Riddled

“‘If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’”

—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

###

From my bedroom window, I can see when the drab agency sedan pulls up. Once a bulbous shlump in tortured denim emerges, gripping the requisite foster-kid Hefty of worldly possessions, the car takes off like it’s dumped a bag of hypodermics into a preschool sandbox. When the rotund bastard, face blitzkrieged with acne, looks around the neighborhood and its sagging roofs and scattered “For Sale” signs with a dopey gaze, like a baby rabbit gawking at the glow of an incoming forest fire, I figure he’s not going to make it twenty-four hours. I’ve got three months in this game, a record as far as I can tell, so I should know what I’m talking about.

Still, I don’t want to get too cocky, so as Pizzaface approaches the house, I make for the hallway for a little more surveillance. I race past my bathroom (more like a closet with a toilet and shower) and down the passage of naked drywall until I reach the corner by Margie’s room, where the fleur-de-lis wallpaper begins. From there, I creep along the oriental runner onto the landing and crouch against the built-in shelves, where my brown tee and dark hair recede nicely into the wood stain.

The kid taps the front door tentatively, as though he’s free to leave if no one answers the door. But Margie doesn’t let him linger. She hurry-walks from the kitchen and opens the door with a flourish.

“I’m Margie,” she chimes, hand to her chest, a shag-cut shy of being a full-blown Mrs. Brady.

He can’t be older than fifteen. Funny how MINOR THREAT stands out on his heavily markered sleeve. A very minor threat, I hope.

“I can take care of that.” Margie gestures towards the creped trash bag. She’s dealt with enough fosters to wait and see whether he’s the kind for a handshake, a full hug, or hands the fuck off, so she keeps her hands in front of her in a nonthreatening manner. I was the final category when I first showed up, an emaciated cat who backed away from any living presence.

They face each other a good while, maybe two complete minutes of silence. Finally, Pizzaface’s nose turns him towards the kitchen, where Margie has mac and cheese at the ready. He grinds his jaw and lets his bag slip to the floor.

Margie swoops it up and coos, “I’ll get these washed in a jif. Go eat.”

He mumbles something—a name?—and Margie huffs off to the cellar door. She asks if he wants his jacket washed, too, but he trudges on without responding. “Plates are on the counter,” she sings. “Take as much as you like. Only three of us right now.”

That last line is an opening I could jump on to stake a claim, as this tubalard looks liable to scarf up all the good stuff. Margie’s first pot of the night is always the homemade. Anything after that comes from the box. The feral me lunged at food like no more could ever exist, but I’ve tamed down since then. Not to the point of being all smiles and lilts like Margie, though. And I don’t think I should be.

###

By my count, I’ve outlasted thirty-two or -three other fosters so far. Hard to nail it down exactly because there was one in a tattered hoodie who slept in the other cot one night, hood up and back to me, without ever saying a word. Lit out before I got up, but by dark, there was a tattered hoodie, curled up and back to me but in the opposite direction, hood also (still?) securely in place. Didn’t matter, ultimately. Two days later, someone new took that spot.

And the fosters who didn’t make the cut? Found tangled in razor wire outside the power station, blue with hypothermia under the Parkway overpass, choked by stale pizza crust in the dumpster behind Pizza Boys. Some met more direct ends: back of the head mashed by a cinderblock, thrown in the river with hands and feet bound to a barbell plate, soaked with gasoline and force-fed a road flare. No police investigation, no moment of silence at school, the cadaver packed off with no fanfare.

Which can mean only one thing, as far as I can tell: Margie’s is a gauntlet where the agency lines up their hopeless cases like soda cans in a convenience store cooler to see who makes it through. After all, there are only two cots, and I share my room with whoever shows up next: boy, girl, or prefer not to say. What did the ugly fucker in that movie say? “There can be only one”?

