When Never Comes by Barbara Davis

Author:Barbara Davis [Davis, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781503950177
Amazon: 1503950174
Goodreads: 36278103
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2018-05-01T23:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SEVEN

Goose Creek, South Carolina

June 27, 1998

Christy-Lynn turns off the water and steps from the shower. Her reflection stares back at her from the steam-mottled mirror, dripping wet and unnaturally still. Her eyes are enormous in her face, great pools of bewilderment.

It’s been eight weeks.

Eight weeks since Charlene Parker was arrested. Eight weeks since the caseworker drove her back to the apartment she shared with her mother and told her to pack her things. Eight weeks since she had been shuffled off to a suitable foster home.

It isn’t a bad place, a two-story colonial out in the cookie-cutter suburbs, the kind of house she always wanted to go home to after school. The furniture is new, the phone works, and there’s plenty of food in the fridge. But it isn’t home. At least it’s not her home.

They call it a receiving home, a temporary place to stick new kids until they decide where to park them long term. The people who run the receiving home, Jean and Dennis Hawley, like to brag that they specialize in teens, but Christy-Lynn isn’t so sure.

There are two others kids living with the Hawleys now. There were three until last week, when the girl who shared Christy-Lynn’s room—a thirteen-year-old named Dana whose entire left arm was crisscrossed with a web of fine white scars—got hold of a razor blade and nearly bled out on the bathroom floor.

Christy-Lynn had watched from her bedroom window as they loaded the girl onto a stretcher and then into an ambulance, siren screaming as the flashing red lights sped away into the darkness. Even if she lived, she wouldn’t be coming back. Not to this house.

Down the hall there are two other residents, a pair of brothers, Terry and Todd Blevins, whose parents died when their trailer exploded while they were cooking up a batch of meth. They’re the thickset, sullen sort—mouth breathers, Dana called them—and Christy-Lynn is careful to give them a wide berth. She doesn’t like the way the oldest brother’s eyes follow her, lingering just a little too long for comfort.

The one thing they have in common is that none of them have any hope of finding a forever family. Forever family. It’s the stomach-turning term some caseworkers use for adoption, as if they’re corgis or cocker spaniels instead of human beings. Kids who end up in foster care already have two strikes against them, but toss in the potential for alcohol, drugs, and unwanted pregnancy, and a teen’s pretty much guaranteed to remain in the system until the clock runs out, and they’re finally kicked loose on their eighteenth birthday, often without a job or a cent to their name.

Not that Christy-Lynn wants a forever family. It’s too late for that. She only wants to be left alone, to finish school, then find a way to get into college so she can get a decent job and never have to depend on anyone but herself. But she’s in a holding pattern now, caught in a bureaucratic

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