The Accidentals(3)

“So…” He returns his attention to Hannah. “You said Rachel is headed to boarding school in the fall.” His eyes dart toward me. “It sounds like she needs a place to go after she turns eighteen next month.”

“Technically, she will age out of our system in August,” Hannah agrees. “But she can probably keep her place at the group home until she leaves for school.”

I close my eyes, my stomach clenching at the idea of staying there even one minute more. When I open them again, he’s watching me. He turns a bit in the too-small chair so that he is facing me. “Rachel, I want to help you. My first choice was to just take you away from here.” He waves a hand, taking in either the Department of Children and Families or the entire state of Florida. I don’t know which. “But if I can’t do that, I’m going to make sure you’re being treated well.”

“Okay,” I whisper.

He turns to Hannah again. “There must be some way I can see her. She isn’t a prisoner of the state.”

“Well.” Hannah taps her desktop. “That will be up to Rachel. She goes to summer school, and she has a curfew in the evening. If she wishes to make time for you, she can tell you herself. I’m not at liberty to give out her contact information, but I can give her your phone number.”

“Please do,” he says, watching me.

There’s a pounding in my ears. “Pine Bluff High School,” I blurt out, surprising all of us. “I’m usually finished by two thirty.” I sneak a look at Hannah to see if she disapproves. But the social worker’s gaze is steady. “My curfew is seven thirty.”

“All right,” he says, taking a notebook and a pen out of his shirt pocket. I think I see his hands shaking as he scribbles on the cover.

Hannah glances up at the clock. “We still have a few minutes here. I could make a couple copies of the documents Mr. Richards provided. Should I do that now, Rachel? Or I could wait.”

I nod. “Go ahead.”

Hannah gets up and blocks the door open with a rubber stopper on her way out.

Frederick sits back in his chair, his head against the wall. “I know that I…” He doesn’t finish the sentence. “I don’t expect you to understand. But I want you to know how happy I am to see you.”

I only nod, because I don’t trust myself to speak. I’ve waited my entire life to hear those words. And yet I would trade them in, in a heartbeat, to erase the last month.

“If it’s okay with you, I’ll wait in front of your school tomorrow at two thirty.”

“Okay.” I lick my dry lips. “I’ll have homework.” It’s such an idiotic thing to add. Like homework matters right now.

“I’ll only stay as long as you’d like.”

In the silence that follows, Hannah breezes back in. “Do either of you have any questions?”

“I just want you to call me if there’s any way I can help,” he says. “You have my cell, and I’m just at the Ritz-Carlton.”

That’s when Ray, the van driver, knocks on the door jamb. “Hi Rachel! Are you ready?”

I stand up, ready to flee.

“Rachel?” Hannah’s gentle voice stops my exit. “I left you three messages today. Let’s make sure we confirm our next meeting together, okay?”

“My phone doesn’t work anymore. It must have, um…” I don’t want to admit it—that it must have been shut off. My mother was sick in the hospital for weeks before she died. Some bills weren’t paid. Of all the things going wrong in my life, an unpaid phone bill doesn’t even make the top fifty. But it embarrasses me, anyway.

“Oh,” Hannah says, her face full of compassion. “Then could I email you about our next meeting?”

I nod.

“Take this,” she says, passing me a business card. It reads Freddy Ricks. Hannah has just given me something I’d never been able to find before. His personal phone number and email address.

I look at him one more time, just to check that he’s real. He stares back at me. His eyes have reddened. “Bye,” he whispers. Then, the man whom Rolling Stone describes as “eloquence you can dance to” presses his lips together and turns his head away from me, toward Hannah’s wall.





It’s a warm, sticky Florida night, the only kind we have in July. Orlando will be unbearably hot for three more months. By the time it cools off, I plan to be far, far away from here.

I sit on the scratchy bedspread, trying to review a pre-calc homework assignment. Nearby, on the other bed, my roommate Evie conceals herself beneath too-long bangs and monstrous headphones. The music blaring from them is so distracting that I can’t imagine how Evie isn’t profoundly deaf.

Evie has lived at the Parson’s Home for four years. Maybe she doesn’t care if she’s deaf.

This will be my seventh night here. Inside these walls, reality seems to slip and reshape. I watched my mother die. And even though I’d seen her casket lowered into the ground, I keep expecting her to walk through the door, saying “Rachel, gather your things, we’re leaving. And why haven’t you taken all your exams yet?”

I flip another page in my math book. Claiborne Prep—where I’m going next year—won’t accept a report card full of incompletes. I missed all my final exams the week my mother died. My school arranged for me to take them during the summer session. And now I’m stuck with this homework and this room and a spinning head. I try one more time to make sense of the equation on the page. But then I hear a car horn outside.