He knelt next to me, right on the rocks. “You noticed that much. About a poem.”
“Do you still think I’m crazy? If not, do you know how to solder?”
He laughed a short laugh that was more like the sound you make when you get punched in the gut. “You’re not exactly what I expected.”
Hanging out with Taylor’s crowd no doubt gave him total access to the Lakebrook High rumor mill. “What did you expect?”
He toyed with a rusted spring. “I heard you were a bit shy…”
I suspected he was politely editing the information he had received.
“… and socially dysfunctional.”
Or maybe not.
“I also heard”—he dropped the spring—“that you were cursed.”
That was new. And it stung. I snatched up the spring and fought the prickle in my eyes. “Be careful. This spring might not look like much, but it’s good material.” Jamming it into my backpack, I stood and stalked away from him, down the tracks.
He caught up with me, offering a shiny railroad spike. “What about this?” He spoke so humbly that I paused and forced myself to look at him.
“Cursed?” I tried to keep my voice light. “Cursed, like how? Like someone’s using a voodoo doll of me as a pincushion?”
But I had guessed what he had meant, and I was right.
“People say that you’ve lived in as many foster homes as years of your life. They say that no one wants to keep you.”
“People are wrong,” I said, and a tear spilled over.
Astonishment flashed across Conn’s face, then a kind of hesitancy crept in, one that reminded me of someone who has broken something and has no idea what to do with the pieces. “Darcy … I didn’t mean to make you cry.” He lifted a hand. He stretched it out slowly, as if I might bite him. He touched my sleeve. “I’m sorry. Truly.”
I swiped at my wet eyes. I felt a surge of frustration—resentment, even—that just a few words from him had stripped me bare. I didn’t even really know Conn, yet still he made my most intense emotions simmer to the surface.
“People are wrong,” I began again. “I’m sixteen, and I’ve lived in nine foster homes. Plus two years in a group home when the DCFS couldn’t place me.”
“Why so many?”
“There was always a reason. An excuse the foster parents gave for not keeping me. I got kicked out of my first home for poking a wire hanger into an electrical outlet. My foster mom caught me, shrieked, and called the DCFS to come cart me away, because I was clearly suicidal and no one had told her that I was a child with ‘special needs.’”
“Were you? Suicidal?”
“I was five.”
“Still.”
“No, I wasn’t trying to off myself. I was curious. Little kids spend half their waking hours being warned not to do things. Don’t run with scissors. Don’t lick a flagpole in winter. Don’t stick anything into electrical outlets. Those three little holes looked so mysterious. I had to know if they were as dangerous as everyone said.”
“What happened?” A smile curled the corner of Conn’s mouth, indicating he’d already guessed the answer—which wasn’t exactly hard, given that I was standing right there in front of him, and not buried in an early grave with the tombstone Here lies Darcy Jones, electrocuted orphan.
“Nothing happened,” I said. “Just a jolt. My foster mom freaked out over nothing.”
“It does seem like an insufficient reason to send you back to the DCFS.”
“It was a better reason than others. My second set of foster parents canceled my stay with them because I brought a bat inside the house.”
It seemed like every word I spoke surprised Conn more. “Why did you do that?”
“It was dying. I found it on the ground outside, struggling to lift its wings. I just wanted to give it some water, but my foster parents thought that what I really wanted was to give their kids rabies. They declared me a danger to their children.”
He paused. “It sounds to me more like there’s something wrong with your ex–foster parents.”
“All nine sets? No. They were nice people. Maybe a little hysterical where bats and electrical outlets were concerned, but, with one exception, they tried to be nice to me.”
His gaze sharpened. “One exception?”
I wished I hadn’t said that. But now Conn was standing in front of me, feet planted on the tracks in a way that made clear he wasn’t going to let the matter lie. “One foster father,” I said. “When I was twelve.”
“What did he do?”
I shrugged. “What does it matter?”
Conn’s eyes were hard. “Tell me.”
“He didn’t do anything. I punched him in the face first. Broke his jaw in three places.”
“Right. Of course he didn’t.” The tension drained from Conn’s body. “Of course you did.”
Believe me, I was glad, too, that that story had a happy ending. But it got even harder for the DCFS to place me once I had ‘Violent’ and ‘Behavior Disorder’ stamped on my record. Hence the two years spent in the Ingleside Home for Girls.
I probably should have thought a little more carefully about why a twelve-year-old girl had been able to put a grown man in the hospital, but that would have meant mulling over the whole incident, and it’s hard to think too much about things that hurt. So I didn’t.
Still, a needle of unease slid into me. For a moment I sensed the suspicion that must have touched every single one of my ex–foster parents.
“Have you ever read Sherlock Holmes?” I asked Conn.
“Yes … although I’m having some difficulty figuring out what he has to do with the topic at hand.”
“He once said that, when solving a mystery, you have to consider all the possibilities and eliminate them one by one. Whatever’s left, no matter how strange it seems, must be your answer. What makes more sense? That all eighteen adults vetted and interviewed and trained by the DCFS to be foster parents were awful people, or that there is something wrong with me? Something deep inside. Something they didn’t notice right away, but eventually couldn’t live with.”
Conn didn’t reply.
“So maybe I am cursed,” I said. “It’s the most straightforward answer.”