CHAPTER 3
WREN — Then
Before.
Before Marrowfield there was a long grey nothing, and I was the smallest thing in it.
I don’t remember my mother as a person, only as a temperature, warm, and then less warm, and then a closed door and a man’s voice telling me to be quiet, she was sleeping, she was always sleeping by the end.
I was six. After that there was the system, which is a polite word for a series of rooms with other people’s furniture in them, and a series of women with clipboards who were kind in the way you’re kind to a thing you know you’re going to hand off, holding something back so the handing-off won’t cost you.
I learned the rules of being a stray before I could spell them.
Rule one: don’t get attached, because attached is just a longer word for about to be moved.
Rule two: don’t want anything out loud, because wanting tells people where to hurt you.
Rule three, the big one, the one that built me — no one is coming.
Not your mother, not the kind woman with the clipboard, not the family that smiled at the meeting and then called the agency three weeks later to say it wasn’t working out.
No one comes. You learn it at four and they keep proving it to you until you’d be a fool not to believe it, and somewhere in there you stop being a child who’s waiting to be chosen and start being a thing that has decided, preemptively, that it doesn’t need to be.
I was good at it. I was the easy one, the quiet one, the one who never cried at placements because crying just tells the house where you are.
Eleven homes by the time I was twelve. I could pack a garbage bag in four minutes.
I knew how to make myself small enough to fit in the gap between not-wanted-here and not-yet-sent-on, and how to live in that gap without leaving a mark, because the ones who leave marks are the ones who get sent on faster.
And the cruelest thing the system ever did to me, crueler than any single room, any single failed family, was teach me that being chosen was the most dangerous thing that could happen to a stray.
Because the homes that wanted you, really wanted you, that picked you out and brought you in and called you theirs, those were the ones where the wanting had a reason underneath it, and the reason was never the one they said at the meeting.
A foster check. A marriage they were trying to glue.
A child they’d lost and were trying to replace.
Free hands for the farm. I learned, eleven homes deep, that I’d choose you was the most frightening sentence in the language, because nobody chooses a thing like me for nothing, and the price was always hidden, and you never found out what you’d cost until you couldn’t afford to leave.
So when Donna drove me up a black hill in the snow when I was twelve, saying you are so lucky, do you understand how rare this is, they didn’t have to take a girl like you, they chose you, every alarm I had ever learned to live by went off at once.
I sat in that car with a garbage bag on my knees and I thought, with the flat clarity of a child who’s done this eleven times: no one chooses a thing like me for nothing.
What do they want me for. What am I going to cost.
I was right. God, I was right. I had no idea how right.
Augustus Frost had chosen me the way you choose a part from a catalogue, and the price was going to be my whole self, and I sat in that car already knowing it in my bones, and there was nowhere to go, because behind me was eleven homes’ worth of nobody-coming and ahead of me was a lit window on a hill, and a stray takes the lit window.
A stray always takes the lit window. That’s the whole tragedy of being one.
You know the light is bait and you walk toward it anyway, because the dark behind you has already proven what it is.
This is the thing I need you to understand before I tell you the rest, because it explains everything I did after, the wall, the lie, the grey dress, all of it. I was built, before I ever set foot in that house, by a childhood that taught me two iron facts and made them the floor of who I am:
No one comes.
And anyone who chooses you wants something, and the wanting will cost you everything you’ve got.
So when a strange, silent, beautiful boy on a staircase looked at me, a thing eleven families had passed back, like I was worth keeping, and wanted nothing, asked for nothing, took nothing, year after year after year —
I had no idea what to do with it. I had no shelf to put it on.
There was no category in me for chosen, and it costs nothing.
It broke every rule the grey years had carved into my bones.
And when the time finally came that I had to decide what he was to me, the system’s last cruelest lesson was still the loudest voice in my head, still screaming the only truth I’d ever been able to count on:
Nothing is free. If he chose you and it cost you nothing, then the price just hasn’t come due yet. And a debt you can’t see coming is the one that kills you.
So I made one come due. On a witness stand. In a grey dress.
Better a price I chose than a price I couldn’t see.
That’s not an excuse. There’s no excuse. It’s just the floor I was standing on when I did the worst thing I’ve ever done, and I think you should see the floor before you watch me fall through it.