I’d grown used to competition elsewhere, but when you’re just another support check crammed into an already crowded basement or barn, it becomes obvious you’re going to have to elbow your way to that pot of chicken broth watered up from a can a tenth its size if you want a spoonful, or get in the first jab when some alpha wannabe and his cronies start eyeing up your sneakers or between your legs. I had no memory of any kind of life before this, but considering what I’d heard from other fosters, I’m sure it contained some combination of addiction, inappropriate sexual contact from a step-something, getting locked out on cold nights, and/or a parent or two turning tricks I blocked out for good reason. (My case file says my name is Sonya and that I’m seventeen, but I go by Sonny so I have at least some say in the matter.) But Margie’s was like walking into an afterschool special. My first roommate, David, a two-month vet who’d grown so comfortable with his position that he had band posters on the wall and wore a varsity jacket, lent me his Imagine Dragons comforter the first night.

“Gets drafty,” he warned. With a smile, but still I slept with my head on the metal frame of the cot, in case he decided to aim a hard-on at me during the night. I may have the build of a middle schooler, but that only spurs some horndogs on. The next day, he walked me to school and escorted me to the main office so I could get a schedule (ninth grade, every class, since I’d never stayed anywhere long enough to accumulate a transcript). I slouched through every class and at the table during dinner while David told Margie about football practice.

Before bed that second night, he didn’t talk much as he flipped through a book, Foundling Fables, its leather cover squiggled with threads of gold. It had once been the size of a cinderblock from the looks of it but now had large gaps of missing pages. When I asked him what it was about, he muttered, “Found it,” and chuckled at his own wit. When he was done reading, he folded a page over and tucked the book under his mattress.

Two days later, David got dragged under a freight train for three miles before the engineer noticed. Margie cleared out his posters and book by the time I got home, but not the comforter, as I’d kept it on my bed. Next came a stick of a girl whose eyes took up most of her face (and I thought I was small). We stared each other down all night, poised like two alleycats waiting for the other to make the first move. Hours later, she wound up in a car trunk at Masher’s Collision, her neck broken.

Should have known there was a catch. And no lie, realizing there was a game afoot was comforting. I just had to figure out the rules. So how long did this competition run? What had kept David in play for two months while Stick barely made it through a night?

While casing out the next arrival, a goth who’d wind up drowned in a pothole, I caught a glimpse of that gold-threaded leather on the built-in shelves, crammed in among some decades-old National Geographics and birdwatchers manuals (no, Margie has never shown any interest in the drab pigeons and brown golf balls that flit about here). While the goth brooded on her cot, I flipped around Foundling Fables for clues. The stories were about orphans, like the guys who built Rome, a little girl freezing to death in the snow despite the matches she couldn’t sell, and a Hansel and Gretel where the witch cooked the boy. Then, on a page that had been folded over, one about squirrels adopting a baby who’d been abandoned in a forest. They named him Acorn, and they showed him how to forage. They taught him to be kind to other animals, as the forest provided everything they needed. But when his family got trapped and killed by some boys, Acorn trailed them to their cabin. The boys’ mother (somehow!) recognized Acorn and explained that she’d left him in the forest so the other children wouldn’t starve (the children who were now chowing down on his family, by the way). She begged for Acorn’s forgiveness. Acorn said to his mother, “I will be the better human,” and left. As soon as he was out the door, a great tree fell down onto the cabin, killing everyone inside.

Better human, huh? Sure, the story was a crock of shit (I’d seen squirrels crunch on living birds), but it was a fable. The fact that mattered most was that David had lasted two months in this contest. So I sat up at the dinner table, made small talk with Margie while we watched TV together (nothing but ancient comedies she chuckled and sighed at like they were home movies). At school, I raised my hand to whatever pronunciation my teachers offered (“sahn-ee-ya?” “sew-nya?”). I even did homework for a little while, though no one ever collected it.

But I couldn’t bring myself to be nice to the other fosters, considering the stakes. I kept reading Foundling Fables to see where David had fallen short.

Thus, I found another story, of a prince whose name I have no idea how to pronounce (starts with O), who heard he’d one day kill his dad and bang his mom. Thought he’d beaten the rap when he left home, probably blew his ego even larger when he saved a kingdom by solving a monster’s riddle. So big he didn’t think twice about killing some road-raging old man and having kids with the previous king’s widow.

Guess who? O-guy never knew he was a foster because his adopted parents never bothered to tell him. Prophecy fulfilled.

Conclusion? It’s when you think you’re in the clear that the pavement beneath you opens up to reveal a trash compactor under your feet.

