Right Behind You

Which is why she’d fallen desperately in love the first time she’d met Sharlah. She’d looked into her foster daughter’s eyes and she’d known her. Just . . . known her. Sharlah’s fears, anxieties, fragile hope, bone-deep strength. Rainie saw all of her daughter. And she loved her, not in spite of her weaknesses, but because of them. Sharlah was a fighter.

And how many episodes of being “not yourself” do you get before people figure out this is who you really are? I

Family is family. Even if you hate them, it’s hard to let go.

can’t do this. I suck at this. Which is why they’re making me go. Not to improve my swimming—who cares about that?—but to work on that whole playing-well-with-others thing. Another one of my broken bits. I don’t want to socialize with other kids. I don’t trust ’em, I don’t like ’em, and best I can tell, the feeling’s mutual.

approached alone, the hallway too small, the rooms too tightly bunched

Families aren’t built in a day. But they can be destroyed in an instant.

For a bit, he picked up the paperbacks, thumbed the worn edges. Military thrillers. Books with clear right and wrong where the good guys always won in the end. Zero or hero. A part of Telly clearly wanted to be the hero. The brother who’d saved his sister. The troubled teen who, according to his PO, was trying to do better.

Warn a kid with oppositional defiant disorder not to do something, and you’ve pretty much guaranteed the crime.

This new generation, they’ve been raised by their parents to assume they’ll start at the top. No scut for them. They’ll just sit in their parents’ basement till the job offer for partner comes in.

Is your father really evil?” I heard myself ask. “Yes.” “Because he drank, did drugs?” “No, honey. Because God made him that way, and he liked it. Your father had an excuse. My father doesn’t.

We are all a little bit broken, she tells me (the reason she doesn’t sleep at night?), but we all work on fixing ourselves.