I’ve ridden the same carousel for the past sixteen spinning revolutions of my life, hearing the same annoying pinky-dunk children’s tune ringing in my head. The same view of worn, wooden horses and tigers with their paint starting to peel. The same overweight conductor shrieking her whistle to blur the past year of my life into the next.

Roz. She was the red-haired lady from hell that oversaw my foster home carousel. I’d have no time between the last home and the new one before I’d be at the trash can vomiting from the last go-’round when there she’d be, grabbing me from behind and chaining me onto that stripe-less tiger once more.

“There must be somethin’ wrong with you, girl,” she’d snigger laboredly, forty-five years’ worth of smoker’s smog floating into my face.

I gave up talking back to her long ago. It wasn’t worth the black eye or the dark bruise under my arm. So I just kept my mouth shut. Didn’t say anything about the latest family. Didn’t say anything about what I thought about her. Sure as heck didn’t say anything about leavin’ in the middle of the night.

At two in the morning, I am standing on the corner of 85th and Jefferson, seventy-six bucks in my pocket, waiting for the public bus.

I jingled the few coins in my pocket and hiked my backpack higher on my shoulders. The zipper was almost debilitated in its ability to zip, the pack was so old. Deodorant, underwear, Mrs. Turner’s Chanel perfume, some packaged stuff from the pantry I wasn’t allowed to eat, the little Bible that was swaddled with me when I was found at the police station, a flashlight, Mr. Turner’s expensive watch, two black spaghetti-strap tanks, a pair of jeans, my sketchbook, and a tin of Prismacolor pencils.

Suddenly I was standing in a spotlight as a pair of headlights beamed down the hill and into my eyes.

Maybe foster care was good once, I let myself suppose as the bus pisssshed to a stop. Maybe. Maybe it was a fun little carousel in its beginning, though after years of riding the merry-go-round of pain, it was hard to imagine how.

The quarters I dropped in the fare slot shouted in the early morning silence: pling, pling, pling! and by the last little metallic cymbal of sound, I had deposited myself into a seat near the back. No one else was on the bus. Still, I swung my backpack to my lap and hunched over it protectively. I yanked my yellow and black-striped stockings above my knees. Subconsciously, I spun the black and yellow bangles around my wrist.

West. The bus was heading west. I didn’t know where I was headed other than that, but it was something. Just getting away from the city, where I could maybe hear myself think, was enough.

#

I had forgotten how to cry a long time ago, but if I could’ve cried, I would have. This was the one place that was just starting to feel like home, the one place I thought I might finally, truly, belong, a place where I had only just begun to make memories.

Why did this have to happen?

I stood fifty feet from the wicked inferno consuming the livestock barn and the house. With each home, my heart had been painfully branded over and over and over again, and now it was a deflated, freakishly tattooed organ in my chest.

Just this past week, I had learned to milk a cow, and I actually thought it was fun. I had pulled out my sketch pad and drawn the chestnut and white cow, Annabelle, and the gray gelding I had learned how to groom, Mister Bean. I’d sketched the goat who had just given birth, one of the sheep, and a couple of the absurd chickens that woke me every day at the freakin’ buttcrack of dawn. All of them were gone.

Along with learning how to care for the animals, I had started to learn how to cook. From scratch, I could make biscuits in an iron skillet, apple cobbler, beef stew and fried chicken. Out of all the foster homes I’d visited, not one had offered to show me how to make something as simple as scrambled eggs or french toast. They all assumed I was the moody, uninterested teenager who hated everyone and everything. They were wrong.

I sighed, remembering the apron Mrs. Marsh surprised me with after I’d burned my first attempt at blueberry muffins. “You can’t be extraordinary without failing sometimes, honey,” she’d told me. Then she had smiled, her right cheek dimpling. “Besides, Mr. Marsh has been known to enjoy a burnt muffin or two.” She lowered the apron over my head and tightened the strings around my waist. “I burnt the first meal I made him after we married…that poor pork chop! I dissolved in a fit of tears as soon as I pulled that little piggie out of the oven, but that sweet man asked for seconds.”

I blinked rapidly, though no moisture threatened to escape. It was just an apron. The air was bitter and heavy with sorrow. Again I wished I could cry.

