“They won’t bother you unless you try to leave the barn at night,” Minh promised me in a low voice. “As long as you just stay in the barn at night and only go between the house and the barn during the day, they won’t hurt you. Come on—if we don’t go, Ms. Nancy will be real mad.”
She took my hand in her own much smaller one and led me past the dogs, who were growling low in their throats as we passed. I felt sick with fear—the sound of growling animals seemed to bring back some other memory from my past but I pushed it away, not wanting to think about it.
At last we were back in the barn and I changed into my pajamas and shook out the filthy sheets and blanket as best I could. No matter what I did, though, they still felt grimy when I lay down on the thin foam rubber pallet.
Minh had the stall beside mine but she went right to bed, saying we weren’t allowed to stay up and talk.
“Sometimes Ms. Nancy comes and checks,” she whispered to me. “Especially when there’s a new kid. Better just go right to sleep if you can and we can talk more in the morning.”
So I lay in the darkness of the old stall, feeling more alone than I could ever remember. It was a hot, sticky Georgia summer night and the air was heavy with humidity. The dirt I hadn’t been able to get out of my bedding stuck to my damp skin, making me feel like I needed another shower—not that I wanted one, with everyone watching me.
I wondered if I might be able to escape this horrible place. Anything seemed better than living with the Spauldings. But when I looked out the barn door, I saw both the dogs parading back and forth, going round and round the barn and covering both exits. And past the canine silhouettes, I saw the glowing coals of a fire that had already burned down. Seeing that, I knew my things were gone—burnt to ashes because of Nancy Spaulding’s spite.
At last I lay back down on the dirty pallet and let myself cry. There was no hope of escape or rescue—my mind kept coming back to the same thing I’d been thinking all day.
I was trapped here and there was no getting out.
TEN
Those first two months at the Spauldings’ foster home seemed like the longest of my life. I was half-starved most of the time since every meal was the same—we only got the scraps the Spauldings left behind. Also, the work was relentless and endless. If I wasn’t doing laundry, I was filling the tiny essential oil bottles. And if I wasn’t doing that, I was supposed to be helping Minh with cleaning the entire enormous house—and Nancy Spaulding insisted that every inch of her mini-mansion must be spotless at all times.
The hardest thing about keeping the huge house clean was having Alexis around. Nancy was fastidious herself and Gary Spaulding left plates of half eaten food and his dirty socks in various places but their daughter was the real slob of the household and she sometimes made messes just for us to clean up.
I remember one day I had just scrubbed the entire kitchen—not mopped, mind you—scrubbed, because Nancy Spaulding insisted that I get down on my knees with a scrub brush to “do it right.”
This was a punishment for the way I had ironed one of her skirts wrong—apparently I hadn’t gotten the seams straight enough to suit her. So after breakfast was over, I was set to scrubbing for the next three hours until every bit of the kitchen floor was so clean you could eat off of it.
Just as I was finishing, my back, arms, and knees aching from the exertion, Alexis came into the kitchen. I was still kneeling on the floor and she nearly tripped over me as she came in.
“What are you doing here, you little foster brat?” she demanded, glaring down at me.
I glared up at her. She must have come in from outside because she was leaving dirty sneaker tracks on the just scrubbed marble floor.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” I said in a low voice. “I’m cleaning the kitchen floor and you’re getting it dirty again.”
“You little bitch—how dare you talk to me like that?” she snapped. “This is my house and I’ll get the floors dirty if I want to!”
Marching across to the massive refrigerator, she whipped out her keys—all the Spauldings had a set—and unlocked the chain and padlock that kept it closed. Reaching inside, she pulled out a huge bottle of dark purple grape juice. Then, looking me right in the eye, she spun the lid off the bottle and deliberately poured it all over the freshly washed floor.