anymore. Imagining wasn’t really something I still did, because nothing I imagined anymore was very good, so why dream it up?
Nobody was talking, and that got weird after a while, so I said, “This place seems kind of bad. Or is that just me?”
“I’ve had eight foster homes,” one of them said, “and this one takes the prize for the very worst.”
Then the other girl said, “I had one that was worse. But it’s bad enough. Why? Have all your other placements been good?”
“Placements” seemed like a weird word to hear such a young kid using, so I figured it was a language she learned from her social worker or her foster parents.
“This is my first,” I said. Then I said, “That one looks a little like an elephant. See? That’s his trunk, going off to the right there.”
I waited, but nobody said they saw the elephant, so I decided to keep talking. Sometimes when I get nervous I just keep talking.
“So she keeps telling me all these things that I’m not supposed to tell my social worker, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll just tell on her anyway. I mean, if she’s a bad foster mother, shouldn’t somebody know?”
“Don’t,” one girl said.
And the other one jumped in right away to back her up. “You really are new, aren’t you? You never do that. You never tell on them with your social worker. Especially not with this lady. Because they don’t really do anything about it. They just go to the foster parent and tell them to fix the problem, and then they walk away and go back to their office. And then you’re stuck home with the lady you just told on, and she knows you just told on her. So it gets a lot worse after that.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time, because I was letting it settle in, about how this lady who more or less owned me, who had total control over my life at that point, would make things worse for me on purpose, as punishment, if I tried to make anything better.
“I wonder why people like that even take in foster kids,” I said. More or less talking to myself out loud.
They both laughed.
“Because they get money from the government for every one they take in,” one of them said. I never knew which one because they sounded a little bit alike and I never turned my head.
“Well, that solves a lot of mysteries,” I said.
It’s funny how many times when something seems impossible to explain, it turns out money is the part you weren’t getting. You know, once you finally figure it out.
Dinner was spaghetti with almost no sauce. She gave us a lot of it but, holy cow, there was almost no sauce. It was like she just waved a jar of sauce over the pasta without really pouring.
Roger didn’t even bother to show up, just stayed in the living room watching TV, and the lady didn’t even turn off her electronic cigarette or take it out of her mouth.
Then I looked up and saw that the five-year-old, the real daughter, had hot dogs and baked beans for dinner. Two hot dogs on those nice, soft white buns, with ketchup and mustard, and this big sea of baked beans all over her plate. I was amazed that a kid who was only five could eat all that, but Lisa was kind of plump so I guess she was putting away a lot of food on a regular basis.
That’s when I started to get mad, and I never stopped being mad after that, because what kind of person takes money from the government to feed a kid and then gives them nothing but cheap white flour for dinner and pockets the difference while they have to watch your real kid get real food to eat?
But I ate all the spaghetti, because I was hungry, and because there was something to be said for having your stomach full of food, almost no matter what kind of food it is.
The whole thing really came apart at bedtime when I found out she was going to lock me in, so that’s when it hit me that I might be better off the way I’d been living before. I mean, the street was bad in a lot of ways, but at least I was free to try to make things better for myself if I could think of how to do that.
But I still figured I would try to tough it out for the rest of Bodhi’s ninety-day jail sentence.
She told me to go to the bathroom before
