by Lina Langley
“I know—”
“You can’t do this,” he said, opening the drawer in front of him and grabbing my file. I knew he kept it close to him, but I was pretty sure it was the only file he kept that close. “I’m serious.”
“Where would I go?”
“Where will you go,” he replied quietly.
I swallowed. “David,” I say, my voice a whisper. “Please. I like it here, the last time I was with a foster family, it was—”
“I know,” he replied. “But I don’t have a choice. You were warned, several times, and you kept breaking the rules. This is what happens when you do that.”
I shook my head and swallowed, my mouth dry. “You can’t just kick me out of here.”
He waved his hand in front of his face. “Kelly already scheduled some meet-ups tomorrow.”
“Meet-ups,” I echoed, sitting back and crossing my arms in front of my chest. “Meet-ups? Like I’m a puppy?”
He trained his gaze on me. “We’re doing this for you,” he said. “This isn’t a good environment for a boy like you, Mason.”
“Why not?” I said. “I can stay here, I can keep my head down, I don’t have to pay rent…”
“You won’t have to pay rent with a family,” he replied, then leaned back on his chair and stared at me. “Do you know how many foster kids go on to become college students?”
I cocked my head. “Not… a lot?”
“That’s right,” he replied. “Less than ten percent.”
“Okay…”
“But you have potential, Mason,” he said. “You’re driven and hard-working. You’re smart. You have taken every opportunity you—”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, you can’t dump me with a family, not when I’m about to—”
He raised his eyebrows. “This is out of my hands, Mason,” he replied quietly and looked down at the folder in front of him. “You did this. Not me.”
“David—”
“You have to be here on Sunday,” he said. “Now please go to bed.”
“David—”
“Go to bed, Mason,” he said, glaring at me. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to get through to him with reason, so I nodded as I pinched the bridge of my nose. I needed to come up with a solution, but I had no idea how I was going to get out of this.
And the fact that David had decided to parade me around like I was an animal in need of adopting… it pissed me off, but running away was just going to fuck everything up even more. I was going to have to stick around, be well behaved, and pretend that what had just happened didn’t bother me.
I knew how to pretend. I was good at pretending. What I wasn’t good at was waiting. The idea that I was going to have to wait a few more months until I could even start the process of emancipation made me fidgety.
I walked to my room quietly, trying my best to sneak in so I wouldn’t wake up my roommates, and finally sat down on my squeaky bed. I took a deep breath, feeling sick when the bed made the noise, but my roommates continued breathing deeply.
I licked my lips as I put my head on my pillow.
Maybe a foster family wouldn’t be the worst thing to ever happen. Maybe I could find a way they could accelerate the process.
But my eyelids were heavy, and it was going to have to wait.
CHAPTER SIX
MASON
David was glaring at me as he tapped his finger over his bicep. He was wearing a tie—something he rarely did—and he had even shaved his goatee off. He looked nice. I just wished it wasn’t because he was prepared to pawn me off. “Are you going to hurry up?”
“Don’t you have a hot date or something to go off to?”
“At nine in the morning? You wish,” he said. “But I do have somewhere to be. It’s Sunday, I’m not even supposed to be here today. I just thought…”
“You wanted to watch the public beheading,” I replied with a grin.
He shook his head. “You are going to find a family,” he said. “It should be a cause for celebration, not mockery.”
“Please,” I replied as I rolled up the sleeves of my checkered button-up. “Seems a little late to find a family.”
He sighed, then looked me up and down. He was leaning on the wall next to the bed and he kept staring at me. He had been there for only a minute or two, ever since I had told him it was okay to come in, after I was done with the shower. “Do you know how uncommon it is for foster children your age to find a family?”
“Not very,” I said. “But I’m sure your about to dazzle me with some math.”
He shook his head, but he was smiling. “You’re right,” he said. “Not many. Do you know why?”
“Because we’re all hardened criminals and not as cute as toddlers?”
“Well, yeah,” he replied, though the smile hadn’t quite disappeared from his face. “I mean, they don’t know your background. They’re worried about what you might be bringing to their homes.”
I sighed, running my hand through my wet hair. It wasn’t going to stay up. It never stayed up.
David began to walk out and I followed him, lagging behind him slightly as he power walked down the hallway. “But Kelly,” he said. “She told these couples just how amazing you are. Everything that you’ve overcome. How you’re on the road to independence.”
“Did she say I get along well with cats and other children?”
He ignored me. “But as you know, the most important thing is a personal connection,” he said. We were about to walk into the reception area, but he stopped suddenly and trained his eyes on me. He put a hand on my shoulder and spun me around so I was looking right at his face.
“Listen to me, Mason,” he said. “This is important. You’re going to have to impress one of these couples, because I can’t keep you here, and the only other placement possible for you right now is Central.”
I blinked. “Central? The halfway house for juvvies?”
“It’s not a halfway house,” he replied. “Some foster kids are there, too.”
