Addition
I didn't have a normal childhood, not by anyone's standards.
For a while, though, I didn't notice. Sure, there were the fights that escalated to dishes being thrown and my mom crying in the laundry room. One morning, my dad even broke my big brother's arm for playing ball in the house. At the time, I just shrugged and wondered why my brother hadn't known better. Me, I knew. (Soccer ball) + (house) = (broken arm). I was always good at math.
I flew under the radar for the most part. My dad rarely noticed me, until the day he started noticing me. But that didn't last long, thankfully. All he got in were three months of leers and a couple of gropes before my mom got fed up and grabbed the butcher knife.
Then it was into the group home out on Warren, the one with twenty-four kids and twelve bunk beds. The other kids stole my shoes and my underwear and most of my dignity - and the rest was lost in the weekly drive-bys.
It was the stupidest system. We'd all gather in a large playroom every Sunday while prospective parents walked through and zoned in on their favorites. Like a glorified animal shelter; with the littlest and cutest kids wagging their tails and getting snatched up left and right.
I'd get a couple bites a month, if that. There was always some guy who pointed out "that skinny girl with the big brown eyes," and tried to make conversation with me. But it doesn't take long for someone to realize you're broken, especially when you don't care to hide it.
The playroom was designed for little kids; I was twelve and already almost five foot seven. So week after week I'd fold myself into one of the tiny chairs in the corner and read books from the local library. Or I'd do extra-credit reports for school. I never asked permission to do the projects, just kept handing in unassigned papers and research reports. My teachers didn't quite know what to do with me. One of them mentioned Harvard as an eventual possibility, so I researched Cambridge, Massachusetts and dreamed of snow.
Foster care wasn't so bad, not really. The worst part was the drive-bys, watching the American Dream come and go.
"What's your name?" an older man asked me one day. He looked like my Grandpa Joe.
"Sara."
"That's a nice name," he said, smiling at me.
"If you try putting your wiener in my mouth, I'll bite it off," I replied flatly.
His eyes widened in shock. "What?"
"Your wiener plus my mouth equals chomp." Maybe even chomp squared.
"Oh, I... oh."
Yes, Grandpa Joe, blink at the little broken girl and be on your way.
The next week, a woman with blonde hair told me I looked like her niece. "Spitting image," she beamed. "Are you sure your name isn't Katie?"
"I'm sure," I nodded.
"You two could be twins."
"Neat."
"I should arrange a playdate."
"That's okay."
"It's really no-" She got distracted by her husband, who was waving her over to see a little blonde boy named Jonathan.
I noticed that the Grandpa Joe lookalike was back, standing and staring out the picture window. Eventually he turned around and saw me watching him, and ambled over to me.
"Sara, right?"
"Yeah." I glared at him hard, and he nodded seriously.
"Chomp. I remember."
"So why are you here?"
"Mrs. Wilkerson tells me you're a good student."
"So?"
"So I thought maybe you'd like a mentor."
I didn't know what that was, but I'd be damned if I let him know. "I don't need a mentor."
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
"I don't know." (Money) + (love) / (false hopes) = (contentment)
"Do you like it here, at the group home?"
"It's okay." Something about the way he looked at me, with far more compassion than the real Grandpa Joe ever had, made my eyes start to hurt.
"Are you happy here?"
I hadn't cried when I saw my dad's body, or when they separated me from my brother, or even when the other foster kids put my old teddy bear down the garbage disposal. But fifteen seconds of talking to this geezer, and I could barely hold back the tears.
"Right," he said finally. He stood up and walked away, and I couldn't tell if I was relieved or disappointed.
That Thursday morning, we got a new kid in the home. He was fifteen and a half and wore a perpetual scowl. It took him three days of appraising stares before he whispered to me in the kitchen, "I'm gonna rape you, kid."
The next day was Drive-By Day, and I sat in my usual corner. But the practiced mask of indifference didn't fit right that day. So when fake Grandpa Joe arrived, he hadn't taken three steps into the room before I called out "I need a mentor, please," fat tears tripping their way down my cheeks. He took hold of my hand, eyes wild with confusion and panic, and we walked over to the room next door. I'd never been in that room - it was where the adoption papers got signed.
