You Make Me Read Free Page B

smile, though I knew him well enough to hear the slight edge of insecurity there.
    “I’m yours,” I said, reaching up to give him a soft kiss.
    But even as I did, my thoughts were elsewhere and my eyes were drifting downstairs, searching, searching.
     
    The first time I saw Heath I was sitting on the sagging back porch of our house, swinging my legs between two posts, eating a pile of blueberries I had picked off the neighbor’s bushes. I liked to maneuver them around my mouth, feeling the waxy skin on the inside of my cheeks. The car had pulled into the gravel drive and I knew who it was—it was a social worker car. They were always the same. An inexpensive sedan in blue or burgundy. The social workers were always the same too. Smiling women with a distracted air to them, wearing long skirts or capri pants in the summer, fur trimmed boots with puffer coats in the winter.
    She gave me a wave as she stepped out of the car. “Hello. Is your father here?”
    I nodded. “In the house.” I could have gone and gotten him, but I was more curious what annoyance she had brought with her this time. I was almost sixteen and by that time, I’d had around forty foster siblings. They were a blur of faces and names and bizarre habits. Some were cool, some were quiet, some I actually liked. Most hated me on sight for no reason other than that I had my parents, regardless of how shitty they were most of the time. Those ones liked to stand in my way in the hallway so I couldn’t pass and stole my clothes and put mouse shit in my cereal.
    It had been a good long break from one of those, at least three weeks, and I wasn’t looking to have my solitude interrupted.
    My parents collected foster kids for the government checks. It was my mother’s full time employment and the only thing she was capable of doing since she had let the psych ward electroshock her in her twenties, when I was a baby. She couldn’t remember things, like how to use the stove or where the bedroom was. Every day she spent wandering around confused, muttering to herself.
    My dad was a lobster fisherman until he lost his hand in the ropes pulling up a trap. After that he did odd jobs and collected disability and the foster kid checks. I think he kind of liked the chaos of random people in and out of our house. Otherwise, he’d have to stop and think about my mom, and he wasn’t good at facing facts. He liked to pretend everything was okay, even when it wasn’t.
    The social worker climbed the porch steps. But I ignored her, because her passenger had gotten out of the car and was walking towards me with a confident, but defensive stride. He was about six feet tall, lean but muscular, and his hair was dark, shaggy, in his eyes. There was stubble on his chin, and his jeans were worn, dirty, but fit his body in a way that made me very aware of my own. My mouth went hot. My cheeks burned. My breasts tingled in a way that shocked the hell out of me, and I squirmed, aware that I was only wearing a tank top and little bitty denim shorts. I was sure he could see my nipples since I didn’t have a bra on. But he wasn’t even looking at me.
    His gaze was straight ahead, focused on the door, and it seemed he was purposefully not acknowledging me. I sat up straighter, pulled my shoulders back. I bit my lip in an instinctive flirtation. I’d never been particularly into boys, but this one… he looked sexy and mature and dangerous. I understood all at once why girls at school fell all over themselves to talk to guys, and lacquered their lips with seventeen layers of lip gloss. I’d always been a tomboy, and it hadn’t interested me, the primping and the effort.
    Suddenly it did, and I was aware of my dirty feet, my unshaven legs. I wanted to say something to him, but nothing came out of my mouth. He just moved up the stairs past me and into the house after the social worker.
    I felt like he had just done the same thing to me all over again, five years later.
    Only this