“Fuck me,” I said under my breath. “Are you serious right now?”
“Language,” he replied, sounding positively outraged. “I didn’t want you to worry, okay? But I thought it was important that you know the truth. Now go out there and dazzle these people, alright?”
“Wait,” I said as a knot formed in my throat. “You’re not coming with me?”
“I’ll be in the room,” he replied. “If you need me to bail you out, just look at me.”
I looked at him.
“Cute, Mason,” he said. “Now get in there and impress some families.”
He opened the door and I stood there, willing my feet to move but unable to do so. I took a deep breath, trying my best to look calm. No family was going to want me, a sweaty person who could barely string a sentence together because of how nervous I was.
“You got this,” I told myself as I walked into the reception area. I didn’t believe the words for a minute, but they made me feel a little better. I tried my best to plaster a smile on my face and looked around the reception area.
There were two couples out there. They both looked to be in their thirties and they were making conversation with each other. The woman with the curly blonde hair and the fake breasts was sitting closest to me, her partner’s hand on the small of her back. He was a massive guy, tall and thick, with black-rimmed glasses. The other couple was much smaller, dressed in drab blue and grey. The woman had black hair which went down to her shoulders and the man had closely-shaved blond hair.
I cleared my throat as I began to approach them. Four pairs of eyes looked up at me.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Mason.”
They all introduced themselves, but I wasn’t paying much attention to what they were saying. I was mostly trying not to collapse onto myself, not to pay attention to the sweat accumulating around my brow and near my lips.
They both appeared to be nice couples and I was genuinely surprised that any one o
f them would want to foster me. I was worried about what they wanted from me. I would have much rather stayed back at the group home, where I knew exactly what to expect, but I was out of options.
I didn’t know how I was supposed to choose between them. If they even wanted me. But by the time around five minutes had passed, the small couple was looking at each other.
I had a knot in my stomach. I had been there enough times to know what that meant. It was the man who spoke as he stood up, brushing his jeans off. “It was very nice to meet you, Mason,” he said. “You’re a remarkable young man.”
“You are,” his wife echoed. “Thank you for your time.”
I quieted as I watched them walk away, not even finding it in me to say thank you back. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t thank them for coming and disturbing my life, when everything had been fine before. When everything was already fine.
The worst part of it all were the looks that Blondie and her husband were giving me. I could only see them from the corner of my eye, but I could feel their pity on my skin and in my bones. I wanted to get up and storm back into my room—or what had been my room, I supposed—when Blondie reached out and touched my forearm.
“Mason,” she said, her voice sugary sweet. “Would you like to come home with us?”
I tried to answer her, but all I managed was a weak smile.
***
After all the paperwork was done and my things were packed into black garbage bags and loaded into their RAV4, they drove for about an hour as dread came over me. I didn’t have a car, and I needed to be able to keep my job if I was going to get emancipated. The further away we got from the city, the more I realized that there was not going to be any form of public transportation out there, and taking an Uber or something would have been unmanageable.
On the other hand, if it was what I had to do, then I would do. I would walk to work if I had to.
I thought about that as I looked out the window, nothing but tall trees around us. I spotted a few signs with deer and alligators on them, telling us to watch out for wild live.
“Mason,” Blondie said. She had told me her name, but I’d already forgotten, and I didn’t want to start a relationship with my new foster mother by asking her to repeat her name.
“Ma’am?”
She laughed. “You can call me Denise,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. Each mile we drove in silence felt like we were driving further and further away from my future.
“Do you know how to drive?”
I turned around to look at the back of her head. Her hair was perfectly coiffed, blonde curl upon blonde curl. I thought she would not have been out of place in an eighties movie.
“No, ma’am,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” she replied, looking over her shoulder to flash me a smile. “Clive can teach you. He’s an excellent teacher.”
I furrowed my brow. The idea that they were going to teach me how to drive was preposterous, but then, it would help. I would be able to save up and drive to work. It might take me a few months, but I could pull it off.
“Yes,” Clive chimed in. “I’m kind of a gearhead, to be honest with you, so there are a bunch of cars sitting in the garage that nobody does anything with. We could work on one together. Too many kids these days don’t know anything about the cars they are driving.”
My gaze darted between them and I shook my head.
“What do you say, Mason?” Denise prompted me. “This way, you don’t have to quit your—”
“Yes!” I replied, a little too excitedly, then cleared my throat and sat back down. I didn’t know these people and I had no reason to believe that they were nice to me for the sake of it. “I mean, uh, sure,” I continued as they snickered. “If you want to.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
JULES
I looked down at the food in front of me and moved it around with my fork. My parents were talking about something, but I was tuning them out. I had to talk to them about it, but every single time I began to think about it, I felt sick to my stomach.
I had only been back at home for a couple of weeks, but it felt like longer than that. I was supposed to be going back to school in late August, and I couldn’t wait.
