White Oleander

I could picture her writing it, Ms. Cardoza, her skin muddy with makeup applied like cake frosting. She never once took me out for a visit, always spent the whole time talking to Amelia in Spanish over plates of butter cookies and yerbabuena tea in matching flowered cups and saucers. She was so impressed by Amelia and the big house, the sparkling silver. All that remodeling. She never wondered where the money came from. Six girls bought a lot of remodeling, even antiques, especially if you didn't feed them.

 

I glanced up at a drippy, heavy painting of a woman lying on a bed, her legs spread, snakes crawling out of her vagina. Joan Peeler craned her neck around to see what I was looking at.

 

"Did she say why I asked to be moved?" I licked powdered sugar off my fingers.

 

"She said you complained about the food. And that Mrs. Ramos restricts use of the telephone. She found you bright but spoiled."

 

I laughed out loud, pulled up my sweater to show her my ribs. The men across the aisle looked too, a writer with a portable computer, a student making notes on a legal pad. Seeing if I'd pull it up any higher. Not that it mattered, I didn't have much on top anymore. "We're starving," I said, covering myself again.

 

Joan Peeler frowned, pouring tea through a wicker strainer into a chipped cup. "Why don't the other girls complain?"

 

"They're afraid of a worse placement. She says if we complain she'll send us to Mac."

 

Joan put her strainer down. "If what you say is true and we can prove it, she can have her license revoked."

 

I imagined how it would really play. Joan started her investigation, got transferred to the San Gabriel Valley, and I lost my chance to have a young caseworker who still got excited about her clients. "That could take a long time. I need out now."

 

"But what about the other children? Don't you care what happens to them?" Joan Peeler's eyes were large and disappointed in me, ringed in dark liner outside the lids.

 

I thought of the other girls, quiet Micaela, Lina, little Kiki Torrez. They were as hungry as I was. And the girls who came after us, girls who right now didn't even know the word foster, what about them? I should want to close Amelia down. But it was hard for me to picture those girls. All I knew was, I was starving and I had to get myself out of there. I felt terrible that I would want to save myself and not them. It wasn't how I wanted to think of myself. But at bottom, I knew they'd do the same. No one was going to worry about me if they had a chance to get out. I'd feel the wind as they hit the door. "I've stopped having my period," I said. "I eat out of the trash. Don't ask me to wait." Reverend Thomas said that in hell, the sinners were indifferent to the suffering of others, it was part of damnation. I hadn't understood that until now.

 

She bought me another pastry, and I made a sketch of her on the back of one of her papers, drew her hair a little less stringy, overlooked the zit on her chin, spaced her gray eyes a bit better. I dated it and gave it to her. A year ago I would have felt a panic at being thought heartless. Now I just wanted to eat regularly.

 

JOAN PEELER said she had never come across a kid like me, she wanted to have me tested. I spent a couple of days filling out forms with a fat black pencil. Sheep is to horse as ostrich is to what. I'd been through this before, when we came back from Europe and they thought I was retarded. I wasn't tempted to draw pictures on the computer cards this time. Joan said the results were significant. I should be going to a special school, I should be challenged, I was beyond tenth grade, I should be in college already.

 

She started visiting me weekly, sometimes twice a week, taking me out for a good meal on the county. Fried chicken, pork chops. Half-pound hamburgers at restaurants where all the waiters were actors. They brought us extra onion rings and sides of cole slaw.

 

During these meals, Joan Peeler told me about herself. She was really a screenwriter, social work was just her day job. Screenwriter. I imagined my mother's sneer. Joan was writing a screenplay about her experiences as a caseworker for DCS. "You wouldn't believe the things I've seen. It's incredible." Her boyfriend, Marsh, was also a screenwriter; he worked for Kinko's Copies. They had a white dog named Casper. She wanted to win my trust so I would tell her things about my life to include in her screenplay. Research, she called it. She was hip, working for the county, she knew where it was at, I could tell her anything.

 

It was a game. She wanted me to strip myself bare, I lifted my long sleeve to the elbow, let her see a few of my dogbite scars. I hated her and needed her. Joan Peeler never ate a stick of margarine. She never begged for quarters in a liquor store parking lot to make a phone call. I felt like I was trading pieces of myself for hamburgers. Strips of my thigh to bait the hook. While we talked, I sketched naked Carnival dancers wearing elaborate masks.

 

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