The FORM said she’d been placed three times before me.
I’ve been watching my foster sister Deja wait at that bus stop for six weeks, and something about the way she stands has been eating at me.
She faces the street, not the sidewalk.
Every other kid turns their back to traffic, scrolling or talking or whatever.
Deja watches the cars.
The first time I mentioned it to our foster mom, Linda said she was just adjusting.
Linda has a way of making every concern sound like impatience.
I adjusted.
But last Tuesday I stayed back, pretended to forget my jacket, and watched Deja from the window.
A silver sedan slowed down.
Deja didn’t move.
She just tracked it with her eyes until it turned the corner, and her shoulders dropped maybe half an inch.
RELIEF.
Not from a random car – from a specific one that didn’t stop.
My chest did something I didn’t have a word for yet.
I was twelve when I came to Linda’s.
I also watched the street.
I watched it for two years before I stopped, and I don’t remember deciding to stop, I just noticed one day that I wasn’t doing it anymore.
Deja has been here six weeks.
I went through her backpack that night, the small one she keeps under her bed, not in the closet with the rest of her stuff.
A gas station receipt, a phone number written on the back of a library card, and a photograph of a woman who looked like Deja but tired.
I took a picture of the phone number.
I didn’t call it.
I haven’t called it.
I keep thinking about what Linda would say if I told her.
I keep thinking about what I would have needed someone to say, at twelve, standing at a bus stop, watching the street.
The next morning I walked with Deja to the stop.
She didn’t say anything until the bus came.
Then she said, “You don’t have to do that.”
I said, “I know.”
She looked at me the way I used to look at anyone who sat too close.
Like she was already calculating the exit.
That afternoon I called the number.
It rang four times and a man answered, and he said, “DEJA, BABY, WHERE ARE YOU.”
What I Did With That
I hung up.
Just ended the call, right there in the school parking lot, standing next to the bike rack with pigeons walking around my feet like nothing had happened.
My hands were fine. I noticed that specifically. I thought they’d shake. They didn’t. My whole body went very still and very cold and I stood there for probably two minutes just staring at the cracked asphalt.
The way he said her name.
Not where are you like a worried parent. Not slow and relieved. Fast. Hungry. Like he’d been sitting on that question for six weeks and it came out in one compressed burst the second the line connected.
Deja, baby, where are you.
I’d heard that register before. Not from anyone who called me that. But I’d heard it. You grow up in houses like Linda’s and you develop a pretty specific ear for the difference between someone who misses a child and someone who’s looking for something they think belongs to them.
I deleted the call from my phone history.
Then I sat on the curb and thought about what I’d just done.
Three Placements
The form was a standard intake document. I’d seen versions of it before, filed in Linda’s kitchen drawer with the takeout menus and the expired coupons and the manual for a bread maker she’s never used. I wasn’t supposed to read it. I read it anyway, the night Deja arrived, because I needed to know what I was dealing with.
Prior placements: 3.
That’s all it said. Three. No context, no explanations, just the number sitting there like a fact about the weather.
I’ve been at Linda’s for four years. I know what three placements in – Deja is nine, so do the math – means in terms of timeline. It means she’s been moving since she was small enough that she probably doesn’t remember not moving. It means she’s had three sets of rules, three sets of bedrooms, three different versions of what counts as safe behavior in a house with adults she doesn’t know.
It means the small backpack under the bed isn’t paranoia.
It’s infrastructure.
The gas station receipt was from a Sunoco off Route 9, dated eight months ago. Whoever bought whatever was on it paid cash. The library card had someone else’s name on it – Marcus T. Webb – and the phone number was written in blue pen on the back, in handwriting that wasn’t Deja’s. Too big. Too loose.
The photograph was the one that got me.
The woman looked like Deja in the specific way that relatives look like each other when one of them is young and one of them is worn down. Same jaw. Same way of holding her mouth slightly open, like she was about to say something and then thought better of it. But the woman’s eyes were somewhere else entirely. Not vacant. Just pointed at something the camera couldn’t see.
Deja had folded the photo twice. The creases were soft from being unfolded and refolded a lot.
I put everything back exactly how I’d found it.
What Linda Knows
Linda is not a bad person. I want to be clear about that because it would be easier if she were.
She’s been fostering for eleven years. She has a system. The system works, mostly, for kids who need a certain kind of stability – a house that runs on schedule, meals at the same time, rules that don’t change. She’s good at consistent. She’s not as good at paying attention to the specific shape of a specific kid’s specific damage.