So even though I find it a waste when Pizzaface waddles from the kitchen with a mound of homemade high enough to be the whole damn pot, I keep to my blind and watch as he heaps up spoonfuls that smear his cheeks and chin.

Because he’s not dead yet.

As Margie shambles down the cellar stairs, she calls out, “Don’t wait on the washer. Plate in the sink when you’re done. After that, you can go upstairs, down the hall. Bed’s already made.”

All hope for the homemade gone, I slip back to my room. On my side, I’ve stapled up pictures of zoo animals and rock stars in mid-performance that I’d torn from magazines at the school library. I wrap myself in my Imagine Dragons comforter, since I haven’t lent that shit to anyone. After a couple minutes, I hear Pizzaface clop down the hall.

“Behave yourself, Bluto,” I growl when he’s in the room, a waft of dumpster close behind him. He keeps his eyes down, though he’s got a few inches and at least forty pounds on me, and sits on the other cot. “My name’s Edith,” I say, “Edith Bunker,” because why bother? “Be a good boy, and I’ll let you walk me to school.” I got time until Margie gets to whipping up a mac and cheese box, so I fish out my book and reread the story of that motherfucker of a king (haha!) while Pizzaface sits there and mopes. After a while, he sags back, perpendicular to the mattress, his knees hanging over. Then those lipsmacks of sleep.

I give it a few minutes and go downstairs. The basement door hangs open, the washer banging back and forth down there. Margie stirs powdered cheese into a pot at the dining room table.

“He’s quiet.” She puts the pot in front of me.

I spoon out a serving in a concertedly sophisticated manner. “Everyone’s got a story,” I say after I’ve chewed and swallowed.

“So true,” Margie exclaims, like she’s never thought of this before, though I’m only quoting her.

After I wash my dishes (and Pizzaface’s), and Margie switches the laundry, the two of us retire to the living room. She brings a bag of pita chips and a can of hummus. Tonight, The Odd Couple.

“Those two,” she chuckles, and I chuckle in kind. Oscar offers Felix an ice cream scooper instead of a melon baller, and she hums agreement when I comment, “I’d eat a melon ball that big.” After three episodes, Margie closes up the hummus and clips the pita bag.

“Make sure he’s up for school, Sonny,” she groans as she stretches.

###

Pizzaface sleeps like he’s been flicked off. He doesn’t move until morning, when I poke him in the cheek. Margie has eggs and orange juice ready. Pizzaface stays in his tortured denim, despite the pile of folded clothes Margie left for him in the hall. He crams his eggs into one bite. I grab us each a Slim Jim and chips for lunch and parade him out the door.

“Make sure he knows where to go,” Margie calls as we hit the street.

Once we’re out of sight, I take back his Slim Jim. Pizzaface’s blotches redden until his face is like a lava lamp. “Front office will make you a schedule,” I instruct, and I hustle off.

School is a straight shot a dozen blocks down, easy to figure out if you take a look around. It’s a neighborhood of undocumented and other people who live full-time on part-time work, their houses similarly tired and struggling. Other kids come out and cluster together as they walk, talk a little. If anyone makes eye contact, they look disappointed that I’m still alive. No biggie. I smack each baby sycamore along the street as I pass, their camo patterns all the more noticeable in this drear, for reassurance that I’m still in this game. After a block and a half, I take a look back. Pizzaface mopes in the same spot I left him in, the bag of chips dangling between his pinched finger and thumb.

If he makes it to dinner, I’ll ask him his name. He’ll be a contender at that point.

###

From my usual corner of the lunchroom, under the mural of founding fathers reading classic literature with exaggerated interest, I eavesdrop on the clutch of ninth grade girls who sit at the other end of the table. “Fry cooks,” I make out, “drive-thru…curbed himself…emo tubalard.” One casts a woeful glance in my direction.

This is what I piece together: Pizzaface mashed his skull on the edge of a curb. Found by fry cooks. Couldn’t even cut that one straight shot of a walk. I could ask these girls for more detail. They eye me like they want me to join them, but that’s because I used to diddle some for their hot lunches.

On my way to fifth period, Mr. Renshaw swoops in on me, his sympathy eyebrows in full effect. “My office?” He crowds me against a locker. I don’t respond, and he nods like he’s accomplished something. “I’ll notify Ms. S.”

