“Okay,” I say. My voice cracks. I feel self-conscious all of a sudden. I brace myself. I can already feel the opening I made to let the words out. There’s nothing left to do but let go, talk. “Okay. My parents adopted me when I was four.”
I stare at the wall, at the roses. They don’t look that great suddenly. Whoever stayed in here would have realized that really fast. The huge leaves and forced perspective: it’s like it was engineered to keep you feeling small. “My biological mom left me at a shelter in Pennsylvania. I don’t know what her name was.”
Lilly makes a consoling sound, like that was the punch line of my story. Not even close.
I pick at the pillowcase plan, the black arrows and scribbles bleeding into the fibers. I think about my biological mom sometimes. Who doesn’t? But she’s not the one who makes me angry. She’s not the one who made me want to run away to foreign continents or break Japanese porcelain with a baseball bat, or sit under the dining room table for three hours ripping my straight-A report card into smaller and smaller pieces, because no one had even asked, no one cared at all what it said–––
“Usually if you’re in an orphanage past the toddler stage, it means you’re going to foster care. People don’t want messed-up babies, or ones with druggy parents, or emotionally distant ones. So when this couple came in and said they would adopt me, it was amazing. I never smiled. I hardly ever spoke. I just watched people. But for some reason they didn’t mind. They were rich. They really wanted a kid.” My lungs feel tight. I can still remember the first time I saw them, coming across the parking lot, all honey-colored lighting and flowing hair like they had stepped straight out of an insurance commercial. I bet there are all sorts of great adoptive parents out there. Waiting lists of people who can hardly wait to give some random kid a great life. Mine were not those parents. It was like they were shopping for a purse or a new car, something to complete their idyllic image of familyhood.
Step 5: Adopt a small child. Great for holiday pictures and also to shut up all your annoying, judgmental friends who think you’re self-absorbed.
“They could have been monkeys and I would have loved them,” I say. “I did love them. And then when I was six, they had a real baby.”
The shadowy roses look monstrous now, writhing across the walls. The others are sitting stock-still, waiting, and that old, hot anger is creeping back into my stomach. I see fourteen-year-old-me snipping my hair short in the bathroom, calling myself names for being a whiner, for being needy, for being a typical spoiled-brat-rebel with no real problems, even though they felt like real problems, even though I’d like to be happy.
“My parents got the news and it was, like, from one day to the next I was extra. They didn’t need me anymore. It’s like they blamed me, like I had somehow tricked them into adopting me. I was this imposter they had let into their home and pretended was theirs, and now they didn’t need to pretend anymore. You know how that hurt? Do you have any idea how it hurts when you’re six years old and you don’t have anyone in the universe, and then some people come along and say they’ll take care of you and . . . and they lie? They toss you aside after five minutes, like you’re not even a person; you’re just a photogenic accessory and now you’re done, who even cares about you anyway, Anouk.”
I’m crying. It started somewhere between “hurt” and “take care of you” and now it won’t stop. Jules and Will are staring at me, wide-eyed. Hayden’s leaning over a pump-action shotgun, fiddling with it. I want one of the roses to detach from the wall. Swallow me down whole.
“You wanted all the gory details, right, Jules?” I say. “Well, this still isn’t the end. Here you go: my parents hardly even talked to me after my sister was born. They talked about me. I overheard them all the time, being, like, ‘What about her? What are we going to do with her, what if she exhibits emotional problems and influences our daughter?’ And yeah, I had emotional problems after that. I thought my parents were aliens. I started getting paranoid delusions and I couldn’t trust anyone and I watched them playing with Penny and how they loved her a million times more than me, and one morning I took her out of her crib and carried her down the driveway to the street. I was barely big enough to lift her, and she was crying and I was crying, too, and I was telling her we were leaving, and I hated her, and we were never going back, our parents would never see us again . . . I didn’t know what I was doing, okay? I was a dumb little kid and I took her out into the street. A food truck hit us. Larry’s Brasserie Chickens, how ridiculous is that? I broke four bones in my arm. Penny flew fourteen feet. She almost died.”