Mr. Banks, my social worker, peered at me over his glasses. "Sara, are you sure you'd like to-"
I squeezed the man's hand tighter. "I'm sure."
It took an hour or so, and a little bit of packing, and then we were leaving, leaving together. I didn't know what kind of old man adopts a twelve-year-old, but hell, I'd read Silas Marner. Stranger things can happen.
We got to his house around six. It was smaller than the place I grew up in, but he also had a dog, so that was something. I was finishing off a glass of milk and wiping dog slobber off my knee when the front door opened.
A woman came in, kind of pretty and tired-looking. She tossed her keys on the counter and looked up, freezing in surprise. "What's all this?"
"This is Sara," fake Grandpa Joe said quietly.
"I thought we were going to talk about this some more," she said, just as softly, not taking her eyes off me. "I wanted to meet her and-"
"Time became an issue," he said simply.
She nodded, slowly, and came to sit next to us at the kitchen table. "Hi."
"Hey."
"I'm sorry we don't have a room ready for you or anything."
"It's okay. I can sleep on the floor, it's cool." And it was, really. I'd choose this place over the group home any day.
"No, that's not. You have a room. We just haven't, you know, painted it and everything."
"Oh."
"I'm Sara," she said finally. "This is Gil."
"Sara with an H or no H?"
"No H."
"That's going to get confusing."
She grinned at me, a wide smile that made her look about ten years younger. "You hungry?"
"Yeah."
"I'll order Chinese. You like Chinese?"
I nodded, and she disappeared to find a menu.
"You'll like her," the guy said. (Grandpa Joe) + (warmth) = (Gil)
"She seems nice."
"She is. Smart, too. She went to Harvard."
Well, sure. Big smile like that, she probably had parents who gave her a free ride.
She came back to the table and I couldn't help noticing the wrinkles over her forehead. Worry lines, my mom used to call them.
Do free riders worry?
I picked out the sweet and sour pork, and Gil chose shrimp lo mein before excusing himself to go walk the dog. Sara called in the order, and sat back, rubbing her eyes.
"Long day?" I asked, surprising myself.
"Just changed shifts," she said, yawning. "Gil retired last year, so I just moved to the day shift. Made it easier to get approved as adoptive parents."
"How many kids are you looking to adopt?" I could earn my way, I figured. Changing a few diapers never hurt anyone, and they were smart to adopt me as free childcare for the kid they really wanted.
"Just one."
I blinked at her. "One what?"
"We're just adopting you."
"But I'm old," I blurted out, worried that she'd somehow overlooked the obvious. "You could get a little kid easy, or one of those Asian babies, why would you want some twelve-year-old girl?"
"We didn't want some twelve-year-old girl. We wanted you." She sighed and spread her palms on the table. "You remember the night your dad died?"
"He died in the morning."
"Oh." She shakes her head, as if to get rid of cobwebs. "Right. Well do you remember a guy at the scene, the one who took your fingerprints?"
"The one with the spiky hair?"
"That's the one. He's a friend of ours. When he told us about you and about what had happened, we thought maybe we could give you a new home. So Gil announced his retirement, and I applied to days, and we started jumping through hoops to get approved as adoptive parents. And once we were, he started visiting you, to get to know you."
"Why didn't you come?"
She smiled. "Let's just say it usually takes people longer to warm up to Gil. I wanted you two to have some time to get to know each other. But then he brought you home early-"
"One of the boys at the home was going to rape me," I told her bluntly.
The smile faded instantly. "Oh."
"I think it's nice that you guys are taking me in and all," I said. "But you should know, I didn't have a normal childhood."
"Me neither," she said, and something in her eyes made me believe her.
Gil came back a few minutes later, beating the Chinese delivery guy by about thirty seconds. We took the food into the living room and ate right out of the containers.
I've still never had a meal that tasted that good.
Sara smiled too much and Gil smiled too little. The dog fell asleep on top of my feet, snoring loudly as we cracked open our fortune cookies. The fortune was something about wealth, but I crossed it out that night when I was lying sleeplessly in my new bed in my new room, and penciled in: (Gil) + 2(Sara) + (dog) = (home)?