I had no idea what these visits entailed, but watching how it wrecked them made me—again and still—glad I did not have parents; from what I could see, having parents meant nothing but soul-crushing court-ordered visits and getting dragged in and out of foster care year after year. No, thanks. And all the while these girls got yanked around, no one who was in any position to help them seemed to be able to, and the girls’ response to this bullshit was bullshit of their own: fighting, and screaming tantrums, and things thrown—shoes and lamps, sometimes food. When I got back from my walks, I just picked up the wreckage of our shared room and helped the foster parents clean up any damage done to the living room or kitchen, and by then the girls were usually asleep, so I could go lie down, too.
The foster mom got the wrong idea. She loved my housekeeping prowess, my good grades that kept her out of meetings with teachers and social workers, my squirreling away allowance money so I never asked for field trip money or bus fare. She misinterpreted my well-honed survival techniques as affection for her. I was home sick from school one day, alone in the bedroom, and she came in to sit on the edge of the bed and smile. She handed me a tiny gift-wrapped box.
A brass key.
“To the closet,” she said. “You could use it for your clothes! This whole room would be yours, just for you.” I knew what was coming. I thanked this woman very much, expressed my gratitude for all she and the man had done for me over the past four months, and politely refused her offer of adoption.
She was still crying when the man came home that afternoon. His voice, loud enough to make sure I heard him, echoed from the beautifully tiled kitchen. “That kid just passed up the best offer she’ll ever get in her life. She doesn’t know how good she’s got it. She doesn’t know how to be grateful.”
My face burned, stomach swam.
He isn’t right. I am my own best offer. I am all I need.
When Joellen picked me up the next morning, I said goodbye to the girls, slipped the forgotten key into my pocket, and sent a prayer to the universe that the woman would never again be able to get back into that fucking Christmas closet.
“THIRTY MINUTES?” KIRA SAID at lunch on Monday. “That’s it?”
“Thirty-two. I’ve never been thirty seconds late in any placement, with anyone, ever. God, I think I’m getting an ulcer.” I held the right side of my abdomen, feeling a tight and sharp pain that had been there since Sunday morning.
“Have you talked to Sean?”
“Texted him yesterday. Told him I needed to cool it for a while for Francine’s sake. He said he understood.”
“Cool it? Okay, grandma. Did Francine say you couldn’t go out with him anymore?”
“No.”
“So this is a self-imposed ‘cooling’?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to stop seeing him?”
“Of course not!” I wailed pitifully. “I want to see him! I want to go out with him! I want to do all the stuff with him!”
“All right, okay, I don’t need all the details….”
“You know what I mean.”
“Muiriel,” she sighed. “What the hell?”
“I can’t throw my life away for a boy.”
“Who’s throwing anything away? Just don’t be late anymore, problem solved.”
“It’s…” She had no way of ever understanding the gravity of my need for perfection in all things recorded in the file. “I got careless,” I said. “I like him so much. I’ve never let myself down, ever, until this, which means I like him too much. I need to finish foster care the way I started.”
She sat back in her chair, blew her hair off her face, and looked half-stern, half-sad.
“Okay, so that means, what, having no friends? No boyfriends? Giving yourself an ulcer over being a few minutes late, for getting caught up with talking to a boy and enjoying some nice, refreshing damn froyo?”
“Thirty-two minutes,” I said into my sandwich.
She sat forward and leaned on her elbows toward me. “You know what we talked about in psych today?”
“Um, about how it’s not art class and you shouldn’t be there?”
She almost smiled. “I’m telling you your life now—you can tell me mine later. Shut up and listen.”
I laid my head on my arms. “Fine.”
“You need to separate the nobility of your cause from the misguided means of pursuing it.”
“What.”
“You’re buying into the sunk-cost fallacy!”
“Nope. Get back in art class.”
“Okay, look. You think you’re making a rational decision, based on the potential future value of something—the perceived value of your perfect, pristine, ulcer-producing, solitary life.”
“Oh. Okay.” My eyes rolled up into my head.
“Yes! You think your lifetime of perfection will protect you and, like, secure your future when you age out. You believe it’s going to keep you off the pipe and off the pole. It’s going to guarantee your safety and a viable income, right? But really what’s happening is, your decisions are tainted by the emotional investments you accumulate—the more you invest, the harder it becomes to abandon it.”
“Seriously, you don’t miss watercolor paints? Pottery?”
“Muir. It isn’t worth it. Don’t you feel that? You’re punishing yourself for nothing. Your brain is like, Well, we’ve done this for seventeen years, can’t stop now, my entire life of self-deprivation will have been for nothing if we stop now, but it isn’t true! You can let yourself live a little! Let Francine take care of you. You can make a mistake now and then and it won’t destroy your life. Don’t let Sean go. He is a really good guy, and he is in love with you. It’s so obvious.”
