Oh, Joellen. She thinks the fat file folder recording every moment of my life of “perfect” behavior and acceptable grades is me trying to get into college. The foster parents think it’s me trying to get adopted. Both are so far from the truth it’s a little sad. That file is saving me from adoption, and college is Jo’s fever dream, not mine. The file is the only lever I control, and I have crafted it with painstaking care; clean behavior means more people are willing to let me live with them, which makes it easier for Joellen to place me somewhere new when, to preserve my freedom, I leave a house on short notice. Which I do. A lot.

Most kids in care are understandably sick of always moving, and conventional wisdom among us says that when you find a place and people that feel okay, you stay as long as you can. But that’s for kids with their own families or parents, kids who had a true home and miss it. When I start to feel okay, when it’s too comfortable or when it’s bad—that’s when I get out. I’ve never attended an entire academic year at one school. Every Seattle neighborhood seems to be a different district with its own schools, and I’ve been to nearly all of them.

This is a good time to say that I understand, and so should you: I am definitely not representative of all kids in foster care. I am an anomaly. Mine is not a typical life in care; which is not to say there even is a standard, because every kid’s situation is our own; every birth family and foster family and CPS and social worker situation is its own universe, and laws change all the time. I am only one of a half million kids in foster care in America, one of twenty-five thousand who will age out—but I am a cradle-to-age-outer, which is kind of rare. It’s given me time to accumulate the uniquely high twenty placements I’ve lived in. And I have unfair advantages that other kids do not; as a foundling, I am not in perpetual mourning for a family I remember losing or being taken from, and I am not escaping abuse or neglect at the hands of a relative.

Lucky.