What I Carry by Jennifer Longo

Author:Jennifer Longo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2020-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

Are you okay? I’m so sorry.

I didn’t respond. Terry Johnson snored me to sleep.

* * *

I carry with me a brass key to a door I will never open.

For a room to be legally used as a bedroom for foster placements, it must have a window and a closet. I lived once, when I was eleven, with two other girls in a bedroom that had a closet door, but it was locked. All the time. Because even though the mom pretended it was for us during inspections from CPS, really it was a Christmas closet. I knew this because one early morning I was the only kid awake, still in bed reading, and she came in, put her finger to her lips, and unlocked the door to toss in some rolls of wrapping paper. Inside was a life-sized light-up Santa, huge plastic bins of garland and greenery, and a fully assembled fake tree.

We kept our clothes in our suitcases and in a small dresser, one drawer for each of us. Our shoes stayed beside the front door in wooden apple crates.

The man and woman whose house it was seemed really wealthy; they had two grown children away attending colleges with one-word names, and we could never tell if they were fostering kids now because they were lonely for their own kids or bored or wanted attention or what. The dad was barely around, and when he was, he only ever said some variation of Hey, I know! How about you kids show some gratitude once in a while, see how that works out for you. He and the mom loved rhetorical sarcasm, and they both seemed to confuse foster care with juvenile detention. “Well,” the mom often said to the kids with a smile, “that kind of attitude isn’t going to get you back home with your parents anytime soon, now, is it?” But the house was very clean and fancy, warm on cold nights, with nice blankets on the beds. They had really good food delivered from delis and restaurants all over the city, and, best of all, they paid for school lunch accounts, as much as we wanted. I got two cartons of chocolate milk every day, just because I could.

The two other girls in the house were only a little younger than me, not related, both on weekly visitation schedules with parents, and neither situation was going well. One was visiting her mom in county jail; the other had both parents at home. Every time either one returned from a visit, she would be angry or crying or exhausted, or all three. I felt horrible for them and wanted badly to know them, comfort and protect them, which I knew would be dangerous for my own psyche—so I learned to stay after school and take my long, long walks on days Bio Visit was written on the wall calendar in the kitchen.

I had no idea what these visits entailed, but watching how it wrecked them made

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