The wind, unhindered by a tree line, thrashed my crow-colored hair into my face and threw embers mockingly close to my bare feet. I pulled the hand-stitched quilt from my now non-existent bed tighter around shoulders. But no blanket could keep out the chill shivering down my legs on this cool summer night. Along with the quilt, I’d grabbed my pack with my sketches in it on the way out of the burning house. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I had lost my artwork.

Mr. and Mrs. Marsh, the ones who had approached me at the Leslie church of God the day I bussed into town, grasped each other, weeping and staring, blinking and moaning. They watched, helpless, as their soybeans were swallowed whole by greedy, unrelenting red and orange tongues. Julie and Jordan, their biological children, sat beside them, grief streaming down their faces.

I felt the familiar, all-consuming fear that was just beginning to slither into my heart for the hundredth time.

Was Roz going to come and haul me away?

#

“You’ve got 30 days,” Roz manages between two smoker’s hacks.

Mr. Marsh takes off his glasses and looks at his wife, whose face has turned pale. “That’s it? One month??”

Mrs. Marsh grasps his hand with white knuckles.

I lower my head, unable to watch their expressions anymore.

“Shouldn’t be too hard for you to find a place,” my caseworker says in what I’ve dubbed her “soft voice.” But it’s not particularly soft or nice. More like fake sympathy. Roz sniffs. “This girl has gone from home to home too many times in her life,” she drawls slowly, looking at me from the corner of her eye, a sneer caught on her upper lip. She knows the hell I’ve caused her and many foster parents, and she’s looking for payback.

She knows.

She knows that I actually like this family. And she’s going to make it impossible for me to stay with them, much less be adopted.

“She deserves some stability,” Roz coughs again. “If you can’t bring that to the table, we’ll find someone who can.” She pushes against the only table in the state office boardroom and stands, fiddling in her pocket for her pack of smokes and lighter. “Thirty days,” she repeats, as sweetly as a bitter, fat old hag can muster.

#

It’s two in the afternoon a week later, and I’m staring up at Boyle’s Funeral Home sign, my stomach curdling with ire. The bus door swings closed behind me with a tired, hissing exhale and pulls away from the curb.

I can’t turn back now. I’m not even sure why I’m here.

The woman hated me. I hated her. And now she lay in a coffin to be viewed and mourned, her life perhaps even celebrated by someone.

It really doesn’t shock me that there are only a handful of people in the room. After a couple of awkward minutes hovering in the corner, I approach the open casket. Even looking down at her greyish body, her red hair coiffed around her head and heavily sprayed with hairspray, I can still smell the cigarette smog.

“Did you know her?”

I turn away, trying to swallow my longstanding enmity with my case worker, and there’s a young man, a few years older than myself, standing there. No facial hair, brown hair spiked with gel, black Led Zepplin shirt with a black suit coat over it, black skinny jeans, black sneakers with white laces.

I manage a shrug. “Sort of.”

“She was my mom,” he says, the admission shading his dark eyes.

I blink, my eyebrows probably shooting clear off my forehead. “Roz was your mom?!” A pause. “Seriously?”

Roz’s son nods and glances away as though he’s…embarassed? “Yeah. Kinda hard to believe.”

“I…I thought she hated kids,” I admit slowly.

“Yeah,” he said, lifting his gaze to scan the nearly empty room. “I could never quite figure out why she adopted me.”

I stare at him as though he had five eyes. Roz adopted a son? And he’s still alive? I can’t stifle the smirk on my lips, funeral or not. “Or why she didn’t kill you.”

He gave me a smile that quivered once. “Oh, she threatened hundreds of times.” Roz’s son shoved his hands in his pockets. “How did you know her?”

“She was my case worker…for pretty much my whole life.”

This time it was his eyebrows that shot upward. “I’m glad she didn’t kill you either.”

“There were times I wanted to end it myself.”

“We have that in common,” he says, glancing once more at his mother’s open casket. He shuffles his feet before looking at me. “Wanna get out of here? Grab a coke or something?”

The clock on the far wall behind him tells me it’s only two-thirty. I told Mrs. Marsh that I wouldn’t be very long, but I don’t think she’d mind. She’s the kind of lady who would encourage me to work on forgiveness concerning my past. Talking with the only other person in the world who knew Roz might help…and if that would make her proud of me, I wanted to do it. “Sure,” I say. It’d be a start, anyway.

“Luke.”

I give him my hand. “I’m Shannon.”