I wished she was right. She didn’t understand how aging out works—that Francine couldn’t help me. Joellen couldn’t help me. In a matter of months I would have no one but me. No matter how nice Francine was.
Unpack. Stay.
Kira suddenly looked past me and smiled. I followed her gaze and there was tall, hoodied Elliot.
“Oh my,” I said. “Let’s discuss this turn of events, then, shall we?”
She whipped her hair up into a ponytail. “He’s coming over here—oh no—tell me when he’s here; I can’t look.” She pulled a book from her backpack and pretended to read, and I watched Elliot smile, walk toward our table—and then Katiana were there beside him, talking and laughing, holding his arms, looking right at me. Daring me to do something. Daring me to stop them.
“Need some help in the pottery studio!” Tiana said. They steered Elliot away and out of the cafeteria. Elliot looked back over his shoulder.
And I just sat there.
“Is he coming?” Kira whispered into her book.
“Uh…no,” I said. “Some guys came over and got him for something. They’re gone.”
She looked up. “Oh,” she said, sad. “Just as well. I look crappy today.”
“You look beautiful, as always, and you know it.”
Now she rolled her eyes.
“If you were in art class,” I said, “you’d see him almost every day.”
She put her book back in her backpack. “Yeah, yeah. We are failing with our potential romantic entanglement interactions today,” she sighed.
“One thing I’ll say for psychology,” I said, “it’s making your vocabulary jam-packed with lots of syllables.”
“Indeed.” She nodded. “They take the place of an active dating life in a surprisingly satisfying way.”
* * *
—
Salishwood on Saturday morning after the date night was an exercise in self-control. Even before Sean got there, because of course fucking Natan was there, right where I’d been assigned to pull out some blackberry roots, strumming and tuning his stupid guitar, and he started
in on “Ring of Fire,” which made me wish I could personally apologize to June Carter Cash. Everything we’d heard through the window, all we knew about Natan’s life and Jane’s, the nepotism that kept him ruining every otherwise-perfect day spent in the trees, made me even less inclined to make eye contact with him.
“You like this song?” he said, humming flat and sharp and just—wrong.
I pretended not to hear.
“You know, the title of this tune is one we naturalists think of in a completely different way than Johnny intended. You see—”
“Hi, guys.” Sean’s beautiful, beautiful voice saved me.
“Good morning, sir,” Natan sang. Gah.
Sean smiled at me but did not hug me, as per the promise he’d made. Which, when he walked toward us, so lean and strong and perfect, I regretted asking for. He was right there, and I already missed him. He caught my eye, tipped his head toward Natan, and made a Well, this is awkward face. I nodded.
Sunk-cost fallacy.
Maybe Kira was right. My head pounded.
Summer was finally cooling into autumn. The whole island was slowly turning red and gold against the Pacific Northwest clouds and a few remaining bright blue skies. Kids spilled from the buses, including Zola, whose familiar face made me secretly so happy I could barely keep it in. She ran to me, and I let my arm hug her shoulders for a moment. “How’s things, kid?” I asked.
Her arms were little and strong as ever around me. “Okay,” she said, definitely not meaning it.
“Hey,” I said, and knelt beside her in the grass. “What’s up? Your mom doing okay?”
She shook her head. “I’m at my grandma’s house, but she’s really old. They think she’s too slow to take care of me.”
“Too slow?”
“Tired. She can’t walk a lot. She doesn’t live by my school, but I take the city bus. I don’t know.”
Goddamn it.
I let her hold on to me until Jane came out and called for the kids to line up.
“Hey,” I said, holding Zola back. “You doing okay in school?”
“I guess.”
“Make sure. Keep your grades good.”
“We don’t get grades yet.”
“Okay, well, just—show up. Always on time. Pay attention, do all the worksheets and stuff. Make sure you’re learning. Got it?”
She nodded.
“Zola. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said. I zipped her sweater all the way up and watched her run to join her class.
“Is Zola all right?” Sean asked, suddenly beside me.
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” he said, “could— I mean, could Francine do anything to help?”
My brain was not fast enough to stop my arms from wrapping around him. His huge, selfless heart. The blue-gray knit hat on his dark hair. I hugged him so hard he stumbled a little but righted himself and hugged me.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I collected my wits and pulled back. “Sorry,” I said. “You’re just…you are so kind.”
“Muir.”
“Francine can’t help her. But it’s so nice of you to even think of it.”
He squeezed my hand.
We took the kids, Zola beside me the whole time, tromping through the forest to find late-summer birds’ nests and moss gardens, and I waved to her as the buses pulled away. I brought my lunch to the picnic table to sit if not beside, at least near, Sean.
“Muiriel,” Natan said, eyeing my container of roasted carrots Francine made that morning. “You know women need essential fats in their diet, especially at childbearing age.”
I swallowed wrong and choked until Sean whacked me on my back.
“Jesus Christ, Natan.” I coughed. “What is wrong with you?”
