“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.
She attempted more awkward small talk, about how school was going, how he liked living with Jolene, about the other foster kid who lived in the house, to mostly monosyllabic answers. When Jolene called up the stairs that dinner was ready, Lauren felt guilty when her first feeling was . . . relief. Relief that the visit could be over, and she could retreat back to her car, where she could finally breathe again.
Worst guardian ad litem in the world.
She said her goodbyes to Jolene, waved to the other kid who was already seated at the dinner table, and made arrangements to visit the next week. As she was on her way out, Eddie followed her into the front hallway.
“Miss Lauren?”
“Yeah?”
“When is my mom coming to get me?”
Lauren wished she’d had a chance to role-play this exact scenario. Not something like it, not a hypothetical, but this exact one. Where a tough-looking boy with shadowed eyes strung together the most words she’d heard so far, asking the one question she didn’t have an answer for. She remembered asking that question over and over when she’d first arrived in care, and she never remembered getting a satisfactory answer, because there wasn’t one. Lauren couldn’t say soon because she didn’t know that; she couldn’t even say she’s working on her case plan because she didn’t know that, either.
“I don’t know,” she said finally.
She’d lied about the Avengers, but she couldn’t lie about this.
* * *
? ? ?
Afterward, Lauren swung by her apartment to eat a quick dinner of leftover takeout and grab Kiki’s dress, then headed over to her friend’s house. It looked older than she’d expected, with a wraparound front porch with rocking chairs on it and a rainbow flag hanging from the railing. Lauren tried to rack her brain to remember the names of Kiki’s other housemates other than Asa, in case any of them opened the door, but luckily it was Kiki who ushered her in.
“Turns out Marj is working late again,” Kiki said, “so she’s not even coming over tonight. Sorry. How was your visit?”
More emotionally exhausting than expected. Not only had it brought memories rushing back that Lauren would rather leave behind, of those early days when she’d been put in the system, but it was also surprisingly tiring having to navigate a conversation with a nine-year-old who didn’t want to talk. But she didn’t feel like getting into all of it, so she just waved the question away. “This place is really nice,” she said instead.