I can deal with pancakes. I like them with cheap maple syrup—none of that hundred-percent-pure crap. Deb buys both kinds even though she loves all that organic stuff. I almost like that about her.

I smell the batter as the floorboards at the bottom of the stairs creak good morning to me.

Deb must hear them too.

“Pancakes,” she hollers, just in case I’m thinking of slipping out the front door without eating.

I squeak into the kitchen, past Parker and Jacob, already scarfing down their chocolate chip pancakes, and pull up a seat at the table. My finger drifts automatically to the scratch I made in it last night. It’ll stay here long after I’m gone. Every place I’ve been I could probably go back to and find some piece of myself I left behind—my name scrawled on the inside of a closet door, an inconspicuous gouge out of the back deck, a drawing on the underside of a table. Pieces of me are always with them, even if some of my foster-whatevers don’t remember my name.

Deb will have this scratch. She’ll maybe have Parker, too.

Once, I dreamed of turning eighteen, finding a good job, and getting custody of Parker—finally building our own home together. But I’m already eighteen, I don’t have a good job, and Parker… he’s happy here.

I’ve only actually seen him really happy somewhere once before. The first year we were in the system, we weren’t together. They had to place us quickly, and two kids are harder to place than one, but they put us back together in a place that was okay. Nobody was mean, but it felt more like we were furniture than kids. But then they placed us with a couple that wanted a foster-to-adopt situation. He loved it there. But it didn’t last. There was no happy adoption story in the end. Then we got placed in our last home, where we were two of six kids. It felt more like trying to survive at a summer camp than a home. But those foster-whatevers decided to move, and I wasn’t eighteen yet, so they found us a new place.

And after just six months, this is home to him. I can see it in the way he sits there with syrup dripping on his shirt without worrying whether Deb will yell at him for it. She won’t.

I know what home looks like. When Mom died, I was already old enough to understand what home means—that natural and instinctual belonging. Even when that home wasn’t perfect, it was mine in a way that Deb and Jacob can never be, but they could be home for Parker.