But the thing was, after years of wearing clothes from dirty boxes on the side of the road, you wanted plastic and gloss. You thought you should have had a chance at plastic and gloss, and shopping for a brand-new dress at Park Mall in Tucson, in one of those cute stores with blaring music and pouty girls behind the register, and kissing a cute and nice boy, even. All of it.
You will never forget the hurt in your mother’s voice after you said the bad thing.
The way she said your name before you hung up on her.
In your bedroom, you pull the dress off the hanger and slip it on.
She was right. How did she know that it would fit so well? That the torso was cut to be somewhat loose, so your breasts wouldn’t strain the fabric. It’s billowy, and then drifts into the sash.
You will never take this dress off. It was all she wanted, for you to wear it, to look beautiful. And she didn’t get to see you in it.
You hear footsteps and turn. Your friend’s face is wet with tears.
She says, “Is that.” No question mark.
You nod.
“Okay. If that’s what you want to wear.”
She blinks, considering.
She says, “Actually, it looks really good on you,” and bursts into fresh tears.
She sniffles, “I swear we’ll get through this.”
You are silent. Whatever words you might have had left are drifting away. Inside the glass, the girl-bug drops her eyes. She’s tired now.
“I love you,” Cake says.
She’s crying hard. It kind of makes you angry, that she would cry. Like you should comfort her.
Her mother is driving somewhere in a nice silver car, with coffees in a cardboard tray, and warm muffins in a bag, and will arrive at any moment. And when your friend goes home tonight, and needs clean clothes, or someone to watch a movie with, someone to buy her the kind of underwear a sixteen-year-old girl would love to wear, someone to make her favorite food, which is homemade pizza with artichoke hearts and pineapple and garlic, that person will be there to do it.
Her mother is alive.
Your friend says, “I’m so sorry, Tiger. I’m so sorry. I’m here, Tiger. You aren’t alone.”
You wish you could speak, so you could tell her she’s a goddamn liar.
16 hours, 1 minute
IT’S A TINY BUILDING with paneled walls and thick green carpeting and dusty window blinds in the lobby that clink against the glass. There’s a hallway with lots of doors and faded posters with sad-looking kids. The posters say things like A home shouldn’t be hard to find and Fostering means family.
It’s getting late now. It was hard to get Cake’s mom out of the house this morning; she lingered for a long time, looking through my mom’s drawers and files, muttering, “She must have left something,” even though Karen said we needed to be at her office by 1:00 p.m.
The loud clock on the paneled wall says 1:22 p.m.
Karen the frizzy-haired social worker is talking to another woman in the corner. Karen’s not dressed in sweats and a hoodie now. She’s wearing a nice beige skirt and a pink shirt with white buttons. She’s holding a folder with my name on it, written in blue felt-tip pen.
Grace “Tiger” Maria Tolliver, 12/5/2002.
I’m a file folder now, a case, someone’s job.
My breath comes in hiccups. Cake whispers, “It’ll be okay.”
“No, it won’t,” I tell her.
We stare at each other.
Cake drops her eyes. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Karen comes over. She does a double take at my dress.
“Pretty,” she says hesitantly. “Different, that’s for sure.”
She says Cake and her mom can’t come in, that it’s time to say goodbye. Her voice is clipped, all business. She tells Rhonda, “Grace and I need to start some paperwork.”
I say flatly, “Tiger. My name is Tiger.”
Karen nods. “That’s right. My apologies, Tiger. I’m a little tired this afternoon. I know you are, too. We have a lot to do today, so I’d like to get started.”
Cake’s mom is still mad. She tells Karen, “This is ridiculous. I cannot believe she’s going to foster care when perfectly nice people are right here to take care of her.”
Karen gives the smallest of shrugs. She probably deals with this all the time. “I understand. I don’t make policies, though. I just follow them.”
Cake hugs me so hard I see spots. She smells like coffee and the banana muffins her mother brought to my house this morning. I just picked at my muffin, but Cake and her mother devoured theirs.
I try to make sure to at least seem like I’m hugging Cake and her mom, but the truth is that I really have no strength. My arms feel like licorice whips, loose and floppy, and I’m empty inside. At the hospital, people kept trying to give me candy bars and fruit chews, cardboard cups of weak tea, and I took each of those things and held them, but I didn’t eat them.
The thought of eating now makes me remember that book about the little girl named Sal and her mother who went blueberry picking and ran into the bears on a hill. Every time Sal’s mother dropped a blueberry into her tin pail, it made a sound like kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk.
I used to love it when my mother would read that book to me.
That’s what it would sound like right now, if I ate. Kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk. Empty and hollow, because I’ve been carved out.
Cake and her mother leave. On the way out, Cake asks if they can stop for lunch somewhere and my heart aches; I want to go with them so much, and be normal again, and stop somewhere for salty fries and greasy burgers and sodas so cold and icy the outside of the cup sweats.
But it’s just me and the social worker now.
She says, “I need some information from you, Tiger, and then we’ll take you out to your foster.”
My eyes swiftly fill with tears.
Foster.
