Chapter 2

Interlude

The fight started it all.

Eight-year-old Lachlan Quinn arrived in Emory on a rainy March day holding tightly to a faded blue pillowcase that held all his worldly possessions: a tattered book of poems by Kipling that a visiting Santa gave him two Christmases ago, two pairs of underpants, seven mismatched socks and his play jeans with a hole in the knee. He was wearing his good ones.

The social worker, a tired looking thin-faced woman, had smoked one cigarette after another during the silent drive up from Seattle. As soon as they arrived, she pulled over, parked and turned to him. Lachlan was an old hand at this, he knew a lecture was coming, so he put on a well-practiced attentive look and pretended to listen.

“Young Man, you are stubborn, stiff-necked and disrespectful. You better get a handle on that temper of yours or you’re going to end up in Greenhills. You are lucky to be here, so don’t mess up and embarrass me.”

She placed him in a regular family with a mother, a father and little sister.

To young Lachlan, the new place was like winning the Lotto. His new father even bought him a warm coat and some brand-new Nikes. After the first couple of months, he had even started sleeping in pj’s instead of being fully dressed down to his shoes in case he had to run. He’d had to run before—twice—a caregiver boyfriend, Jack Daniels and meth was a dangerous mixture.

He tamped down the fear that this was too good to last and let himself believe that his life from now on would be clean sheets on a bed in his very own room—with so much food that he didn’t have to worry about hiding some away for the hungry times.

Later, Lachlan knew he should have known better—but he just couldn’t seem to stop himself from hoping.

He had been in Emory nine months when a little second-grade girl with big blue eyes and blond pigtails walked up to him on the playground of Lincoln Elementary School and breathlessly announced that her name was Amanda Teague, but everybody called her Mandy.

The little chatterbox pointed out three little girls who were standing off to the side like outsiders do, watching the other kids play. She informed him they were her sisters, Katie, Charming and Bella. They were all new kids at school, and they had a new mommy who seemed nice, but she wouldn’t let her bring her kitty, Biscuits, to school.

That clued him in that, like him, the girls were system kids. To kids like them, the name mommy had a whole different meaning than it did to regular kids. To them, a mommy was any random female caregiver of whatever fresh hell the state had placed them.