“New York … Boston … I've been here for two years.”

The black girl nodded, she was reed thin and Hilary could see she bit her nails to the quick. She was tall and angry and nervous. “Yeah? So why you come here? Your ma and pa in jail?” Hers were. Her mother was a prostitute and her father was a pimp and a pusher.

“My parents are dead.” Hilary's voice was dead too as she said it, and her eyes were guarded as she stood just inside the doorway.

“You got brothers and sisters?” She didn't see what difference it made and she was about to say yes, and then decided against it and merely shook her head. Maida seemed satisfied with her answer. “You gonna work hard for Louise, sweetheart. She a bitch to work for.” It was not entirely welcome information, but somehow Hilary had suspected as she walked in the door that this was not going to be as easy as they'd told her.

“What do you have to do?”

“Clean the house, take care of her kids, the yard, the vegetable garden out back … laundry … any thing she tells you to do. Kinda like slavery, except you get to sleep in the main house and she lets you eat here.” There was an evil smile in Maida's eyes and Hilary wasn't sure whether to laugh or not. “But it still beats juvie.”

“What's that?” She was a neophyte to all this, to foster homes and juvenile halls and parents who had gone to jail, even though her own father had died there. It was difficult to absorb the changes he had wrought in her life with one night of unbridled fury. Hilary often thought late at night, when she allowed herself to think about it, that he might as well have killed her along with her mother. It would have been a great deal simpler, instead of this slow death he had condemned her to, far from home and those she loved, abandoned among strangers.

“Where you been, girl?” Maida looked annoyed. “You know, juvie … juvenile hall …” She made a big deal of mouthing it, as Hilary nodded. “That's jail, for kids. If they don't find you a foster home, you go there, and they lock you up and treat you like shit. I'd rather work my ass off for Louise until my Ma gets out again. She'll be out next month and I can go home then.” This time she'd been caught in a drug bust with her “husband.” “What 'bout you? How long you think you gonna be here? You got relatives to go to?” She figured Hilary's parents had just died and maybe this was only a temporary arrangement. There was something different about Hilary, the way she spoke, the way she moved, the silent way she stared at everything, as though she didn't really belong here. But she shook her head in answer to Maida's question, just as the social worker walked back into the doorway.

“You girls getting acquainted?” The woman smiled, as though totally unaware of the jungle she worked in. To her, these were all nice kids, and she was finding them lovely homes, and everyone was happy.

Both girls looked at her as though she were crazy, but Maida was the first to speak. “Yeah. That's what we doin' … gettin' quainted. Right, Hilary?” Hilary nodded, wondering what she was supposed to say and relieved when the social worker took her back to the kitchen. There was something about Maida that scared her.

“Maida's done very well here,” the social worker confided as they walked down a dreary hall to the kitchen.

The children had gone back outside, and Louise was waiting for them, but all signs of any food they'd been eating were gone, and Hilary felt her stomach growl as she wondered if they'd give her something to eat, or if she'd have to wait until dinner.

“Ready to get to work?” Louise asked, and Hilary nodded, having gotten the answer to her question. The social worker seemed to disappear, and Louise directed her outside to a shovel and some rakes. She was told to dig a trench, and promised that some of the boys would help her, but they never showed. The boys were smoking cigarettes behind the barn, and Hilary was left to wield the shovel by herself, grunting and perspiring. She had worked hard in the last four years, but never at manual labor. She had cleaned Eileen and Jack's house, done their laundry, cooked their meals, and nursed Eileen until she died, but this was harder than anything she'd done before, and there were tears of exhaustion in her eyes when Louise finally called them in out of the torrid heat and told them to come to dinner.

She found Maida there, looking victorious as she stood by the stove. To her had fallen the ladylike task of cooking dinner, if one could call it that. It was a few pieces of meat and gristle floating in a sea of watery grease, which Louise cheerfully called stew as she ladled out small portions to each of them and sat down to say grace. And despite the pangs of hunger that she felt, and the dizziness from being in the hot sun all day, Hilary was unable to make herself eat it.

