CHAPTER
1
MY TOOTHBRUSH WAS slime green, and the bristles, after only six weeks of use, were beginning to fray and spread outward. They also came unattached and got stuck between my teeth when I brushed, which I did, twice a day, for the full two minutes that my mother would have insisted upon had she been around to do so. The end of the toothbrush’s handle tapered to a sporty point, and the gold-embossed brand name, WALLYTEETH, was chipping quietly away. It was as if someone at the Wallyteeth factory had said, We want it to look like a toothbrush, but basically it should suck.
And it did. But what really bothered me was that someone else’s hair was taped to it.
The day I’d arrived at Palmer House, a woman named Ms. O’Neil, who had long, curly auburn hair (as I was later reminded twice a day for two minutes at a time), gave me a short welcome speech, followed by a tour. She had a stack of supplies waiting for me on her beat-up wooden desk, including a pair of pajamas still on their plastic hanger, a thin graying bath towel and washcloth, the green toothbrush, and a small blue stuffed bunny.
“The pajamas and the rabbit are donations,” she said, almost an apology. “You don’t have to keep them if you don’t want them. I’m sure once your things arrive, you’ll want to wear your own clothes, but that may be a few days—”
“No, I don’t have anything,” I said.
“Like I said, it may be a few days before it gets here,” she said, with the unpleasant smile of someone who was being very patient in the face of stupidity. “But your caseworker will arrange to ship everything—”
“No,” I said. “There’s nothing to ship. They thought I was going to die, so they donated everything.”
Blink. Blink-blink. The smile never left her face. Her silence seemed like a call for more information.
“They thought they were being nice,” I said, feeling like I had to cover for them. “My dad’s law firm handled the estate pro bono because there was a lot of debt from my mom setting up her dental practice. And . . . mistakes were made.”
“I see,” Ms. O’Neil said.
“There are a few boxes,” I admitted, not wanting to seem melodramatic. “Mostly paperwork. It can stay in storage.”
I turned away to inspect the pajamas, noting that the print on the polyester fabric was hot-pink lipstick kisses and that the front read #TOTESFAB. I handed them back to her and was on the verge of passing the bunny back, too, when I decided to stuff it into my backpack instead.
Ms. O’Neil tossed the pajamas onto the table in the corner and held the door open for me.
I hadn’t known until a few days before my arrival that there still were places like Palmer House: technically an orphanage (which made me technically an orphan?), officially a home for kids who needed somewhere to stay but hadn’t yet found their way into the foster care system, or had been slightly chewed up and then spit out by it. Palmer House certainly didn’t look like the prison-style brick structures of my childhood nightmares (oh, you naive little nightmares); it was just a dated beige stucco house with a treeless yard, designed maybe twenty years ago by someone who wasn’t particularly good at designing houses, with five bedrooms and a kitchen and some bathrooms and all the other things you might expect to find in a house. It had been donated to the Children’s Relief Society by the Palmer family—hence the name. My caseworker, an obviously overworked woman named Frankie, told me I was supremely fortunate to get a spot here. It was “one of the nicest in the system.”
And I was its newest resident.
Efforts had been made to find me an actual home, but I had no living relatives, and staying with my best friend Becca's family had ended badly—probably because of my nightmares, nosebleeds, and middle-of-the-night screaming episodes that kept the family awake and sent her younger siblings to therapy. Becca and I discovered that we hadn't been very good friends after all. In fact, that had happened with all the people I’d thought were my friends. While finishing out the school year, I realized that what had bound us to each other was just that we were all kind of . . . mean. Mean to other people and mean to each other.
I guess I didn’t have the energy to be mean anymore. I didn’t have the energy to be anything at all.
Palmer House’s administrative offices were in a converted space that had once been the garage, so we emerged into the kitchen and went from there to the living room, where some of the other girls were lounging, watching TV, or absently scrolling on their phones.
“Hey, everyone,” Ms. O’Neil said. “This is Margaret.”
Actually, I go by Margot, I didn’t bother to say. In my old life, no one had called me Margaret except substitute teachers, but I let it go for the moment. Margaret was an old family name, and Mom had agreed to the name only if she could shorten it.
A vague chorus of hellos answered her, and a few of the girls glanced up, but they all quickly turned away again.
Except one girl with dirty-blond hair and a scowl.
“Hey!” she snarled. “That’s my toothbrush!”
Ms. O’Neil blinked, looking down at the toothbrush sitting atop the graying towels, and then sighed. “Tam, this is not yours. It’s a new one from the supply closet.”
Tam sat up. Her too-big T-shirt read #GIRLSQUAD. Her eyes were watery blue and her face seemed weirdly flat, like everything except her nose and eyes were on the same level. “Well, it looks like mine,” she said. “And that means at some point she’s going to mess up and use mine. Which is disgusting.”
Ms. O’Neil turned away with an eye roll. Tam saw it, too, and her lip curled as she prepared to say more.
Then Ms. O’Neil held up her hand, warding off the attack. “Okay, okay, don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”
“Disgusting,” Tam repeated.
“Come on, Margaret,” Ms. O’Neil murmured, and we retreated to the garage. She grabbed a roll of duct tape out of her desk drawer and started to write on it with a black marker.
Since it seemed like I might be here for a while, I decided to take a chance. “You can just write Margot,” I said.
“Oh, is that what people call you?” she asked. “Okay.”
She wrote Margo, ripped the tape off the roll, and wrapped it—along with a wayward strand of her own long, curly hair—around the handle of the toothbrush.
“Ta-da,” she said. “Now it is clearly your toothbrush.”
In my old life, I would have said, Oh, excuse me, there’s a t at the end of my name.
Maybe even, Oh, excuse me, you’ve attached a piece of your hair to this device I’m supposed to insert into my mouth.