Karen plucks some tissues from a box on the other woman’s desk. “Follow me,” she says, handing me a wad of pink tissues.
I’ve read those books in school, like Dickens, or whatever. Kids whose parents die and no one wants them. Bad things happen to them. They go to houses and the foster parents there are evil and beat them and starve them and make them rob and steal.
I follow Karen down the hallway to her office. She motions for me to sit.
She shuffles some papers on her desk and looks at me. “There’s still time, Tiger, to tell me about your dad. He’s not on your birth certificate, and it’s okay if you’re trying to protect him, but I need to know if he’s out there. If you’ve got a blood relative, we don’t have to do this, we can shut this process down now. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m not sending you to summer camp, Tiger.”
I wipe my face with the pink tissues. I never knew it was possible to cry this much, ever.
“I told you last night at the hospital, I’ve never met him.”
“That’s an awfully long time to keep a big secret like that. You were never curious? Never snooped around the house?”
Of course I’d asked my mom over the years about The Person Who Shall Not Be Named, but she always got squirrelly and shut down, and no kid wants to make their mom angry or sad, and she was all I had, so I just stopped asking.
We are we and us is us, my mother would say, braiding my hair, kissing the top of my head. We don’t need anybody else.
“No,” I tell her. “I love my mom. She’s enough.”
Is. Was. I will never get it right.
I push my fists against my eyes and hold my breath.
Karen says, “Easy, take it easy.” She starts typing into her computer.
That’s the only sound, for a long time. I rip the tissue into tiny pieces in my lap.
There’s still time for this to be a
mistake, for my mom, wherever she is, to wake up and start screaming in some room in that hospital, pushing aside the heavy blankets and ripping out those tubes and wires. It’s happened in movies that me and Cake have watched with her Uncle Connor. He likes scary movies. It’s not implausible.
That’s another word I learned in English Lit last fall. Fusty old Mr. Hoffmeister wrote it on the board with a flourish and I copied it in my notebook, along with the other words that had jumped out at me from the books we read. Inopportune and corporeal.
Desperation licks at my skin. I try out some other words to calm myself down.
Lapwing. Frazzled. Mezuzah.
Karen finally looks up and says, “I have to ask these specific questions, according to policy, okay? Just say yes or no.”
Her questions are rapid-fire and I’m so tired and confused I hardly have time to nod yes or no or say yes or no out loud.
“Do you have a sister, or a grandmother or grandfather, a cousin, anything? The law says you must live with a relative and that if a relative cannot be found, you’ll become a ward of the state. Do you understand?”
I tell her, “My mother’s parents died when she was in college. She was an only child.”
I tell her, “Like I said, I don’t know my dad, or where he is. My mom had a lot of secrets. She didn’t tell me much.”
Karen’s eyes get very bright when I say that, but she tries to make her voice casual. “Like what?”
I stare at her. “She wasn’t, like, a drug queen, if that’s what you’re hoping. Nothing like that. She read books and made jelly from cactus and just didn’t tell me a lot of stuff, that’s all.”
Jars and jars and jars of her jellies and jams, neatly lined up in the shed behind our house. All for nothing now. My mother didn’t cook drugs. She cooked strained prickly pears with pectin and lemon juice, that’s what she cooked.
Karen blinks, like she’s sizing me up. It could be sympathy, it could be suspicion, I can’t tell. There must be kids who come into this office all the time with sad, awful stories, and maybe lies, too.
I say, “Don’t you think it’s a little crazy that I have to go live with complete strangers when adults spend a lifetime telling us kids never to trust strangers?”
“You’re funny. Don’t lose it. That’ll help you.”
She goes back to typing.
I go back to waiting, for what seems like hours. For what is, actually, hours, as Karen types, and gets up and goes to talk to the woman in the front office, comes back, makes phone calls from the phone on her desk, checks her cell, files papers, makes copies, takes my fingerprints, and looks through the suitcase Cake packed for me. She even gets down on her knees to take out each piece of clothing. She runs fingers all over the inside of the pink case and shakes out each piece of clothing.
“If there’s anything in here I should know about, now’s the time,” she murmurs.
“Like what?”
“Dangerous objects, drugs, things like that.”
I stare at her. “You got me. That tampon is really filled with weed and I’m an expert at using a mascara wand for a shiv.”
She grunts. “Like I said, keep being funny. That’s the best weapon you could have.”
She folds my clothes, not very well, shuts the suitcase, and stands up, smoothing her beige skirt down and hauling a purse over her shoulder. “Let’s go. I have to make a stop before we head out to your foster.”
The car has a slight dent in the passenger-side door, and as I open it, Karen says, “No, dear. You have to ride in the back. Those are the rules. We’re working for the state right now, not taking a joyride to the mall.” She shoves my suitcase in the trunk.
There’s a seal on the rear passenger door. The State of Arizona. A sunset logo.
I slide in. I have an excellent view of the back of Karen’s neck.
I feel like I’m being arrested and that makes me feel dirty and kind of ashamed.
The air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror smells like lemon.
