“Harper, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No,” I said, looking back over my shoulder at him. “It’s okay. I don’t mind talking about it.”
“What happened?” He asked, sidling closer to me and laying his hand on my shoulder.
I placed my hand over his. “Dad, I mean, Henry Strauss, got a job offer in Chicago. I wished so badly that they’d adopt me but as we neared their moving day and I was prepared for yet another transition, the offer never came. I was silly, really, hoping they’d make me a part of their family. It was then I realized that I was really, truly on my own, that no one was going to love me the way I wanted to be.”
“Harper. You don’t really think that, do you?”
“I don’t know,” I threw out quickly. “Anyway, that’s when I went off the deep end, getting into hella’ trouble and getting a new family every six months. The all time record was one month. I’m sort of proud of that one.
“The foster families got worse as I got older. Either my reputation preceded me or, you know, they just didn’t like taking the older ones, which was pretty common.”
“I know,” Callum said.
I shrugged my shoulders, scooting against the back of the couch and getting comfortable beside Callum. I lay my head on his shoulder and he reached his arm around mine. We sunk into one another.
“The last few foster families were just atrocious,” I admitted to the room. “I’d just turned sixteen and gotten thrown out of a bad family for breaking into the school.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long story. Basically, I had this friend named Lauren who unfortunately got pregnant. She was kicked out and sent to one of those magnet schools for ‘troubled teens’. Anyway, she had a few things in her locker along with some money. They wouldn’t let her enter the school to retrieve it. They’d said they would retrieve her belongings for her and forward them on but she was desperate for the cash inside and was afraid the shady janitors would pocket it and claim there was nothing else inside.
“We came up with this plan to leave a classroom window open nearest her locker during school and then we’d come back later and get into her locker.”
“I don’t get it. Why didn’t she just give you the combination to her locker and you do it during school hours?” He asked.
“Because if anyone and I mean anyone saw me get into her locker, even with Lauren’s permission, I’d have gone to jail and I couldn’t have another arrest on my record.”
“I guess I can understand that.”
“Well, I left a window in the wood shop classroom open and we returned that night but Lauren was too big to fit through, so I agreed to go in without her. I was in an out in less than five minutes with all her stuff. I thought it the perfect pseudo-crime.” I paused.
“But?” He asked, eyebrows raised.
“But, turns out, a few kids, who hated me, saw us while playing basketball on school grounds and turned my name in.”
“What jerks, dude.”
“No kidding.”
“So, then what happened?” He prodded.
“I told the school but to them it didn’t matter why I did it. They expelled me anyway. I was just thankful they didn’t press charges.”
“That’s when you were forced to change families?”
“Yeah, that was the straw that broke that camel’s back, I think. If I had known what kind of family I would have been moved to, I never would have broken into the school.”
“What kind of people were the new family?”
“It wasn’t the family so much as it was the other foster kid I had to share the house with. The first day there, I had a pretty pleasant conversation with the parents about their expectations and all that crap. You know the drill. We were just sitting at their kitchen table, talking, when I heard the door open and this hulking guy around my age fills the door way.
“‘Harper,’ the old lady says. ‘This is John Bell. He’s the other foster child here.’ I stood up and shook the guy’s hand. He sat down with us and seemed pleasant enough through conversation. We all ate dinner together and then watched a little television. All nice and neat and pretty, right?
“Anyway, the next day, John introduced me to the kids at my new school and others in the neighborhood. I was really starting to believe he would be cool and that this family could be one I could stick it out with, at least for a little while.
“I couldn’t have been more wrong,” I said solemnly.