Inside the office, the school principal sat at a desk in front of two police officers, whose backs were turned toward her as she entered the room. They sat her down in a third chair and explained to her that her mother was very sick and in the hospital. Having contracted hepatitis B, she had developed jaundice. Upon seeing her writhing in pain, her skin and eyes yellowed, one of the people at the house they were staying in had become so worried about her that he had driven her to the hospital. The principal assured Aria that as soon as her mother was better, she could go back to living with her, but until then, she would be living in a group home.

He lied.

Aria left with the police that day and met with a social worker who placed her in an overcrowded group home. Since Aria had no address, she could not go back to collect her things. She went to the home with only the clothes on her back.

In one day, she had lost everything. Nothing was familiar anymore. It was the last time she saw her mother. The following years were a blur of group homes and foster homes. She switched schools sometimes more than twice each year. Aria didn’t belong anywhere. The pain of those years was reasonably suppressed in her memory.

When Aria was 14, a group of members from a Christian church brought a truckload of donations to the group home she was staying in, so that the children could receive stockings for Christmas. The children had been prepared by the staff to thank them by singing Christmas carols. Aria took her place in line and was singing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer when she noticed a couple watching her rather intently with a look of pity in their eyes. A few weeks later, she was informed that there was a foster family who wanted to take her in and consider adopting her.

Aria was filled with mixed emotions. She would have done anything to get out of state homes. But she was also afraid. “What if they don’t like me?” she thought to herself when she rounded the corner with the social worker to meet them for the first time. She dared not get her hopes up; after all, she had been in and out of so many foster homes that she knew the chances of finding a family who wanted to keep her at this age were slim. Aria was surprised to see that the couple who were to be her new foster parents were the very same couple who had been eyeing her at the Christmas celebration only weeks before.