The Secret Sister by M. DeLuca (leveled readers txt) 📗

some California beach soaking up the sun for this last chapter of his life. Every ounce of his energy had been drained trying to fix a corrupt, screwed-up system.

“I wish I could do more, but I’m only one voice in the grand scheme of things and I’m afraid it carries very little weight. So I offer a Band-Aid to a bleeding system. If I save only a few kids I’m happy. I’ve done my bit.”

I left his office so agitated I almost forgot how to get to the exit doors. Then I reached my car without even realizing how I got there. Thoughts cranked through my head like an endless film reel. Nothing was being done about Rafferty, which meant I had to do something. And besides, I’d made a promise years back. At night on a bridge – streetlamps throwing cones of light onto the sidewalk, river foaming beneath me, freeway traffic roaring by in the background, the concrete trembling underneath my feet. I’d be the one to take Rafferty and all his cronies down. God only knew how I’d do it, but I would.

For Birdie. For my twin sister. Who’d vanished from the face of the earth.

I’d screw them all over and destroy their miserable lives.

I didn’t shower for weeks after I went back to the Flatts’ place. I woke up in that beige bedroom with the two single beds, my head foggy from the drugs they’d given me to calm me down. I lay there looking at Birdie’s empty bed, its poster of Zac Efron tacked above the headboard, and realized how she’d felt all those days she was a drugged-up prisoner in this same room, while I went off to school and flirted with Colby. Guilt stabbed at my gut and I curled into a ball until the pain subsided.

The stink of leftover Chinese takeout and boiled hot dogs seeped through the space under the door and the spiderweb of cracks spread across the ceiling like a living fungus. I squeezed my eyes shut. Rules didn’t count in that house. Expect the unexpected at all times. The Flatts were opportunistic beasts disguised in sagging bodies, who’d successfully fooled the authorities into believing they actually cared about the lives of vulnerable children.

I squirmed onto my stomach and pressed my face into the pillow, vowing that Lester would never touch me like he touched Birdie. The only way I could be sure was to become so unkempt – so disgusting he’d steer clear away from me.

As it happened, I needn’t have worried. Their crack buddies, Tray and Anita, had become regulars at the house, so Lester was occupied in a downward slide towards addiction. Hence the urgency that I return to the family fold to help fund his growing habit.

At first I missed a few days of school. My brain was so blurred from the drugs they fed me, recommended by the helpful social workers who’d managed to check off another prickly client from their caseload. I didn’t speak. Just shuffled around in my hoodie and showed up at the kitchen table. Patti, now thin, courtesy of her cranked-up meth-fueled metabolism, usually slid a plate of burnt macaroni and chopped wieners towards me.

Her stained yellow fingers twirled a lock of her stringy hair. “Eat – don’t want you wasting away. Myself, I’m not hungry,” she said, placing her hands on her hips so I’d notice her skinny waistline. “But I wanna say, I’m glad to see you back on your own. Your sister was one big mess of trouble.”

I nodded and tried to eat. It was easier just to go along with her.

Lester and Patti fought a lot more. Seemed he wasn’t getting so many shifts at the mall. Not surprising considering the way his hand shook when he handled his revolver. No doubt some paunchy supervisor got panicked imagining the aftermath of a mass shooting at the mall. Emergency workers bagging up innocent victims, the whirling lights of cop cars and ambulances flashing in his eyes and some blonde news anchor shoving a microphone into his face while he blubbered to the cameras that he’d always thought Lester was a decent family man until he got into the drugs.

Lester screamed that his fucking boss had always been on his ass only now it was way worse and Patti should get a fucking job instead. See if she could handle the day in and day out of it. She yelled back that if she was out of the house he’d be shooting up from morning till night instead of waiting till after six.

“What difference does it make when I shoot up? I’m gonna do it anyway,” he said.

But when he suggested getting another foster kid I almost threw up my noodles. Patti was surprisingly astute for once and soon put him straight that they’d never qualify for a new kid. They only got me back because nobody knew what to do with me.

At night Tray and Anita showed up, more decrepit than ever, their faces pocked with sores, their eyes vacant and bloodshot. They’d graduated to shooting up rather than smoking. Lester and Patti were headed the same way but hadn’t registered that they too would be walking skeletons if they kept up with the junk.

When Lester wasn’t working they slept most of the day, so I usually smoked up a bit of their spare weed to prime myself for the outside world. Then I let myself out to go to school. I’d given up socializing there. Just soaked in all the lessons, did my homework in the library and if any do-gooder teacher tried to collar me and get me to open up about my problems I gave him or her the evil eye, pulled my hood over my head and clammed up. I got good grades so they all backed off eventually after three minutes of silence. Besides I probably stunk of days’ old sweat and in those heated, stuffy offices the stench soon spread