chapter 3
When I wake the next morning, the sunlight is streaming in the window. It’s so toasty in bed I don’t want to move. I study the dust particles in the slant of light, watch them twirl. My eyes move around my small bedroom and admire how I’ve perked it up with some of the personal things I cart from foster home to foster home. On the dresser there’s a ceramic frog planter that I named Francine. My comforter has a bright sunflower pattern. I stretch and yawn, feel myself crackle to life, then spring out of bed feeling light and optimistic. I even think I smell fresh-squeezed orange juice.
That’s the truly messed-up thing about sunshine. All that bright, glittery yellowness blinds you. It takes about two more seconds to register: I am screwed. This day is going to totally suck. No amount of sunshine can undo that.
By now, word of my freaky outburst is sure to have made the rounds of all the Hunter High cabals—especially the merciless group of smug, too-tanned surfer royalty that rules my bus ride every morning. Those dudes will be my first hurdle of the day. I am going to be bombarded—zombie imitations on the bus, zombie imitations in first-period physics, in second-period English, in Western Civ of course, and on and on. And each and every one of my pop-eyed, twisted-mouthed tormentors will think his particular imitation is the funniest, most original thing ever.
I hate everyone, I say to myself. I really do.
I brush my teeth, spit a big gob of white foam into the sink. How will I get through this day? I have no idea how I’m going to survive. Where will I look? What will I do with my hands?
I try to conjure up some of the power I felt yesterday, but thinking about it only makes my stomach hurt.
I dab on a little face powder, smear rouge on my cheeks. I clip and then unclip my hair, feeling it spring into its usual uncontrollable state. If every teenage girl in the world of every ethnicity started complaining about the problems with her hair—too frizzy, too limp, too wiry, too big, too kinky, too flyaway, too flat on top, not brown or blond or red enough, just a blah, watered-down nothing color—I could join in the conversation at any point. I run my fingers through the maze of knots, tuck what I can behind my ears, and feel the rest of it frizzing out.
My stomach still hurts. What if I have the flu? That would be a good thing. I could stay home all week, and by that time I would be old, tired news.
I pray for food poisoning.
I open my closet. How does one dress for one of the worst days of her life?
I settle on my usual black pullover and jeans. Safe.
I take a deep breath and remind myself of three things that Raymond says I should love about me: I’m smart. I’m strong. I’m a survivor.
But before this dream of a day gets off the ground, it’s time to go into the kitchen and get my usual send-off to school from Lottie Leach, my foster mother, and He-Cat, her butt-ugly pet whose most prominent physical characteristic is the goopy stuff that hardens white in the corners of his eyes. They both hate me.
I’ve been living in this foster home for about six months, but I’m still not immune to the cringeability of what greets me each morning. He-Cat, as usual, is plopped over the floor heater vent soaking up the warmth, his big belly splayed out like an oozing dark puddle. Even on a fairly warm morning, Mrs. Leach—cheapskate that she is about everything else—keeps the heat blasting just for him.
I open a cabinet to get a cereal bowl, and a half-dozen plastic containers tumble out. I straighten them up fast and pour cereal into one. As always, those Leachy eyes are on me, measuring every corn flake to make sure that I don’t eat more than my allotted share. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, her right foot unsocked and propped on a ripped vinyl chair. Her veiny bunion is enough to put me off my breakfast.
Still, I keep a good-girl smile glued in place. I know that putting on this phony act would be living hell to most of the teenage world, but it’s survival tactic number one for me. Imagine that anytime you talk back to your father or roll your eyes at your mother, they threaten to kick you out of their house—and mean it. I am so polite that my jeans would have to catch on fire before I’d complain to a foster parent. Well, the jeans on fire only happened once, which is a whole other story.
Unfortunately, though, as I carry my cereal to the table I accidentally kick the kitty litter box, which sits practically in the middle of the floor like a decorative centerpiece.
Mistake number one: my foot sends a hard, twisted Tootsie Roll of cat crap onto the cracked linoleum and a galaxy of toxoplasma spores into the air. We studied parasites in bio last year, and now I can’t not imagine the invisible creatures that live in cat crap flying up my nostrils and landing in my cereal bowl, where they will proceed to invade my cells and live out their whole life cycle—going into parasite puberty, having promiscuous parasite sex, producing a slew of parasite babies, and then dying messy parasite deaths, all in my major organs.
Mistake number two: I say, “Damn it!”
“You’ll clean that up right now,” Mrs. Leach orders. “And watch that language.”
My face prunes, only not the face she can see but the hidden twin beneath, the face I’ve learned not to show to foster parents. I say, “Of course, Mrs. Leach.”
Satisfied with my groveling, she nods. I sweep. I do everything but whistle while I work. I pretend that I don’t notice how the Leech—the perfect name for her—is shifting in her chair and moaning about the arthritis in her feet. If she tells me to rub her tootsies again, I’ll say hell no! That’s my limit. That’s my breaking point. I won’t do it!
“Rub granny’s poor tootsies, would you?”
A collapse inside of me. I have exactly two choices: rub those tootsies or risk getting on her bad side. And if I piss her off, she might decide that she doesn’t want me living here any more. And that means putting all my stuff into a suitcase again, and living in some awful shelter before they find another foster parent—maybe someone even worse. It could mean a new school and not seeing Raymond every day. It might mean being sent to a group home and sharing a bedroom and dealing with the craziness of ten other foster kids with lives just as sucky as mine. I don’t want any part of that scene anymore.
So I get down on one knee and wrap my hands around a foot that has the texture of a cold, dead fish. I massage. I imagine twisting so hard that her foot comes off like a screw top of a jar. She groans—not with pain, though, with pleasure.
“It’s so nice to have a young person in the house.” The Leech smiles a smile that pulls her lips back over her gums, displaying a rainbow of food particles stuck between the teeth. “Just like having a granddaughter.”
A granddaughter to order around like a servant.
“I have to go now,” I say. “I’ll be late for school.”
Irritated, she shoos me away.
I slam the front door behind me. At least I can do that. That feels good! But only for a second, because now I have a whole day of zombie imitations ahead of me, and even though it’s only 7:30 a.m., I’m exhausted.
It’s not the easiest thing to be one of the world’s best foster kids—the cooperative one, the one who doesn’t talk back, doesn’t run away, doesn’t steal, doesn’t get pregnant, doesn’t drink or do drugs, doesn’t even get mad, doesn’t cause anyone any trouble.