Furious - By Jill Wolfson Page 0,5

dress for one of the worst days of her life?

I settle on my usual black pullover and jeans. Safe.

I take a deep breath and remind myself of three things that Raymond says I should love about me: I’m smart. I’m strong. I’m a survivor.

But before this dream of a day gets off the ground, it’s time to go into the kitchen and get my usual send-off to school from Lottie Leach, my foster mother, and He-Cat, her butt-ugly pet whose most prominent physical characteristic is the goopy stuff that hardens white in the corners of his eyes. They both hate me.

I’ve been living in this foster home for about six months, but I’m still not immune to the cringeability of what greets me each morning. He-Cat, as usual, is plopped over the floor heater vent soaking up the warmth, his big belly splayed out like an oozing dark puddle. Even on a fairly warm morning, Mrs. Leach—cheapskate that she is about everything else—keeps the heat blasting just for him.

I open a cabinet to get a cereal bowl, and a half-dozen plastic containers tumble out. I straighten them up fast and pour cereal into one. As always, those Leachy eyes are on me, measuring every corn flake to make sure that I don’t eat more than my allotted share. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, her right foot unsocked and propped on a ripped vinyl chair. Her veiny bunion is enough to put me off my breakfast.

Still, I keep a good-girl smile glued in place. I know that putting on this phony act would be living hell to most of the teenage world, but it’s survival tactic number one for me. Imagine that anytime you talk back to your father or roll your eyes at your mother, they threaten to kick you out of their house—and mean it. I am so polite that my jeans would have to catch on fire before I’d complain to a foster parent. Well, the jeans on fire only happened once, which is a whole other story.

Unfortunately, though, as I carry my cereal to the table I accidentally kick the kitty litter box, which sits practically in the middle of the floor like a decorative centerpiece.

Mistake number one: my foot sends a hard, twisted Tootsie Roll of cat crap onto the cracked linoleum and a galaxy of toxoplasma spores into the air. We studied parasites in bio last year, and now I can’t not imagine the invisible creatures that live in cat crap flying up my nostrils and landing in my cereal bowl, where they will proceed to invade my cells and live out their whole life cycle—going into parasite puberty, having promiscuous parasite sex, producing a slew of parasite babies, and then dying messy parasite deaths, all in my major organs.

Mistake number two: I say, “Damn it!”

“You’ll clean that up right now,” Mrs. Leach orders. “And watch that language.”

My face prunes, only not the face she can see but the hidden twin beneath, the face I’ve learned not to show to foster parents. I say, “Of course, Mrs. Leach.”

Satisfied with my groveling, she nods. I sweep. I do everything but whistle while I work. I pretend that I don’t notice how the Leech—the perfect name for her—is shifting in her chair and moaning about the arthritis in her feet. If she tells me to rub her tootsies again, I’ll say hell no! That’s my limit. That’s my breaking point. I won’t do it!

“Rub granny’s poor tootsies, would you?”

A collapse inside of me. I have exactly two choices: rub those tootsies or risk getting on her bad side. And if I piss her off, she might decide that she doesn’t want me living here any more. And that means putting all my stuff into a suitcase again, and living in some awful shelter before they find another foster parent—maybe someone even worse. It could mean a new school and not seeing Raymond every day. It might mean being sent to a group home and sharing a bedroom and dealing with the craziness of ten other foster kids with lives just as sucky as mine. I don’t want any part of that scene anymore.

So I get down on one knee and wrap my hands around a foot that has the texture of a cold, dead fish. I massage. I imagine twisting so hard that her foot comes off like a screw top of a jar. She groans—not with pain, though, with pleasure.

“It’s so nice to have a