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I laughed out loud, pulled up my sweater to show her my ribs. The men across the aisle looked too, a writer with a portable computer, a student making notes on a legal pad. Seeing if I'd pull it up any higher. Not that it mattered, I didn't have much on top anymore. "We're starving," I said, covering myself again.

Joan Peeler frowned, pouring tea through a wicker strainer into a chipped cup. "Why don't the other girls complain?"

"They're afraid of a worse placement. She says if we complain she'll send us to Mac."

Joan put her strainer down. "If what you say is true and we can prove it, she can have her license revoked."

I imagined how it would really play. Joan started her investigation, got transferred to the San Gabriel Valley, and I lost my chance to have a young caseworker who still got excited about her clients. "That could take a long time. I need out now."

"But what about the other children? Don't you care what happens to them?" Joan Peeler's eyes were large and disappointed in me, ringed in dark liner outside the lids.

I thought of the other girls, quiet Micaela, Lina, little Kiki Torrez. They were as hungry as I was. And the girls who came after us, girls who right now didn't even know the word foster, what about them? I should want to close Amelia down. But it was hard for me to picture those girls. All I knew was, I was starving and I had to get myself out of there. I felt terrible that I would want to save myself and not them. It wasn't how I wanted to think of myself. But at bottom, I knew they'd do the same. No one was going to worry about me if they had a chance to get out. I'd feel the wind as they hit the door. "I've stopped having my period," I said. "I eat out of the trash. Don't ask me to wait." Reverend Thomas said that in hell, the sinners were indifferent to the suffering of others, it was part of damnation. I hadn't understood that until now.

She bought me another pastry, and I made a sketch of her on the back of one of her papers, drew her hair a little less stringy, overlooked the zit on her chin, spaced her gray eyes a bit better. I dated it and gave it to her. A year ago I would have felt a panic at being thought heartless. Now I just wanted to eat regularly.

JOAN PEELER said she had never come across a kid like me, she wanted to have me tested. I spent a couple of days filling out forms with a fat black pencil. Sheep is to horse as ostrich is to what. I'd been through this before, when we came back from Europe and they thought I was retarded. I wasn't tempted to draw pictures on the computer cards this time. Joan said the results were significant. I should be going to a special school, I should be challenged, I was beyond tenth grade, I should be in college already.

She started visiting me weekly, sometimes twice a week, taking me out for a good meal on the county. Fried chicken, pork chops. Half-pound hamburgers at restaurants where all the waiters were actors. They brought us extra onion rings and sides of cole slaw.

During these meals, Joan Peeler told me about herself. She was really a screenwriter, social work was just her day job. Screenwriter. I imagined my mother's sneer. Joan was writing a screenplay about her experiences as a caseworker for DCS. "You wouldn't believe the things I've seen. It's incredible." Her boyfriend, Marsh, was also a screenwriter; he worked for Kinko's Copies. They had a white dog named Casper. She wanted to win my trust so I would tell her things about my life to include in her screenplay. Research, she called it. She was hip, working for the county, she knew where it was at, I could tell her anything.

It was a game. She wanted me to strip myself bare, I lifted my long sleeve to the elbow, let her see a few of my dogbite scars. I hated her and needed her. Joan Peeler never ate a stick of margarine. She never begged for quarters in a liquor store parking lot to make a phone call. I felt like I was trading pieces of myself for hamburgers. Strips of my thigh to bait the hook. While we talked, I sketched naked Carnival dancers wearing elaborate masks.

16

JOAN PEELER found me a new placement. The girls pointedly ignored me as Joan helped me carry my stuff out to her red dented Karmann Ghia with bumper stickers that said, Love Your Mother, Move to the Light, Friends Don't Let Friends Vote Republican. Silvana sniffed that it was because I was white, I got special treatment. Maybe she was right. She probably was. It wasn't fair at all. It wasn't. But that March day, one of those perfect March days in L.A. when every photographer in town was out scrambling for shots of the city with a bluebird sky and white-capped mountains and hundred-mile views, I didn't care why. All I cared was that I was leaving.

There was snow on Baldy, and you could see every palm tree on Wilshire Boulevard five miles away. Joan Peeler played a Talking Heads tape for the drive.

"You'll like these people, Astrid," she said as we drove west on Melrose, past body shops and pupuserias. "Ron and Claire Richards. She's an actress and he does something with television.

"Do they have kids?" I asked. Hoping they didn't. No more babysitting, or 99-cent gifts when the two-year-old gets a ride-in Barbie car.

"No. In fact, they're looking to adopt."

That was a new one, something I never considered. Adoption. The word rattled in my head like rocks in an oatmeal box. I didn't know what to think. We passed Paramount Studios, the big triple-arched gate, parking kiosk, people riding around on fat-tired bicycles. The longing in her eyes. "Next year, I'll be in there," Joan said. Sometimes I didn't know who was younger, her or me.

I handled the word adoption in my mind like it was radioactive, saw my mother's face, pulpy and blind in sunken-cheeked fury.

Joan drove through the strip of funky Melrose shops west of La Brea, with shops of used boots and toys for grown-ups, turned south onto a quiet side street, into an old neighborhood of stucco bungalows and full-growth sycamores with chalky white trunks and leaves like hands. We parked in front of one, and I followed Joan to the door. An enamel plaque under the doorbell read The Richards in script. Joan rang the doorbell.

The woman who answered the door reminded me of Audrey Hepburn. Dark hair, long neck, wide radiant smile, about thirty. Her cheeks were flushed as she waved us in. "I'm Claire. We've been waiting for you." She had an old-fashioned kind of voice, velvety, her words completely enunciated, ing instead of in', the t crisp, precise.

Joan carried my suitcase. I had my mother's books and Uncle Ray's box, my Olivia things in a bag.

"Here, let me help you," the woman said, taking the bag, setting it on the coffee table. "Put that down anywhere."

I put my things next to the table, looked around the low-ceilinged living room painted a pinkish white, its floor stripped to reddish pine planks. I liked it already. There was a painting over the fireplace, a jellyfish on a dark blue background, penetrated with fine bright lines. Art, something painted by hand. I couldn't believe it. Someone bought a piece of art. And a wall of books with worn spines, CDs, records, and tapes. The free-form couch along two walls looked comfortable, a blue, red, and purple woven design, reading lamp in the center. I was afraid to breathe. This couldn't be right, it couldn't be for me. She was going to change her mind.