I expected to use my key card, but the door to the clinic was still unlocked when I arrived. I slipped into the empty reception area and moved past battered plastic chairs, an empty water dispenser, and end tables with magazines splayed across their tops.

I hurried through the door leading to the exam rooms, but stopped abruptly when I noticed a light. Marjorie was still working in her little office at the end of the hall. I could just see her profile through the door, which was open a crack, her long graying hair hanging over her face as she stared down at a pile of folders. Her desk radio played the Eagles softly.

I didn’t feel like talking to anybody, so I moved quietly across the laminate floor on my tiptoes, escaping into the medical office. I closed the door with a gentle click and slowly pulled open the desk drawer where I’d left my purse, careful not to let the metal drawer runners creak.

Before today, losing my parents was the single worst thing that had ever happened to me. After they died, my brother, Ben, and I went into foster care. Neither of our parents had any family who could take us, so we were left with just each other.

Foster care wasn’t as bad as you’d think. Our foster parents were nice, and we were lucky we got to stay together. But they had two of their own kids, and it was clear we weren’t part of their real family.

Once, shortly after my parents died, they had a birthday party for their oldest daughter, Kelly, a spoiled girl with brown eyes and bad skin. They had a cake, streamers, balloons, a unicorn piñata.

One of Kelly’s uncles had them all pose for a picture. Still aching from my parents’ deaths, I’d jumped into the photo, grinning like an idiot and wrapping an arm around Kelly’s shoulders. My foster mother had firmly moved me out of the way.

“We’d like a picture with just our family,” she said, smiling politely. Just our family.

That was when I realized I didn’t belong. I was an outsider peering in the window.

The next few years, Ben and I coped in very different ways. Ben acted out. Sometimes he stayed out all night, sometimes for days at a time, picking up girls and drugs and bruises along the way. By the time he was seventeen, nobody tried stopping him anymore.

I coped by being careful and good and smart. I wore my responsibility like an invisibility cloak in school. But as much as I tried to be the person my parents would’ve been proud of, to blend in and be good and not be a bother, Ben stood out in the most horrible way possible to a good girl.

He was a bad boy.