“See, again, this is what’s wrong with our patriarchal society. Men can’t even talk about a woman’s cycle—”
“Not men, just you,” I said. “Especially when you’re offering an unsolicited bad opinion, but if a man who was, say, my doctor wanted to lecture me about my diet, I’d be okay with that.”
“Oh, a doctor.” Natan smiled, nodding in his oily, slow-motion way. “Western medicine strikes again. Those doctors just want to cover up illness and cause more with their pills. Food is the only medicine we need, sister.” He opened a jackknife, cut a huge hunk off a log of salami, and dropped it into his bearded head hole. “Paleo is the way to go, Muiriel. The way our original ancestors ate.”
“Yes, because Neanderthals thrived on carcinogenic nitrates in their lunch meat made of domesticated pigs,” Sean said. Natan shook his head and turned to wipe the knife on his pants.
My cheeks flushed. I moved nearer to Sean despite myself.
“How was Zola when she left?” he asked me, low.
“She was quiet,” I said. “Not good.”
“Well,” Natan said from eavesdropping central, “never can tell what a kid like that is up to.”
It was a day of failing to control my impulses. “A kid like what?” I said.
“Relax, sister, I’m not talking about you. A kid like Zola.”
“I am not your sister. Like what, Natan?”
“You know. Adopted.”
“Adopted is a past-tense verb, not an adjective, and Zola has not been adopted; she and I are in foster care.”
“Right…,” Natan said. “Well, see, that’s what I’m saying—whatever you did to get yourself put in the system, you’ve obviously worked hard to overcome your poor choices. Look at you! Holding down a job, going to school, staying out of trouble. You are the exception to the rule. Little Zola will choose to improve herself, or keep making mistakes—but it is her choice. Don’t get wrapped up in it.”
I stood.
“Muiriel,” Sean said, “I forgot to show you…a thing. Come on.” He grabbed my carrots, and I let him lead me to a boulder in the trees, away from Natan and his jackknife and the potential murder scene.
“Breathe,” Sean said, and we sat and ate in peace. “Maybe we should talk to Jane. Tell her we know why he’s here, say maybe she could figure out a way to get rid of him and not ruin her already-bizarre family dynamic. I hate that we know all that crap.”
“I hate Natan,” I said.
“I’m going to get us T-shirts made that say Jesus Christ, Natan, so we don’t have to talk to him anymore. He can just read our stock response to every single thing he says.”
“I was the one who got him going. Talking that shit about Zola, I swear to God…”
“You really worried about her?”
“I don’t know. Every day can be different; it’s hard to tell what’s going on.”
I finished my carrots. He offered me half his CLIF Bar.
“Adopted is not an adjective,” he said.
“Joellen says that. It’s an event that happens, not who you are. As an adjective it implies inherent bullshit about a person that isn’t true. A person is not ‘adopted.’ They were adopted. Words matter.”
“They do.”
“Sean. Why are you being so nice to me?”
“Nice?” He pulled off his hat and ran his hands through his hair, a thing I gladly would have done for him—I’m a mess. “I’ve never had anyone to talk with like we do. I’ve never known anyone, ever, like you. I’m not being nice; I’m trying to change your mind.”
He moved nearer; I stayed still, and he leaned in to kiss me. I gave in, closed my eyes.
Then the guitar was there. And so was Natan’s braying laugh.
“Ooooh, dipping your pen in the company ink, little guy? Listen, you like this song? I was telling Muiriel earlier, you know the title is a little goof for us naturalists, it’s the name of—”
I stood and yanked the guitar from his hands.
“T
he Ring of Fire is a horseshoe-shaped series of trenches and volcanic belts in the Pacific Ocean where a shit ton of earthquakes and volcanic activity happen all the goddamned time, and it includes the volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire, the star of which is our very own Mount Rainier, more correctly known by its Salish name, Tahoma, and many volcanologists and seismologists think maybe Seattle is due for intense plate movement, causing an earthquake that would send the entire Pacific Northwest into the Puget Sound, killing us all, which, when I’m at work lately, makes me hope it happens sooner rather than later, but really cool story, bro.” I stalked off to gather my stuff, dropped the stupid guitar on Jane’s desk, and walked, fast, down the winding forest road to the bus stop.
“Muir,” Sean called, running to catch up. “Wait.” We walked together, not talking for a while.
“You are so smart I can’t stand it,” he finally said.
He stopped in the middle of the road. “Francine talked to my mom,” he said. “It wouldn’t happen again; we would never be late.”
“Sean.”
“Muir. I’m here. Kira’s here, Francine is here.”
“Yes,” I said. “Right now, you are.”
“Where do you think we’re going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or are you going? Are you leaving the second you graduate?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, then what? What can I do to convince you?”
“Convince me of what? I’ve known you and Kira and Francine for five weeks.”
“I mean. More like six.”
“Stop it,” I half laughed. “Don’t be funny.”
“I’m trying to convince you to let us be with you. Let me.”
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