Joellen started worrying when I began refusing offers of adoption, that I’d become “emotionally detached.” In truth, I prefer to think of myself as “emotionally prescient”—there are better ways to express love than through obedience and submission. People stopped surprising me a long time ago. Which kind of breaks my heart.

See? Not dead inside!

The flashlight flickered and went out. Old batteries. Bat wings tapped the window. No night-light. How was I supposed to find the bathroom or remember where I was if I woke in the night? No snoring, no kids breathing—how could a person sleep in all this silence?

Joellen was going to be so disappointed. I’d promised her. Then the most dismal thought—living in a hotel. There was nothing, no place for me. Even if I wanted to ask Joellen to come get me, she couldn’t. I gave in and cried quietly as I could and tried to muster the hopeful feeling back into my heart. I thought about Salishwood—What was the deal with that? What if I could work there?—but alone in the loud dark, I knew: there was no way I could survive staying still, all by myself, for an entire year. Impossible.

I carry with me a thing I stole from a pile of tea bags in the trash at a house in the Queen Anne neighborhood during sixth grade. Seventh? The parents were a retired couple, white and basic, with their own grown children, who never visited. Counting me, it was a rotation of four foster kids, and the parents made us all walk to church every Sunday, even though none of us kids were church people. The mom there had no patience for my not eating meat.

“God says, his own words right here in the Bible, man has dominion over every living thing. Men are the stewards and all living things were created for him, to use or eat or whatever. Don’t be arrogant in God’s eyes—eat that chicken. It’s breaded with panko.”

I thought of poor John Muir, whose own father beat the crap out of his son until, by the age of eleven, he had memorized and could recite every word of the Old Testament, and most of the New. Nothing infuriated Muir more than the hypocrisy of white men claiming God-given blessing and authority to kill his supposed own creations.

I kept my head down, hid the chicken in my paper napkin to toss over the fence later to the neighbor’s dog, didn’t say any of the snarky rejoinders I had on deck. Like how I was not a man and didn’t care what the Bible said. Or that, if her actions were any indication, she didn’t seem to, either.