Runaways

M
y eyes snapped open to the muffled sound of whimpering coming through the walls. These rooms shrunk to closets when you squeezed in our desks and chairs along with a dresser and two beds with a nightstand between them. To get the most space possible, the beds were smack against the walls. My ear was practically part of the wallpaper when I slept.

Two of the new kids we called The Unborn were in the adjoining room. They sounded like puppies. We nicknamed them The Unborn because coming here, living in a foster home, was like being born again, only this time to live in limbo. They had been delivered here yesterday and had spent their first night at the Lakewood House, the foster home Crystal, Butterfly, my roommate Raven and I had christened Hell House.

Information about any new wards of the state, as we were known, spread faster than jam on a fresh roll around here. When it came to learning about one of The Unborns, everyone was suddenly an attentive student, and if you overheard something, you almost felt obligated to be a gossip.

According to Potsy Philips, one of the orphans who made a habit of picking on each and every new kid who came to our home, these Unborns had no father. They were alone with their dead mother for days before anyone noticed.

So what's new about that? I thought. We've been here for years and no one's really noticed—or cared. Actually, that's not entirely true. We care about each other. Not all of the kids get along, but I'm lucky to have found true friends here, my sisters, Raven, Crystal, and Janet, who we call Butterfly because she is so fragile. We all arrived at the house within weeks of each other and became fast friends. When we feel like crying, or our hopes get so low we can't imagine them ever being high again, or when we have happy news to share we know we can count on each other. And that means more than anything.

I lay in bed wondering if the new orphans would be as lucky, then realized that it was almost time to rise and shine. Louise Tooey, our foster mom, whose sickening smile reminded me of the Joker in
Batman,
would come knocking on doors in ten minutes, and if we weren't up and dressed in time, her husband, Gordon, might follow soon after, his boots falling like sledge hammers on the stairs and wooden floors as he approached the rooms. If we were still in bed, he was capable of ripping the blanket off and glaring down at us like some giant buzzard, his eyes wide, his thick lips curled, baring his teeth.

“What do you think this is, a hotel? Are you waiting for breakfast in bed? I have to interrupt my work to come up here? That's ten demerits!” he would bellow, his tan face turning dark red, the muscles and veins in his neck looking like thick rubber bands about to snap.

Your name would go up on the Big Board, a large cork bulletin board in the dining room. When you reached twenty demerits, it was room restriction, a day for every five points over twenty.

Just looking around at the rooms would explain why it was a punishment to be restricted to one. We weren't permitted to put anything on our walls—no posters, no pictures. Supposedly, that was to protect the wallpaper, which looked like it was ready to peel itself off and roll itself into the garbage anyway. No radios or CD players were permitted because the walls were too thin and you couldn't possibly play your music low enough not to disturb someone, especially Gordon and Louise. If you were lucky enough to be brought here with a tape deck or radio, it had to be stored in the utility room and you could have it only during recreation time. You actually had to sign out for your own things!

All the rooms had two windows. The older residents, like the four of us, had the rooms with a view of the lake. We had no curtains, just faded window blinds, most of which had something wrong with them so you had to put a pencil in the roller to keep the blinds down. We were told they were once a buttercup yellow, and the wallpaper was the color of fresh milk with circles as vibrant as newly bloomed violets. Now the walls were the bruised gray of two-week-old hard-boiled eggs, and the circles looked more like dead violets, faded and dried and stuck in someone's book of memories.

Just to make us appreciate where we were lucky enough to be, Louise liked to describe the Lakewood House as it had once been when her parents and grandparents ran it as a resort. She would stop to check on everyone in the recreation room and then gaze around and sigh, her eyes glazed with tears as she drank in the worn oak floors, the tired walls and peeling paint on the ceiling.

“In its day, children, this was the most desirable tourist house in upstate New York, nestled between two mountains with a lake fed by spring water that was once crystal clear.”

Some of the younger children might smile. It did sound nice. Now, however, the lake was brackish, full of weeds, oily on the bottom and off limits to all of us. No fishing was permitted. The old dock was rickety and rotten and there were two damaged rowboats nearly completely submerged beside it. If Gordon caught you within ten feet of that lake, you received a full twenty-five demerits and one day's restriction immediately. No one knew what the punishment might be for a second violation. Gordon left it to our imaginations. Maybe he would put you in the barrel.

