She pulled up ten minutes late to the suburban house where Eddie was staying, which wasn’t ideal but wasn’t as bad as she’d been fearing. She agonized over where to park before finding a spot halfway down the street, then slid her badge on its lanyard around her neck. She hadn’t been expecting the flash when they took the picture, and it made her look wide-eyed and surprised.
Inside the house, dogs were barking at the sound of the doorbell. Lauren thought that was already good. They hadn’t had pets at Miss Bianca’s, but she could see how it would be a comfort, having animals around. When the door swung open, it revealed a woman much younger than Lauren had expected, around Lauren’s own age.
“Yes?” she said, sounding a little harried. “Oh. Yes, I remember. You’re here for Eddie. Come in.”
“I’m Lauren Fox, with the guardian program.” Now that she was actually there, she tried to remember all the procedures and protocols that had been drilled into her head during training. Make sure you introduce yourself. Talk to the caregiver about the child, but also talk to the child separately. Ask to see the child’s room.
“He’s in the bonus room,” the woman said, before yelling up the stairs. “Eddie! Turn the video games off and come down! Your person is here.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Lauren said. “I was hoping to—”
“If he’s not down in two minutes, come get me,” the woman said, then disappeared into the kitchen.
It was a really nice house. New construction, with vaulted ceilings and an open plan. Lauren could see straight through the living room to a sliding glass door that led out to a pool. She made a mental note to ask if Eddie could swim.
On a side table, there was a picture of the woman in a white wedding dress, her hand resting possessively on a bearded man with a kind smile. Lauren stared at it for a minute, her eyes unfocusing, while she idly petted the dog who’d come to sniff her hand. Finally, she followed the woman into the kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t catch your name?”
“Jolene,” the woman said without looking up from the can of corn she was struggling to open with an opener that looked like it had seen better days.
“How long have you been fostering?” Lauren knew from Eddie’s blurb that he’d been there for four weeks, but she wouldn’t be surprised if Jolene had other kids living here, too. There was the padlock on the pantry, for one thing, which looked kind of scary. She knew sometimes kids who’d experienced food scarcity were prone to stealing or hoarding, but she made a mental note to bring it up with her supervisor to get her take. The house looked like it would have at least four bedrooms, if not more, and Lauren bet that Jolene and her husband had bought it with the express plan to operate a small group home.
Lauren had no issue with any of that. It had been essentially what Miss Bianca had done, after all. She’d treated caring for foster children as a job, a calling, with the goal of providing a safe environment for as many kids who might be passing through as possible. Sure, there might be people who wanted foster kids only for the state-issued paychecks they came with, but there were others who were making a true difference in these kids’ lives. Lauren didn’t want to be cynical, wanted to believe there were more of the latter than the former. Miss Bianca had driven them to every appointment, showed up for every teacher conference, allowed social workers and therapists and caseworkers full access to her home no matter the inconvenience.
“We finished the licensure six months ago,” Jolene said, blowing her blond hair away from her face. “We’re hoping to be licensed for therapeutic by next year.”
Lauren asked how many other kids lived in the home right now (one, with another to arrive this upcoming weekend), and how Eddie was doing (fine). But it was clear that Jolene was distracted, trying to get dinner ready, and the child in question still hadn’t come downstairs, so Lauren asked if it would be okay if she went up to him.
Staccato video game gunfire filled the stairwell as she made her way to the room at the top of the landing. A boy sat on an ottoman pulled close to the TV, leaning to one side as he frantically mashed a combination of buttons on his controller. He had a buzz cut and wore a red T-shirt that said The Struggle is Real with some picture underneath that Lauren couldn’t make out. He looked impossibly young, but Lauren supposed that was how nine-year-olds looked.
His gaze flickered to her, as if he couldn’t help it, but then he went back to focusing on the game. She stood there by the stairs for several minutes, past the point where it would’ve felt natural to introduce herself, and just watched him play.
“What does the white circle mean?” she asked finally.
“Storm,” he said.
She watched as it closed in. There were numbers and stats on the screen that she probably could’ve figured out if she studied them hard enough, but right now they were all nonsense to her.
“The storm is bad?”
He was busy in a shootout with another player who was leaping all over the place, so either he didn’t hear her or deemed the question too clueless to bother with. The other player got a final shot that brought up an elimination screen, and Eddie threw the controller to the ground in disgust.
“I’m Lauren,” she said, then realized she probably should have introduced herself as Miss Lauren, or Miss Fox. She was already messing this up. “I’m your guardian ad litem. Do you know what that means?”
He shrugged. They’d had to do a whole exercise in the training where they role-played how they would explain who they were to a child, varying it depending on the age and the circumstances. Lauren had felt pretty good about how she’d done. But now, faced with a kid who didn’t really seem to care, she felt herself faltering. She remembered how it had been, talking to a revolving set of grown-ups who asked the same questions over and over. And now she was just another one of those grown-ups, earnest and well-intentioned and obviously the last person this kid wanted to talk to.
She explained anyway, and then asked to see his room. She’d hoped to segue into that more gradually—had had a fantasy that their bond would be so immediate, his eagerness to share his life with her so natural, that he’d pull her by the hand, chattering happily the whole time. Instead, he opened a door off the landing to a small room with a twin bed, plastic set of drawers, clothes spilling out, and a single lamp set on the floor.
It was hardly Pinterest-worthy, but it was clean, and a space that was all his. At least for now.
“You like Avengers?” she asked, pointing to his Marvel-themed sneakers on the floor. Of course she already knew the answer, but she was hoping to get him to open up a little.
“Yeah.”
“Me, too,” she said. Was it wrong to lie to a kid, if it was about something as innocuous as a superhero franchise? The truth was that Lauren seemed to be one of the only people in the modern world who’d never seen any of the movies, who still had trouble distinguishing which characters were in which universe. Asa had made a comment once, about how she was a pop culture wasteland. It had stung more than it probably should’ve.