My mom’s old white Honda has peace and love stickers over the bumpers. It doesn’t smell like lemons. It smells like her. Cigarettes and coconut shampoo.
That’s where I slept last night, which seems like such a long time ago. I wonder how long it’s been, exactly.
My hands are shaking violently. I wish I had two other hands, so those hands could stop these hands from shaking.
Because my hands are looking for my mother, so she can hold me, and protect me, and make me not scared.
Tears slide down my face.
Karen sighs, looking back at me. “Tissues in the seat pocket on the back.”
I wipe my face with the sleeve of my lace dress instead. “What’s going to happen to my house?” My voice wavers.
Karen pulls out of the lot of the foster-care building. “Well, I don’t know, dear. We’ll have to contact the landlord. Box your things. Where you’re going is temporary. Sometimes it takes moving around before we can place you long-term. To be honest, it can be difficult to home older children in the long term.”
There’s not much traffic. In a little while, we pass Randy Gonzalez’s ranch. The horses are out, sleek and pretty, nickering in the gold afternoon light. I press a hand against the window glass.
Karen looks at me in the rearview. “We can take a minute,” she says. “Want me to pull over? They’re so lovely, aren’t they?”
My mom brought me out here last week. She loves these horses. She packs bags of cold carrots and walks straight up to the fence and holds out a hand stuffed with orange sticks.
Once, she told me, “I used to ride a horse when I was little,” but when I pressed her, she suddenly clammed up, said it wasn’t important, and could I go back to the car and get the bag of carrots? She’d left it on the front seat. But when I went back to the car, there were no carrots. I turned around. She had the bag in her hand.
She was always doing things like that to me, distracting me from what she didn’t want to talk about.
Just looking at the horses hurts. I shake my head. Karen says, “Suit yourself.”
We stop at a fast-food place. “Hungry?” Karen asks. “It’s on the State of Arizona.” But I say no.
She pulls up to the drive-through. “Once, one of my cases was a little boy who’d never even had a milkshake before. He was amazed! He said, ‘All of this, for me?’ I think it took him a good hour to finish the whole thing, he went so slow and took such care with each sip. He was trying to make it last.”
She smiles, but she doesn’t actually seem happy about the memory, more like sad.
I think about that word she used. Cases. We are her job. Kids who don’t have parents. Karen inches the car forward. I glance over at the big windows of the fast-food restaurant.
My heart drops. Taran Parker and his brother and Kelsey Cameron are sitting at a table by the window, staring at me, mouths open. Of course they are. It’s a school day and school must be over by now.
Taran’s eyes grow wide as he skims the State of Arizona seal on Karen’s car. His eyes meet mine. WTF? he mouths to me. His brother shakes his head, half smiling. He looks…impressed.
Oh my God, they think I’ve been arrested.
Kelsey Cameron nods, laughing. Yeah, girl. I can tell, even through the glass. She lifts up her phone. I try to slide back down in the seat before she gets the picture, but I don’t think I make it.
They don’t even know. That my mom died. They don’t even know. Last night seems like a billion years ago.
I peek up. Kelsey Cameron is checking the shot on her phone.
#jailbird #prisoner #geekconvict #teenfelon
“What’s going on back there?” Karen cranes her head in the rearview. “Are you going to be sick?”
She looks toward the windows of the fast-food place.
> I’m down below the car window now, my butt practically on the floor and the seat belt choking me. There is no way I’m sliding back up until we are out on the road.
“Oh,” Karen says softly. “I see.”
When she gets her sack of food, the car fills up with the smell of the greasy burgers I wanted to have with Cake so much, and I feel queasy, so I crack the window. I hoist myself back up onto the seat as she pulls out onto the road.
Miles of cattle fencing, broken old houses set far back in the desert. Mesquite trees. The sky carving into ribbons of pink and deep orange.
After a little while, she says, “Not too far to the foster now.” There are flecks of salt on the corner of her mouth.
The foster. The one who will have the face of an angel when Karen is there and the face of a beast when the door closes.
The longer we drive, the quieter the car becomes, the darker it gets outside, the darker I start to grow inside, that wet cement feeling sinking down on me again, the one that seems hopeless and finite.
I could get my phone. I could text Cake. I wouldn’t be so lonely. I look around the backseat for my backpack. It isn’t here, and my pink suitcase is in the trunk.
“Do you know…do you know what happened to my phone? And my backpack? Am I even allowed to have a phone anymore?” My voice is tiny.
Karen tilts her head. “I’ll have to see. Sometimes, in situations like yours last night, at the hospital, things get shuffled around and lost, so I’ll look into it, okay, dear? And yes, you are allowed to have a phone, as long as you can pay the bill.”
Pay the bill. With what? I hold my breath. I don’t want to cry again. My eyes are already swollen and salty.
I press my hand against the window. The stars are beginning to shine, tiny perfect pinpricks in the darkening sky.
If she was alive, my mother would be in our backyard right now, in her lawn chair, leaning back, her face glossy from the heat. She would say, “Sit with me a bit, baby.”
And I would, our bodies curling together perfectly, as they always did.
How to Make Friends with the Dark Page 6