The Last Chance Texaco (2 page)

"Sure," Leon said. "Follow me upstairs." He didn't sound annoyed at all by my slight, which irritated me more than I wanted to admit.

As we stepped to the base of the stairs, he looked over at my backpack again. "You know," he said, "that thing looks heavy. Any chance you'll let me carry it upstairs?"

We caught my new roommate red-handed, with a lit match in her hand.

"Yolanda!" Leon said. "What'd we tell you about smoking inside the house?" He'd knocked on the bedroom door, then opened it, only to find my future roommate just lighting up a cigarette.

At first she tensed, all set to try to throw the cigarette out the window. But when she saw she was busted, she relaxed a little and actually took a drag. "You said I couldn't smoke in the
bathroom.
"

Leon rolled his eyes. "Yolanda, don't play that game. You know the rules. That's five points." He glanced out at the hallway and lowered his voice. "Next time ..."

She ground the cigarette out on the windowsill.

"Lucy," Leon said, "this is your roommate, Yolanda." She was small and pretty, and her skin was the color of the wood in the staircase in the foyer. I had no control over what Leon and the other counselors thought of me, but Yolanda was my roommate. I
could
control what she thought of me, and I knew how important it was to get and stay on her good side.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," she said, and I couldn't help imagining how I looked through her eyes. White skin, black hair, dark eyes. But even more important than what she could see was what she couldn't see, which was basically anything on my face, anything that I was thinking. The front door of my face was locked and deadbolted, and that was exactly the way I wanted it.

"Well," Leon said to me, "I'll let you get unpacked. Mrs. Morgan will go over the house rules with you tomorrow. Till then, just shout if you have any questions. Bathroom's two doors down."

Then Leon was gone, and I was alone with Yolanda. I closed the door behind him. I used to feel nervous or excited when I first met a roommate, but I wasn't nervous or excited now. How could I be? Meeting a roommate was such a familiar action, something I just had to do every so often, like clipping my toenails.

"That's your dresser," Yolanda said, nodding to one of the chests of drawers and sucking on the unlit cigarette, which I now saw she'd been careful not to bend.

I glanced at the dresser--vintage Goodwill--but I wasn't about to unpack my stuff Why bother? I knew I wouldn't be here long enough to make it worth my while.

"Where you from?" Yolanda asked, settling back on her bed, watching me. Kids in group homes don't have hometowns or nationalities. They have their previous group home. No matter how many different ones you've lived in, it's only the one right before that matters.

"Bradley Home," I said. "You?"

"Ryden," she said. I'd lived in Ryden for eight months two years earlier, but I didn't tell Yolanda that.

"Like it here?" I said. There was no point in reminiscing about Ryden Home, but talking about the here and now made a lot of sense. Yolanda might tell me something I'd need to know.

" Sokay," she said. She stared out the window for a second, then said, "My parents were killed in a propane explosion. We were gonna have a barbecue."

Where had that come from? And why was she was telling me this now? This wasn't how things worked. Didn't she know I could someday use it against her?

"How long you been in?" I asked. I meant how long had she been in the foster care system, but I knew she knew that.

"Seven months." Her parents had been killed only seven months earlier? That meant she was a newbie. But seven months and she was already at the Last Chance Texaco? What had she done to end up here so soon? It had to be something worse than smoking inside.

"How 'bout you?" she said.

"Since I was seven," I said. "Eight years." I didn't really remember life before The System, before my parents had been killed in the car accident. There were images in my head, frozen pictures, but they weren't connected to me. They were like snapshots blowing down the sidewalk, farther and farther away from me.

"So you meet Ken and Barbie?" Yolanda asked.

"Shhh," I said.

"What?"

I wasn't exactly sure what. I just knew someone was listening in on us. You live with groups of people long enough, you pick up sort of a sixth sense.

I jerked open the door. Sure enough, there was a kid standing just outside, head bent, like he'd been listening in. He was young, twelve or thirteen, with glasses and a part in the middle of his hair. He had an MP3 player and was wearing the headphones, but I figured he wasn't listening to music. He'd been listening to Yolanda and me through the door. I knew this for sure when he looked up and I saw the shocked expression on his face.

"Hear anything interesting?" I said.

He stood there stunned for a second more. Then he said, "Huh?" He was talking loudly, pretending like he couldn't hear me over the sound of his music.

It was a pretty good recovery, but I knew he was faking. "Give it up," I said. I pointed down to the MP3 player. "The damn thing's not even on."

Once again, I'd left him speechless.

"I'm Lucy," I said to the boy, because I figured why make enemies unless I had to.

"Yeah, I know," he said, trying to sound mysterious, which is hard when you have pimples and a paper clip holding your glasses together.

"That's Damon," Yolanda said.

"Yeah, I know," I said, imitating the mysterious tone he'd used on me. That got a smile out of him. At least he was smart enough to get my jokes.

"He's a weasel," Yolanda said.

"I know that too," I said. This was mostly bluster, but the fact is, I did know something about him. After a few group homes, you start to see patterns in the kids who live in them. Roles people play, like parts in a movie. I knew immediately what part Damon played. He was the Mole, the guy everyone went to for information about everyone else. Kids in group homes did a lot of trading, and what Damon traded was information.

"Well, Damon," I said, "it's nice to meet you."