She would say she’s seen it all. She’s seen a lot. That’s not the same thing.
When I told her about the sedan again, the second time, I was more specific. I told her about the shoulders dropping. I told her it looked like recognition, not just watching traffic.
Linda said, “Honey, she’s adjusting. You adjusted.”
And I said, “It took me two years.”
And Linda said, “Some kids take longer.”
She wasn’t wrong. She also wasn’t listening to what I was actually saying. There’s a lot of space between those two things and Linda has lived in that space for eleven years and made peace with it in a way I haven’t.
I didn’t tell her about the backpack. I didn’t tell her about the phone number.
I thought about calling Deja’s caseworker, a woman named Phyllis Garrett who drives a gray Corolla and smells like the inside of a purse and is handling something like forty cases at once. I’ve talked to Phyllis twice. She’s not incompetent. She’s just spread so thin you can see through her.
I kept the number in my phone. Deleted from the call log, but still in my camera roll, a picture of a library card with a man’s handwriting on the back.
Tuesday Afternoon, Bus Stop
I started walking with Deja every morning.
She didn’t ask me to stop again after the first time. She didn’t exactly invite me either. She’d just appear at the door at 7:40 and I’d be there and we’d walk. She kept about a foot and a half of distance between us, which I respected. I know what that distance means. It means I haven’t decided about you yet.
We didn’t talk much. Some mornings she’d say something about school – a teacher she thought was stupid, a girl in her class who’d said something annoying. Normal stuff. I’d respond and she’d go quiet again and we’d walk.
The sedan came back on a Thursday.
Different time. We were coming home from school, not going to the stop. It passed us going the other direction, slowed, kept moving. I only noticed it because Deja’s pace changed. Just slightly. Like she’d absorbed a small impact.
I looked at the car. Silver. Older model, maybe a Camry, one of those years where they all look the same. I didn’t get the plate. It was gone before I could think to look.
Deja didn’t say anything.
I didn’t say anything.
We walked the rest of the way home with that foot and a half between us.
The Part I Can’t Stop Thinking About
Here’s the thing about being a kid who watched the street.
Nobody told me to stop. Nobody sat me down and said you’re safe now, you can stop watching. It just happened. Time passed, and some part of my nervous system quietly updated its files, and one day I was just a kid waiting for a bus.
But I remember the watching. I remember what it felt like. The way your eyes get trained to catch movement in peripheral vision. The way certain car colors register before you’ve consciously looked at them. The way your body starts doing the math on distance and speed before your brain has caught up.
Deja’s body is doing that math right now.
Every day.
And there is a man with a phone number written in his handwriting on the back of a library card that isn’t his, and he picked up on the fourth ring and said her name like she was something he’d misplaced.
I’m nineteen. I age out of Linda’s system in eight months. I have a part-time job at a copy center and a community college acceptance letter and approximately zero experience with whatever this situation actually is.
I also have that phone number.
And I have a memory of being twelve, standing at a bus stop, watching a street, and nobody – not Linda, not Phyllis, not any of the adults in the building – nobody asking me what I was watching for.
What I Did Next
I called Phyllis.
Not about the man. Not directly. I called and said I had some concerns about Deja’s adjustment and asked if there was anything in her file about the prior placements that might be relevant. I kept my voice even. I used the word concerns because that’s the word that makes caseworkers listen without getting defensive.
Phyllis said she’d look into it.
I said, “Specifically, I want to know if there’s a reason she was moved from the third placement.”
Phyllis went quiet for a second. Just a beat. The kind of pause that means something landed.
She said she’d call me back.
She hasn’t called back yet. That was five days ago. I’ve left two messages.
In the meantime, Deja and I have been walking to the bus stop every morning. This morning she closed the distance between us by about six inches. She probably doesn’t know she did it. I noticed.
The sedan hasn’t come back this week.
I still have the number.
I don’t know what the right move is. I know what it feels like to be nine years old and have nobody around you who understands what they’re looking at. I know what it feels like to be watched from across a distance by someone who thinks they own something about you.
I’m not going to let Deja stand at that bus stop alone.
That’s the only part I’m sure of.
—
If this one got under your skin, pass it to someone who needs to read it.
If you’re looking for more stories that grab you from the first sentence, you’ll want to check out My Niece Asked Me Something in the Backseat That Made My Hands Go Cold or perhaps The Man in the Leather Vest Pulled Out a Document and Handed It to Me and even The Biggest Man in the Diner Knelt Down in Front of My Son.