“Come on, eat up, you gotta keep up your strength.” Louise grinned horribly at her, it was all like some awful fairy tale, about a witch who was going to eat the children. Hilary remembered tales like that from her childhood, but they never seemed quite as real as this, and the witch always died and the children went back to being princesses and princes.

“I'm sorry … I'm not very hungry …” Hilary apologized weakly as the boys laughed at her.

“You sick?” Louise looked annoyed. “They didn't tell me you was sick….” She looked as though she were about to send her back to some unknown fate and Hilary remembered Maida's unpleasant description of “juvie.” Jail for kids. That was all she needed. But she had nowhere else to go now. She couldn't go back to Jack. She knew what he'd do to her this time. So it was Louise or juvie.

“No, no, I'm not sick … it's just the sun … it was hot outside …”

“Aww …” The other kids were quick to make fun of her and Maida gave her a vicious pinch as she helped wash the dishes. It was an odd arrangement, Hilary realized again. They weren't like friends or family, Louise didn't pretend to mother them, they were just like a hired work force she'd brought in to do her work, and that was how they treated her as well. It all seemed very temporary and very distant. Louise's husband seemed to come and go. He had lost one leg in the war and the other was severely crippled. He was unable to work as a result, and Louise took these kids in to do his share of the work, and her own, and for the money it brought her. The State paid her for each child she took in, and she didn't get rich on it, but it gave her decent money. The maximum she could take in was seven, and they knew there would be another one coming soon, because with Hilary there were only six. There was a pale blond fifteen-year-old girl named Georgine, as well as Maida, and three rowdy boys in their early teens. Two of them had been leering at Hilary since dinner. None of them were handsome kids, and few of them even looked healthy. It would have been hard to on the diet they were given. Louise cut all the corners she could, but Hilary was used to that from living with Eileen and Jack, although Louise seemed to have perfected the art even further.

At seven-thirty she shouted at the kids to get ready for bed. They had been sitting in their rooms, talking, complaining, exchanging stories about parents in jail, and their own experiences in juvie. It was all totally foreign to Hilary, who sat on her bed in frightened silence. The boys had their own room next door, and Georgine and Maida talked as though Hilary wasn't there. They shoved their way past her in their nightgowns eventually, and slammed the door in her face when they went to the bathroom.

I can take it, she told herself … it's better than Jack … this isn't so awful … she remembered the money hidden in her suitcase and prayed no one would find it. She only had to live through five more years of this … five years of foster homes or juvie … or Jack … she felt tears sting her eyes as she finally closed the door to the bathroom, and she sat down and sobbed silently into the torn scratchy towel Louise had given her that morning. It was impossible to believe that this was what her life had come to. And within minutes, the boys were pounding on the door, and she had to give up the bathroom, as a trail of cockroaches ran across the bathtub.

“What you doin' in there, mama? Want a hand?” one of the black boys asked, and the others laughed at his delightful sense of humor. Hilary only brushed past them and went back to her own room, just in time for Maida to turn the light out. And a moment later, Hilary was stunned when Louise appeared in the doorway, with a ring of keys in one hand. She looked as though she were going to lock them in, but Hilary knew that was impossible, or so she thought. She could hear raucous laughter from the boys' room.

“Lockup time,” Maida supplied the information and with that Louise slammed the door, and they could hear the key turn in the lock. The other two girls looked as though it was perfectly normal, and Hilary stared at them in the dim light from outside their windows.

“Why did she do that?”

“So we don't meet up with the boys. She likes everything nice and clean and wholesome.” And then suddenly Maida laughed as though it were a very funny joke and so did Georgine. They seemed to laugh endlessly as Hilary watched them.

“What if we have to go to the bathroom?”

“You piss in your bed,” Georgine supplied.

“But you dean it up tomorrow mornin'” Maida added, and then they snickered again.

“What if there's a fire?” Hilary was terrified, but Maida only laughed again.

“Then you fry, baby. Like a little potato chip with your lily-white skin turnin' all brown like mine.” In truth they could have broken the window and escaped, but Hilary didn't think of that as she felt rising waves of panic. She lay down in her bed and pulled up the sheets, trying not to think of all the terrible things that could happen. No one had ever locked her in a room before, and the experience was frightening beyond anything she'd ever thought of.