We’re both getting what we want: Ms. Shopenhauer’s class is painful to get through, the way she veers off topic to describe her upcoming wedding. And the last thing on Renshaw’s mind is counseling me over the loss of Pizzaface.

I take the comfy chair in front of the desk that’s more like an IKEA table. Renshaw sits forward, index fingers to his chin, his legs manspread. He doesn’t stink wholly of predator, but he’s always on the lookout for an opening to launch from his chair so he can touch my shoulder or put his hand on my back. He clearly hopes his fifty-year-old ass is an object of my fantasies. It’s the kind of weakness I would have exploited once: massage his belly, and he’d no doubt let me skip every class.

But I’m not going that route. That O-guy had to be a big man, king and all. He didn’t have the nerve to exist as a peripheral.

After a stretch of Renshaw’s creepy patience, I mutter, “They found him by a drive-thru?”

Renshaw leans forward, as though ready to catch my tears. “Ted’s Famous. Did he like their chili dogs?”

“Just arrived last night.” I shrug, and the room goes quiet as he waits for the more I refuse to offer. When the period ends, I head out.

###

At home, Margie has of course cleaned the other side of the room. No Hefty bag, no lingering stink. I go downstairs for all the homemade I want, and Margie informs me as she pours me grape juice, “New face on Sunday,” as if she hasn’t said this thirty-plus times before. I can’t tell whether she’s numb to the fact that her house is a boarding station to the River Styx, or if she genuinely resets after each death, like a gameshow host who greets each new contestant with toothy enthusiasm.

Saturday night, while we watch One Day At a Time, I float calling her “Mom” to see where I stand. No one has lasted more than a few days since I came into the picture, so I have to be a frontrunner, no? But when the redheaded TV mom argues with her snotty daughters, horse-faced Julie and bullshit-sweetness Barbara, Margie shakes her head and sighs, “No, thank you.” The comment throws my resolve, so I bury the word in the middle of my sentence: “So will this new one, Mom, be my age or younger?” I even swallow the syllable so it can come off like a mild burp.

Margie fishes into the microwave bag for another unpopped kernel, her favorite part. With no change in tone, she says, “We’ll see when they get here,” but I think I see a quick sidelong glance. Just before she crushes the black pebble between a couple of molars, she blurts, “Hun,” or maybe “Sun,” though maybe she’s just coughing up some husk.

###

Sunday evening, a girl comes lurching down the street. No agency car dropping her off. No trash bag. A long abundance of face, but the rest of her body seems bloated, her arms not quite at her sides. Still, she’s fast. She’s nearly at the front stoop before I can put away Foundling Fables. I’d set myself up all afternoon in front of my bedroom window, flipping around pages so I didn’t look like a ghost haunting the upstairs. I make for my blind, but she’s already through the door, no knocking, so I settle on peeking around the wall. Margie, about to vacuum, is also taken by surprise.

“Well.” Margie worries the cord in her hands. After a moment, she introduces herself, the usual spiel.

When I notice how the new girl’s bloat is actually the result of layers under her sweatshirt and jeans, she locks eyes on me. I’m frozen in place as she comes up the stairs, her posture carnivorous. Every step makes her face longer and longer. I reach for a shelf for balance, forgetting that I never got that far. When she reaches the top, I realize she’s at least a foot taller than me.

“That’s Sonny,” Margie calls as she wraps the cord around the vacuum.

“Hot as fuck in here,” she complains as she looms. She cranes her neck like she’s aiming to strike.

I grumble, “Five layers will do that to you, dumbass.”

The new girl only smiles. “Just three,” she says. “I travel light.”

She hipchecks me and lopes off to my room, is inside before I can recover my balance. I find her on my bed, nosing through my book. She alternates between flipping pages and looking over my wall decorations.

“Can’t find a bookmark,” she says as she studies the wall. Then, as she looks back down into the book, “Brave choice, to be into Taylor Swift.”

I stand just inside, flummoxed. If I sit on the other bed, I’m capitulating, which part of me is okay with, the same part that thinks this girl is too aggressive to be anything but doomed. But the urge to reclaim my bed is still potent, as though I’ll lose more than that if I give in.

