A Home For Zoe

Problems (Edited)

Author's Note
I think it is a really important topic. My family has taken in a seventeen foster children in the past five years, and I have become aware how many kids there are out there in need of a home. This story is purely fictional, and all the characters are my own. Please give feedback, I would like to improve as a writer.

"There are no unwanted children,
just unfound families."

Zoe

Sometimes I feel like a passenger in my own life, dragged along for the ride. No control over anything that happens to me. Place to place, bedroom to bedroom, family to family. I wish it would all stop, and yet, at the same time, I dread the moment when suddenly my life is thrust into my own hands.

Right now, I'm staring out the window of Mrs. Anderson's car, hurtling towards yet another unknown destination. She's busy, talking quietly into her cell and she probably thinks I don't realize she's talking about me, but even if I couldn't make out my name, I'd know what she was talking about. I've spent far too much of my life in the back of cars, waiting for the adults to figure out what to do with me now.

I've been in the system since I was seven. It was shortly after my mom died, and my dad just couldn't handle it, he was drinking a lot and he ... gave me up. I haven't seen or heard a word from him since. Some days I'm so mad at him I want to scream and punch and kick him, and other days I'm so sad I want to cry my eyes out. Sometimes, on the very worst days, I think that if he would just come back, I'd forgive him for everything.

Anyway, I had no other family, no aunts or grandparents to take me in. The first foster home I lived in was nice, I was there for two years. I thought for a while that they might even adopt me, but then the women got pregnant and they asked to have me moved. By then I was nine, no longer the cute little kid people felt sorry for, but the almost preteen who'd been in care for a couple of years.

So, then there were the group homes, three different ones in two years. Three non-descript bedrooms shared with five other girls, places that felt more like a prison than a home. Then, when I was eleven, a miracle, the chance to escape my lonely and dark existence, placement with foster family. Little girl that I was, I let my heart fill with hope, only to have it smashed shortly after my twelfth birthday, when they too kicked me out.

Now I'm fourteen, inching ever closer to my eighteenth birthday, when without a second thought, I'll be tossed out on to the streets, with my trusty trash bag carrying my only belongings. Another product of the foster care system, looking out at her dismal future.

I'm almost certain that I'll be moving on to my sixth group home today, but maybe at this point even the group homes won't want me. I wonder if juvie would be better or worse?

I'm really not a bad kid, and I wasn't kicked out of ALL of those group homes; only two. The other three were transition programs and kids can only stay there for up to six months.

The first time I did get kicked out of a group home was kind of my fault. It was the second one I'd stayed in, and my social worker at the time had sworn to me that I would be going to a foster family after my six months stay in the first, but obviously that didn't happen. She promised that it would only be a few weeks before she came and got me, so by the end of the second month I was so angry that I ended up getting in a fight with one of the other girls in my room. They had us both moved.

The second time was today, and it was completely not my fault, not that anyone cared to listen to my side of it. One of the younger girls was throwing a fit and she kicked me. I was only trying to defend myself, but apparently, I have a "violent past" and she was smaller than me and she was crying, so it's all my fault.

A loud sigh comes from the front seat, jerking me from my thoughts. I realize that Mrs. Anderson has hung up the phone. "Don't worry, Zoe. I still have a few more people I can call" she says. Great, one more couple on the long list of people who don't want me, and I don't even know their names. Whatever...I guess. Mrs. Anderson gives me a weak smile, "Everything will work out."

I get that trying to comfort me is basically a part of her job, but I wish she'd stop, I'm fine. I have no expectations, and without expectation nothing can hurt, or at least that's what I tell myself. Besides, it's not like it matters where I stay tonight, I'm never anywhere for very long anyway.

We keep driving and Mrs. Anderson dials another number, "Hello, This Grace Anderson, from the Department of Children and Families..." I let her voice fade into the background, and go back to staring out the window. We pass by a cute little blue house. I watch as a car pulls into the driveway and two kids run out to greet their father with hugs and smiles. For a moment I let myself imagine that one of those kids is me. But I quickly pull my eyes away and push the thought down as deep as it will go. It's an impossible dream.