My parents could see right through me. My mom was usually too worried about her business or some other work thing, but my dad, he was always looking at me like I was about to fall apart.
I tried my best to avoid him. Whenever he asked me if I wanted to go grocery shopping or for a hike, I would try to weasel out of it. I was pretty sure my parents were convinced that I had mono or something, because I kept telling them that I felt sick every time they wanted to spend time with me.
I did feel sick, just not in the way they believed I was. I couldn’t be around them without feeling like I was lying to them, and I couldn’t help but think that when they found what I had been hiding from them, they might turn on me.
My mom didn’t worry me too much. We had never been close, and another disappointment wasn’t going to break our relationship—mostly because our relationship consisted of her making my favorite meals when she had time and avoiding me for the rest of the time. I didn’t mind that.
My father, on the other hand… the idea of disappointing him made me feel sick to my stomach. Unlike my mother, he tried his best to keep tabs on me, even when I was away at school. He had told me that he would have preferred if I stayed back to study at the public school nearby, but I had grown to enjoy boarding school, and in any case, my mom would have never gone for that. She didn’t want me around the house. She would have preferred I wasn’t around at all, I was sure, but she couldn’t say anything like that to me. It was a good thing she rarely said anything.
I grabbed a leaf of spinach and stuck it in my mouth when I realized that my dad was talking to me. I lifted up my head and raised my eyebrows, settling my gaze on him. He always looked older when I came home, with lines on his skin around his blue eyes and close to his lips. He smiled at me. “Jules,” he said. “We wanted to talk to you about something.”
My heart dropped to my stomach. I tightened my grip around my fork and my gaze darted between the two of them. My mom looked up at me and smiled too, but her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.
My dad grabbed her hand and squeezed it. “We haven’t told you,” he said. “Because… well, we wanted to do it in person, didn’t we?”
My mom nodded, her cheeks reddening. Unlike my dad, she didn’t look like she had aged a day. She still looked twenty-five, with her dark blonde hair and her striking green eyes, her thin eyebrows framing her cat-like face.
I licked my lips. “Tell me what?”
They looked at each other again. “Jules,” my mom said. “Your father and I…”
“We’ve been trying for some time,” my dad continued. “We just weren’t sure if it was going to take, and now, well, it looks like you’re going to be a big brother.”
I blinked and dropped my fork down on the table. “Excuse me?”
“Look,” my dad said. “You know that you’re my son, right, and that no one can ever replace you.”
I furrowed my brow. “Yeah…”
“But, you know, your mother and I… we…” he trailed off.
I swallowed. “I know,” I said. “You wanted to have children of your own.”
He furrowed his brow. “Jules,” he said. “You are my child.”
“Yeah,” I replied, smiling at him. “Because you adopted me. Mom was just stuck with me since birth.”
She rolled her eyes, but he laughed. “Now, don’t talk like that,” he said. “We’re excited about this, but… you know, if you want to talk about it, or if you have—”
“Nope,” I said, standing up. “Nothing to talk about. Congratulations, both of you. May I be excused?”
My mom spoke up for the first time. “Jules…”
I didn’t hear what she had to say. I just turned around and walked upstairs, even as I heard them call my n
ame.
I ran upstairs, closed the door behind me, and clicked the lock. I could hear their voices as they talked, but they weren’t coming toward me. I sighed, put my back up against the door and closed my eyes.
Maybe this was good. Maybe it meant that I wouldn’t have to come out to them just yet. It could wait.
They clearly had more important things to worry about. And maybe, just maybe, so did I.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MASON
It had been a few weeks, and life with the Hanleys had turned out to be surprisingly nice. Clive and I spent time fixing the engine of a 1990 Chevy when he wasn’t trying to give me driving lessons. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I tried, and Clive was patient and good-humored.
I couldn’t help but like spending time with him. Unlike Dill, he always wore a shirt, and he never commented on my appearance unless he was trying to get me to eat more. Denise and I spent time doing each other’s nails while she excitedly talked to me about her music career and the kind of colleges I could go to.
She was ridiculous, but I had sort of grown to love her. She would throw her head back every time that she laughed, whether it was for a sensible chuckle or a belly laugh. She always wore light pink lipstick that didn’t at all go with her coloring and ruffles seemed to be her favorite thing. She was trying to teach me how to do piano scales, and I seemed to be doing a little better, but we often got distracted and ended up singing ridiculous duets until it was way past what they had once said was my bed time.
It wasn’t too bad. I was still paranoid about it—I had a stash of money I’d earned and food I’d stolen from their pantry in my locker at work. I didn’t know if I could trust them, and I probably wouldn’t know if I could for a while. Maybe ever.
But that night, when they were calling me to the living room, I was worried. There had been a weird, somber mood around the household, which was normally cheery. Clive just let Denise talk his ear off, and he would smile at her and tell her she was beautiful when she quieted down. But today, there had been no chatter, no laughter, and I was getting worried that something had happened.