She tosses aside the book and starts stripping off layers. My guess was right, of course: two sweatshirts, a flannel and two tees. Three pairs of jeans. Four pairs of socks. “We’re all girls here, right?” she confirms while her final shirt covers her face. She strips down to a stained pair of men’s boxers and sits back. Her ribs lattice her sides, her breasts two empty purses glued to her pale, white chest.

“Well,” she says.

No fights in the road, I remind myself, so I defer to the fresh cot across the room.

She picks up the book again and chuckles as she reads. “Shoulda called this Dumbass Fables. Asshorn just walks out while his family gets cut into stew? And the fuck kind of name is Ooh-dee-puss?” She grabs the page she’s on and tears it out. “Mutherfucker.” She chuckles, like no one’s thought of that before. It should comfort me, that she sees nothing to learn from these stories, but the torn page on the floor pains me. After a while, she turns off the light.

In the dark, she mumbles, “I’m Lily,” with a slur, her face evidently pressed into my pillow, “Lily Munster.” Soon, she’s snoring. Takes me a long stretch of staring at the blank wall to get to sleep.

###

Lily and Foundling Fables are gone by the time I wake. No sign of the page she tore out, but my old bed is a wreck: streaks of dirt and who knows what else on the sheets, a stain of drool on the pillowcase. Somehow, she tore down my pictures without me hearing, nothing but shards left on the pushpins. Most of her clothes remain where she’d dropped them.

Margie eats oatmeal at the dining room table. “She was hungry,” she reports between spoonfuls. Two plates and glasses sit at the other end, both tinted orange.

“She made you this.” Margie nods towards a baggie filled with Life cereal by her elbow. For breakfast and lunch, I presume. “You’ll be late.” At school, I see Lily in Renshaw’s office. He stands over her, nods. When he grips her shoulder, she smiles at me and makes scrunching motions at his belly. Teachers go through their rolls without calling my name, even when I press the issue and raise my hand. When I get to the cafeteria, Lily is already at my table. As soon as I plop down across from her, she rises and goes to the microwaves against the back wall. She leaves a grocery bag on her seat. Inside, a glimpse of gold threads pressed into leather. But before I can make a grab for it, she brings back a plastic container of the homemade, forks up a heap that pulls along a string of gooey cheese that sticks, steaming, to her chin. Doesn’t faze her.

She puts up a finger as she chews, takes a sip of juice box before she can tamp down what’s in her mouth enough to speak. “Sonny as in Sydney? Sophia? Or Sunny with a u, hippy shit?”

The girls at the other end of the table whisper and giggle as Lily brandishes her tongue and licks up cheese tendrils.

###

After lunch, I storm out to the football field. I know it’s a bad idea to be alone right now, but the air inside tickles my throat and lungs with asbestos or some other dangerous shit.

As it’s still chilly, the only others around are under the bleachers, the burnouts firing up their smoke pit. I start towards them, but they tighten their ranks, puffs rising from their hub like a warning signal. Through the windows to the gymnasium, I see Lily leap and spike a volleyball into a kid, whose glasses go flying. Lily pumps her fist and rotates through a series of hi-fives with some senior jocks. She has to lower her hand for most of them to reach her.

To the left of the gym windows, I have a clear view of the walk home, but a sudden weight of loss drops through my gut and buckles my knees. Has Margie already tossed my comforter, picked the thumbtacks from the wall? The trees I’ve passed these last three months, the depressed houses, the UPS van with its hazards flashing, now look like they’re enticing me into their midst with a warty finger. Maybe they’ve always looked dangerous, and I’ve been too pig-headed with hope to notice.

It wasn’t wanting to be king that sunk that doomed bastard (how did Lily say his name?). It wasn’t being cocky about solving riddles. O never knew his actual parents because they’d also heard the prophecy and gotten rid of him. He never had a chance. Nor did I. No clues were going to save my ass. And I take no comfort that Lily’s going to get her turn one day.

I wonder how it’s going to happen. Skull cracked by a rotten branch as I walk under a sycamore? UPS driver who jerks off to teenage girls squirming under the bread bags he’s taped over their heads? Or will Lily’s new crew bust out the back and chase me until I panic and jump into the frigid river behind the field? So many ways to cull the herd.