There was a story going around that Louise and Gordon kept old pickle barrels in the rear of the house and if you were very bad, they put you into a barrel and closed the top with just tiny holes for air. You were left cramped up in there for days and had to pee and do your business in your underpants. When your sentence was over, the barrel was turned on its side and you were rolled hundreds of feet before you were taken out, shaken and dizzy. Most of the younger Unborns nearly wet themselves just hearing about it. When they then saw Gordon come lumbering down the hallway, his jaw
slack, his rust brown eyes panning the room and the children for signs of misbehavior, they shook in their shoes and held their breath.

Gordon was enough to give any kid nightmares for life. The fact that he and Louise became qualified as foster parents is, as Crystal says, testimony enough that foster children are on the lowest rung of the social totem pole. That's the way Crystal talks. You'd think she was already a college professor or something.

I ground the sleep out of my eyes, ran my fingers through my hair and sat up. Raven was still dead asleep, her right leg out and over the blanket, her long dark hair fanned out over the pillow.

Raven is by far the prettiest of the four of us. Her face is as beautiful as a model's, and everyone is jealous of her shoulder-length ebony hair. All she has to do is shower and shampoo and her hair gleams as if a fairy godmother touched it with her magic wand.

“Hey, sleeping beauty,” I called. She didn't move. “Raven, it's time to wake up,” I sang out. Nothing, not even a twitch was visible in her body.

I reached down and scooped my socks out of my tennis sneakers, rolled them into a ball and then flung them across the room, bouncing them off the back of Raven's lovely head. That got her attention.

“Wha . . .” She turned, looked at me, and smirked, sinking back into her pillow as if it were made of marshmallow.

“Rise and shine, Miss San Juan, before you-know-who comes around and does you-know-what,” I said and rose to open the dresser drawer to pluck out a fresh pair of panties. We had to share the one dresser, a reject from a thrift shop, that was
here when the first tourist arrived from New York City, back when the trains were running and the Lakewood House was listed in a resort magazine called
Summer Homes.

“My grandparents began this as a small farm, couldn't make a living at it, and started to take in boarders,” Louise told us for the four hundredth time yesterday. “From that they developed a well-known tourist home. My parents were very successful, but the economy changed so Gordon and I decided why waste all this? Why not do a good deed and become foster parents? You lucky kids are the beneficiaries.”

You lucky kids? Do a good deed? Louise and Gordon care about someone else besides themselves? Crystal, who is smart enough to become President someday, if women could ever become President, told us how Louise and Gordon receive money for each child and how that money grows as the child gets older, and then how that money is tax free!

“It's Saturday. Why can't we sleep later on Saturday?” Raven moaned.

“Bring it up at the next meeting of the directors,” I quipped. “You better move your rump, Raven, before the rug rats take up both bathrooms.”

On our floor we had to share the bathroom with six other orphans. Gordon was always lecturing us about running the hot water too long. We were convinced he was the inventor of the two-minute cold shower. The Lakewood House had its own well, and he threatened us with the horrible possibility of our running out of water and having to bring it up in pails from the lake.

“I hate this,” Raven grumbled. For a moment I
stared at her as if she had said something unexpected.

Yes, I hate it too, I thought, but neither of us has had any prospective parents nibbling around us. And chances were, we never would. Crystal, who was a junior computer whiz, spent the most time of anyone on the home's one donated computer. She often presented us with wonderful facts, especially about foster children. On any given day, she claimed, there were nearly 50,000 foster children who no longer lived with their mother or father and have been declared by the courts as free to be adopted, but who usually remained in state-run, state-funded substitute care. Good luck to all of them. Crystal told us the population of foster children is growing 33 times faster than the U.S. population in general. Maybe we'll take over the world, I joked, but no one laughed.

I slipped into my panties and reached for my jeans just as Crystal burst into our room, her face flushed. She was still in pajamas, which for Crystal was very unusual. She was Miss Punctuality.

“What?”

“She's doing it again! She worse. She's like . . . petrified wood!”

I looked at Raven, who then leaped out of bed, threw on her robe and followed Crystal and me to Crystal and Butterfly's room. There was Butterfly with her legs pulled up and in, her hands clenched into fists, her eyes shut so tight the lids looked sewn together. Her lips were pursed stiffly, her nostrils quivering with her heavy breaths. We looked at each other. Butterfly went into these catatonic trances more and more lately. It didn't exactly take a rocket scientist to figure out the reason. She was lonely, fragile, afraid of rejection. For her, going
into this trance was like crawling into a cocoon. Crystal, our resident child psychologist, said Butterfly was trying to return to the womb. Raven thought she was nuts, but I understood. I never said anything, but I sometimes wished I could go back as well.