So, he is stuck with me.
My phone jars me from my impending escalation.
Steffi. She’s the only person in the world I’d talk to now.
I wipe my face and cough to clear my throat. “Hey, you!”
“Hey, back!” Steffi shouts happily. Immediately, I am comforted.
Steffi has been the one exception to the endless proof that the world is unstable and unreliable. From the moment we met when we were fourteen, we have been partners in survival. For only three months, we lived in the same foster family with four other kids, but three months were all we needed to cement our friendship.
“How is California?” I ask.
“Stupidly sunny and gorgeous. Just like me.” Steffi lets out her gravelly laugh, and I can practically see her flip her long blond hair. “I was made for Los Angeles, you know that. And you are, too. You’ll see that once you graduate and get your ass out here.”
I smile. “That’s the plan.” I hear music fade in and out and the sound of hangers being pushed along a closet rod. “You going out?”
“You betcha. I’m putting you on speaker while I get dressed, ’kay? So, what’s going on with you? How’d drop-off with Daddy go?”
“Fine. You know . . . We had lunch.”
“Simon still as hot as ever?”
“Oh my God, Steffi! Don’t be gross!” But I can’t help laughing.
“He’s not my daddy,” she says, making her voice all sexy and borderline creepy. “If I had my way, I could be Mrs. Simon Dennis. And be your mommy!”
“Shut up! That’s weird. And he’s gay,” I remind her. “You’re not exactly his type. Thank God.”
“There is that,” she says, sighing dramatically. “Dammit! Is he still wearing those adorable aviator glasses? Don’t answer that. Why is romance so unfair?”
I roll my eyes. “I think you’ll survive not capturing Simon’s heart.”
“It’s fine. I plan to drown my sorrows in a slew of vodka sodas and pick up the hottest piece of ass I can find. And you? Will you be getting some college-boy action yourself this fine evening?”
I refrain from snorting. “Classes start tomorrow. Just taking . . . it . . . easy tonight.” For some reason, I stumble over my words, and it’s the only thing Steffi needs to know something is off.
“What’s going on, Allison?” She’s gentle now.
“I’m okay.”
“You having a hard night?”
It’s useless to lie to her. “Yes. A little. I don’t know why.”
The music in the background stops. Like it or not, I have her full attention. “You want to run through it again?” she asks.
I can’t speak, but she knows me well enough to know that I’m nodding.
She begins to tell me what I already know—or what I should know, but what she must remind me of all too often. “We are not statistics. We beat the system. Nobody wanted us for all those years? Fine. So, we blew apart the system. We grew up alone, rejected, unwanted. But screw everybody. We graduated high school, and we’re both in college. We haven’t gone to jail. We don’t use drugs. We’ve never run away or been on the streets doing Lord knows what. We are not statistics,” she emphasizes again. “We lived with some rotten families. We lived with some cool ones. The details do not matter. Do you hear me? The details do not matter. I don’t want to live in the past. Neither do you. We’re not going back there. It’s over. We are not goddamn statistics. We will never be. We are the exception, and we are exceptional. Got it?”
I nod to myself again. “Right.” I had become a shell of a kid until Steffi showed up and rocked me into life. At least to a degree.
“So, what else?” she prompts. “What do we do? Each and every day?”
I roll onto my side and reach to turn off the small desk light that shines over me. “We focus on the future, and we don’t look back.”
“Big futures,” she corrects. “And why do we have big futures waiting for us?” she asks me.
“Because you made us study. Because you knew that our education was the most important thing. That it would save us.”
She’s not bragging when she makes me say this; she’s only pushing me to validate what we both did. She should take more credit, though, because Steffi threatened, cajoled, and bribed to get my contact information with each move. She was relentless in keeping us together even after we were apart. And Steffi is the only reason that I threw myself into school because she instilled in me how crucial this was to survival.
“And you got into college. A damn good one.”
“And you got a full scholarship to UCLA. Nobody does that. Nobody,” I stress, almost as if to remind myself of what she’s accomplished. Steffi’s hard work and ferocious determination have indeed paid off well. She, much more than me, is the exception to the foster-kid rule.
“We got where we are,” she continues, “because we stayed focused.”
I stare at the ceiling above me. “And because you took care of me.”
“We took care of each other.” Steffi pauses. “Do you remember what you did for me?”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
She’s silent for a bit. “Okay. But you took care of me, too.”
“Why don’t you let me take care of you more now?”
“Because I’m a tough shit.”
I can’t help laughing. “You are. I just want you to know that I’m here for you. That I’d do anything for you.”
“Of course you would! I know that. Allison?”
“Yeah?”
“You got a good ending, okay? You got Simon. Don’t forget that. Even when we thought it was too late, even when it felt like it didn’t matter anymore, you got a father. You have somewhere to call home, somewhere to go during breaks and summers. Just because he showed up late doesn’t mean that he doesn’t matter. You defied some crazy odds by getting adopted in high school.”
“It’s not fair.” I cannot stand when Steffi says this, because my guilt is uncontrollable. I cup a hand over my mouth to stifle the sobs that threaten to come through, and it takes me a moment until I can speak without emotion. I wait until my voice is flat. Factual. “But you didn’t get adopted.”
“I didn’t need to. I was a sick little kid, Allison. Nobody wanted a kid who’d had cancer. And then, years later, even when I was better, I didn’t need them.” The them she refers to are Joan and Cal Kantor. Steffi moved into their house around the same time I moved in with Simon. Simon adopted me, but Joan and Cal did not adopt Steffi, instead letting her turn eighteen and go off on her own. No support, no family, no sense of safe haven.
As hardened and independent as Steffi was, even she was shaken when they politely let her know that their time as foster parents was done. It was not a happy graduation from high school.
I will never forgive them.
I’ll never know what to say about Joan and Cal. What to say about how they discarded the most tremendous girl. A could-be daughter.
As always, Steffi steps in to fill the void I create. “Look, Allison, I was a dud, okay? A risk. And why would I want to settle down with a nice family and their three dogs when I have you, right?”