you could hold me
The kid's twelve, but he looks younger clutching that ragged stuffed animal to his chest all the time. The other kids in the group home don't like him much, and it's not just that he never gets the joke until you explain it to him or that he usually doesn't make sense when he opens his mouth- none of these kids are in a position to be picky about things like that.
He's just weird, they say, and somehow he always has bruises but it's easier if everyone pretends it's because he's clumsy, because he is clumsy, there's probably never been a kid so prone to knocking things over and falling down the stairs in the recorded history of mankind.
What's he here for? One of the temporary workers asks.
Tried to kill himself, the group home mother replies, absently. She's not really anybody's mother and she doesn't ask them to call her that. Slit his wrists.
At twelve? The temp responds, with intrigued horror. She knows the type, the ones who like hearing the kids' stories- who got touched in their no-no places by daddy dearest, who's a heroin baby, who got the shit beat out of them with a crowbar before middle school. She hopes the girl doesn't get far in this line of work, but of course she will, she goes on and becomes a social worker or a therapist and gets all the stories she wants to gloat over.
You haven't met his parents, she says, making yet another of the endlessly unmade beds, I'd try and kill myself too, if I was stuck in a house with those people.
His mother was high when she came in to sign the admission papers, you'd have to be an idiot to miss it, and his father- well, his father was a real piece of work. She feels sorry for the kid in a distant, pitying way, but most of these kids have fucked up parents. It's not like it's something she hasn't seen before.
When one of the older kids stabs the kitten the kid found on the sidewalk outside and brought in out of the rain for whatever stupid reason, it's just a cat for god's sake, it takes her three exhausting hours to get him to stop screaming, and he's sobbing still when she shoves him into the bathroom.
Clean yourself up, she says, shortly, too shortly and she knows it, but the other kids aren't exactly settled either, she's just glad he was the only one in the room besides that crazy little fucker who she'd do anything to ship off somewhere with the facilities to handle a sociopath and that she could get the body into the trash before anyone saw it and that that idiot temp girl managed to keep the other kids occupied while she dealt with it.
She hates this job. She hates the kid's big injured eyes because you'd think that with everything in his file that he'd just be able to deal by now and what the hell was he thinking showing something that tiny and vulnerable to Liam, of all people, the fourteen year old she's pretty damn sure is responsible for those cuts the kid swears up and down came from brushing his leg against broken glass but she's been working this job, this fucking job, long enough to know that that is flat out bullshit.
But what's she gonna do? She can't prove it, and little darling Liam's darling mommy has a great deal of money she spends making sure no one labels her baby boy 'anti-social' or 'psychotic' or even 'violent', which she should know seeing as how she took some of that money but what else was she going to do? She knows that whatever she got went to her superiors double or more and she needs this job and she hates this job and it never, ever fucking stops.
The next day the kid comes down to breakfast with that freakish teddy bear in his arms and quietly asks her, when no one else is around to hear, if his parents are coming to visit. He asks almost every three days and she's always had the patience before to say no, not yet, they haven't arranged for it but I'm sure there's a good reason and that's all the kid seems to want.
No, she says, not yet, and I don't think they're ever coming.
She's horrified that she said it- and then almost pleased, and then disgusted with herself for it, and she almost apologizes and explains that she's just tired, she is so, so tired and she's not sure she can do this anymore, that what she really wanted to do was build bridges but she couldn't afford to become an engineer and girls didn't do that when she was young anyway so somehow she ended up here and she's just as scared as he is and her parents never visited either when they were alive.
But he's already walking away, and she can't see his eyes but she's pretty sure she knows just how dead they are, and Alicia's already tugging on her arm and asking for more juice and she tells herself she'll make it up to him later but she never ends up getting around to it. There's always something else to do, and the day he finally gets sent home (more because they need his bed than because he's recovered) she's shocked when he hugs her at the door, too shocked to hug back before he's pulling away and nodding at her.
Thank you, he says, picking up the suitcase they got in a pile of donations because he didn't bring one with him, just a tattered pillow case his father threw the contents of his drawers into. You've been really nice to me.
It's what they pay me for, she says, in a daze, and it's only after he's gone that she realizes she probably should've said something else.