Don't Fail Me Now(5)

Cass glowers at me. “You don’t even care because you’re almost done,” she says. “In two months you’ll never have to go to school again.” She crumples up her Fritos bag and crushes it into the tabletop with her palm. “Lucky bitch.”

“Hey!” I cry. “Watch it.”

Cass rolls her eyes dramatically. “Like Denny’s never heard a curse. Doesn’t he have Tourette’s or something?”

Denny grins, his teeth smeared with chocolate. “Poopy pants!” he cries. It’s true that Denny’s teachers have complained about him disrupting class, but his outbursts tend to be pretty G-rated. Pee-pee, butt, stupid head, poop: your average first grader’s nuggets of comedy gold. I’m not saying it’s great or anything, but he’s not exactly calling someone a stank-ass ho.

“No,” I say sharply. “He’s fine. And I’m not—” Lucky, I want to say. I’m not lucky. But instead I say, “I’m not letting you guys cut school.”

Cass shrugs and sits back in her chair, but she’s chewing furiously on her lower lip—her giveaway since age two that she’s trying not to cry.

“Sorry,” I mutter.

“Poop, poop, poop,” Denny laughs, which are my thoughts exactly. And then there’s a knock on the glass behind us.

I turn around to see a short, middle-aged woman with a gray pixie cut and a navy pantsuit standing in the doorway. She’s clutching a slim, leather-covered notebook, a pen, and a digital recorder, and she’s smiling in that overcompensating way that doctors smile at little kids before giving them a shot. I don’t have to look at the ID clipped to her blouse to know she’s from Child Protective Services. I stand up, instinctively trying to block Cass and Denny from seeing her, from understanding what she’s here for.

“Hi,” she says in a condescending, honeyed voice. “Are you Michelle?”

“Our aunt is coming,” I blurt in a panic. “She’s probably almost here.”

They’ll try to split you up.

The lady nods even more condescendingly and says, “My name is Janet. I just need to talk to you for a few minutes. May I sit down?”

I want to say no, to take her fancy notebook, hurl it down the hallway, throw both siblings over one shoulder like I’m Schwarzenegger in Commando (Buck’s favorite movie, left behind on DVD, and the only thing we have in common besides our eye color), and run until my legs give out. But I know I have no recourse; we’re a bunch of unaccompanied minors in a police station in the middle of the night. I step back and lower myself into my plastic bucket chair, folding my hands primly on the table as if somehow weaving my fingers together can contain this phenomenal mess we’re in. Cass looks Janet up and down without a word or even so much as a facial twitch. Denny, meanwhile, bounces rhythmically in his seat. I shouldn’t have let him have so much sugar all at once.

Janet pulls up a chair between Cass and me and sits with her legs crossed, placing her supplies in a neat row in front of her. She pushes a button on the recorder and then opens the notebook, licking her thumb to turn the pages. I hate that. Seriously, how hard is it to separate two flimsy pieces of paper without smearing your germy saliva all over the place?

“You guys must be tired,” she says with a sympathetic frown.

Cass and I say nothing, but Denny, who doesn’t know better, chirps, “I took a nap before, and then I had a candy bar.” He eyes her notebook. “Can I draw?” This kid will talk to anyone. It must be in his dad’s genes, because Cass and I are like Mom, immediately suspicious of strangers until proven otherwise—and maybe even then.

“Sure,” Janet says, neatly tearing out a sheet. “I even have an extra pen.” She hands Denny one of those thick ones with the four different ink colors that you can change by pushing down the buttons, and Denny beams. I bet she uses that pen exclusively to charm small children.

“So,” Janet continues, looking back and forth between the three of us, probably searching for physical signs of abuse she can put in her bullshit report, “I just have a few questions to ask so we can get you out of here as soon as possible.” She smiles at Denny. “I’ll start with an easy one: How old are you?”

“I’m six,” Denny says proudly.

“Thirteen,” Cass mutters, barely audible.

“Seventeen,” I say, then quickly add, “But I’ll be eighteen in July.”

Janet raises her eyebrows and writes something down. “Okay,” she says. “And you live with your mother, correct?”

“Yes,” I say quickly. I don’t want my sister and brother to say another word to this woman. I feel familiar tingles climbing up my neck. Ever since I was little I’ve had episodes—not attacks, exactly, more like tidal waves that I drown in for just a few seconds at a time. It’s like I get paralyzed, only it’s my brain that shuts down, not my body; my anxiety reaches some max-fill line and overrides the system. I close my eyes and focus on my heart beating, reminding myself that I’m still alive. When I open them again, Cass is being her usual stone-cold self, staring off at a wall poster outlining the steps of the Heimlich maneuver, and Denny is immersed in coloring in the legs on a dinosaur.

“There’s no other adult in the home?” Janet asks, not looking up from her notebook.