"It's not like I--" he started to say, but I shut the door in his face. Yolanda actually squealed in pleasure.

When she'd calmed down a little, she said, "Damon's harmless," but I'd already known that too. That's why I'd closed the door in his face.

It had been a long morning, and I needed to pee, so I waited a second for Damon to make himself scarce--I knew he'd leave after getting busted once. Then I opened the door and headed for where Leon had said the bathroom was.

The bathroom door was locked. Or was it just stuck? The doorknob turned okay.

I knocked. "Hello?" I said, but there wasn't any answer from inside. What the hell was it about this house and sticky doors?

I was just about to give it a good kick when a voice said, "Occupied."

The voice hadn't come from inside the bathroom, but from farther down the hall.

I turned. There was a girl walking toward me, about my age. Big hair, big boobs, lots-o'-makeup. But there was fire behind that mascara, and I knew it.

"You're new," she said. "I'm Joy." I don't think I'd ever heard anybody sound quite that aloof. I knew immediately that, unlike Yolanda and Damon, this one was trouble. Without thinking, I stepped back from the bathroom.

"Lucy," I said. "There someone in there?" I nodded to the bathroom.

"Not yet," Joy said. She stepped between me and the door, and gave it a good shove with her shoulder. The door squeaked open, and she stepped inside. "But there is now." Then she slammed the door in my face.

Ever wonder where the term "pecking order" comes from? It comes from flocks of chickens.

Chickens create this sort of social ranking where every chicken can peck on any other chicken lower down in the pecking order. The chicken at the bottom of the pecking order is usually the weakest one. And if that chickens weakness is really obvious--like if it's badly injured--the rest of the flock might even peck it to death.

Just so you know, that's pretty much how it works in group homes too.

• • •

Dinner in a group home is the one time when everyone is together in one place. The counselors always say this like it's a good thing. The truth is, dinnertime at a group home is like dusk on the African savannah--it's when everything happens.

That night, Leon called us down to dinner, and I joined Yolanda and Damon at the long table in the big dining room. Leon was in the kitchen cooking with one of the counselors I hadn't met yet.

A second later, Joy breezed into the dining room with another girl, who I'd later learn was named Melanie. Her hair was a little smaller than Joy's, and her makeup was a little thicker. And she was just this side of plump, but the fat was in all the wrong places.

"You're in
my
chair," Joy said to me.

Yolanda looked up. "We don't have chairs." My roommate may have been in The System for seven months, but it sounded like she hadn't picked up much except smoking. She still didn't know a challenge when she heard one.

"We do so have chairs," Joy said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Don't we, Damon?"

Damon was suddenly fascinated by his spoon. "Oh, yeah." So I'd been right about Damon--at least he was smart.

"Fine," I said. I was new here, no reason to make waves. So I stood up and took a seat a chair away from Joy--far enough that I wouldn't have to deal with her all through dinner, but not so far that it looked like I was scared of her.

"Now you're in my chair," Melanie said.

Of course I was, I said to myself. I wondered, How many times have they played out this little routine?

Not making waves was one thing, but there was no point in letting myself be pushed around. "Tell you what," I said. "Why don't we share? I'll sit here now, and you can have it after dinner."

That hit Melanie right between the eyes. She was just about to say something in response when the counselor I hadn't met yet entered with a pitcher of milk from the kitchen. "You must be Lucy!" she said to me. "I'm Gina." She was tall and willowy, with long sandy blond hair.

"Hey," I said, already irritated by all her teeth.

"Hope you like lasagna," she said. I
would
like lasagna, I wanted to say, except I'm allergic to cheese. This was the one part of my file the counselors obviously hadn't read yet. But Gina had disappeared back into the kitchen before I could say anything. It's not like I wanted my three hundred thousandth peanut butter and jelly sandwich, anyway.

When I looked back at Melanie, she'd taken the seat on the other side of Joy, pretending like our little incident with the chairs had never even happened. So I'd won the first round.

Just then, the front door burst open, like someone had had to give it the boot again. A second later, a voice called out, "Hi, honey, I'm home!" and I heard a couple of kids groaning from the foyer. Joy and Melanie groaned too, like this was a joke that got made every night. This had to be Ben, Gina's husband. Yolanda had told me the two of them were live-in counselors with their own bedroom upstairs. Ben had been out somewhere with the rest of the kids in the house.

From my chair, I could see Ben as he entered the kitchen, and it made sense why everyone called him and Gina Ken and Barbie. He looked nothing like Ken--he was a couple of inches shorter than Gina, and was dark and swarthy--but he and his wife were both young and good-looking. They worked in social services, so Gina didn't wear makeup and Ben had a beard, but they were still just too cute for words, especially when they were kissing, which they did over the salad bowl.

At the same time, the last three of the house's occupants, all guys, descended upon the dining room table like a herd of buffalo. Windows rattled, dishes clanked. I learned their names later, but there was Eddy, the Cute One. Juan, the Big Lug. And Roberto, the Cocky One. Eddy was probably fourteen, and Juan and Roberto were both sixteen or seventeen.

Except for Joy and Melanie, who both threw me the occasional dirty look, no one paid any attention to me. This made sense. Living in a group home, you get used to people coming and going. For all they knew, I'd be there one night or two, until a bed opened up at the place where I was really supposed to be.