I hadn’t known until a few days before my arrival that there still were places like Palmer House: technically an orphanage (which made me technically an orphan?), officially a home for kids who needed somewhere to stay but hadn’t yet found their way into the foster care system, or had been slightly chewed up and then spit out by it. Palmer House certainly didn’t look like the prison-style brick structures of my childhood nightmares (oh, you naive little nightmares); it was just a dated beige stucco house with a treeless yard, designed maybe twenty years ago by someone who wasn’t particularly good at designing houses, with five bedrooms and a kitchen and some bathrooms and all the other things you might expect to find in a house. It had been donated to the Children’s Relief Society by the Palmer family—hence the name. My caseworker, an obviously overworked woman named Frankie, told me I was supremely fortunate to get a spot here. It was “one of the nicest in the system.”

And I was its newest resident.

Efforts had been made to find me an actual home, but I had no living relatives, and staying with my best friend Becca's family had ended badly—probably because of my nightmares, nosebleeds, and middle-of-the-night screaming episodes that kept the family awake and sent her younger siblings to therapy. Becca and I discovered that we hadn't been very good friends after all. In fact, that had happened with all the people I’d thought were my friends. While finishing out the school year, I realized that what had bound us to each other was just that we were all kind of . . . mean. Mean to other people and mean to each other.

I guess I didn’t have the energy to be mean anymore. I didn’t have the energy to be anything at all.

Palmer House’s administrative offices were in a converted space that had once been the garage, so we emerged into the kitchen and went from there to the living room, where some of the other girls were lounging, watching TV, or absently scrolling on their phones.

“Hey, everyone,” Ms. O’Neil said. “This is Margaret.”

Actually, I go by Margot, I didn’t bother to say. In my old life, no one had called me Margaret except substitute teachers, but I let it go for the moment. Margaret was an old family name, and Mom had agreed to the name only if she could shorten it.

A vague chorus of hellos answered her, and a few of the girls glanced up, but they all quickly turned away again.

Except one girl with dirty-blond hair and a scowl.

“Hey!” she snarled. “That’s my toothbrush!”

Ms. O’Neil blinked, looking down at the toothbrush sitting atop the graying towels, and then sighed. “Tam, this is not yours. It’s a new one from the supply closet.”