Oranges
It had been almost two days since I had last eaten a whole meal. It was spring break, so I couldn’t take whatever was thrown away at school. My foster mom’s cooking made me vomit a few days before, so I wasn’t allowed to eat for a few days as punishment. I had already trained my body to get used to not eating; the hunger pains stopped after the first nine hours, then stop for good. I could still hear my foster mom’s granddaughter smacking her food in her mouth from the kitchen. My foster sister, Dana was as talkative as she usually wasn’t, responding with one or three-word responses with her big, goofy smile and awkward lip bite as if to bite off a sentence that tagged along. I could only make out Dana’s mispronounced words to sound goofy for our foster mom’s granddaughter’s entertainment and her granddaughter struggling to count to seven.
After dinner, Dana shuffled into the room. She plopped down on my bunk bed, squirmed around on it like a fish out of water, got up, and hustled back out to do her chores. I jolted off the floor to run and do mine, turning my mind off and lowering my head as I was told while Dana hummed to herself as she vacuumed. Seeing the food crumbs on the floor almost depressed me; I focused on making a steady, obsessive rhythm with the broom on the hardwood floors. I wanted to make the rhythm to Dana’s humming, but I didn’t want to get in trouble and lose my food money again. It was done, but I told myself to let go of the seventy or so cents I earned for the day, just in case I had to buy school supplies instead of dinner.
Dana shuffled back into the bedroom. She wiggled her toes beneath her matching white socks. The light blue jeans caught underneath the heels of her feet. Her large gray hoodie dangled past her waist to her thin thighs. Strands of her naturally light blonde hair fell loose from her tight ponytail. She looked down at me with the same glint of childish wonder in her big, blue eyes and a goofy smile with crooked teeth that stuck out past her glossy lips.
There was nothing odd about a seventeen-year-old foster youth acting half her age, or even two-thirds in better cases. She was a year older than me by body, but I never could decide if she was my big sister or little sister by heart.
“Hey,” she said, swinging her arms side to side to flail her sleeves, “wanna go to bed early?”
I looked at her, puzzled. “Why?”
“’Cause I have a ’prise for you.”
My gut stiffened. She hadn’t been nice to me to trick me like other foster girls had in the past. They had often lied to our foster parents to get me in trouble for their gain, be it to have the bedroom to themselves to steal my allowance—my food and school supply money, but I wasn’t sure if Dana get us in trouble by mistake instead.
I sighed and brushed it off. I picked up another Anne Rice book to read while she skipped off to the living room to watch the news with my foster parents until it was our bedtime.
* * *
Dana waddled into the bedroom in her pajamas when it was finally eight-o’-clock. She tried bringing up the surprise she had for me again, but I had to distract her from talking about it until it was time to set the alarm on our door. Although she did it to alert the house if we left the room for her family’s protection from those of us who might seek revenge or warn her we were running away to escape the neglect, it made it feel even more like a prison. I was glad we weren’t locked in, probably because the door didn’t have any means of a lock, but I didn’t like having a burglar alarm go off every time I opened the door to request permission to use the bathroom. I was also glad my stomach wasn’t upset anymore; otherwise, I’d get in trouble for needing to use the bathroom, but it would still be a few days before I was allowed to eat again.
At nine-o’-clock, the door was shut and the alarm was set. Dana and I peeked under the door and waited until we saw the shadow of our foster mom disappear into the bedroom next to us. I waited until the scratching of her oxygen tube scratching on the floor stopped before I let Dana talk.
“Okay—okay,” Dana said in a chipper whisper, “you’re gonna like this one.”
She carefully crawled on top of my bunk bed and squirmed on it again. To my surprise, she was quiet for how much she moved. I worried we would get in trouble if they heard us, but she had gotten better about not making sounds. Had they seen her, they would have viewed it as flirting, us being foster sisters would be a strange level of incest, despite any disapproval of us dating normal humans.
We could hear our foster parents talking about how much they hated having us here—we couldn’t hear exactly what they said, but we knew they meant us whenever they called something “that”, “it” or “them”, sometimes, though rarely “the girls”, never referring to us individually by or name. To them, we were just sociopathic paychecks that believed we were human just because we had a similar anatomical structure as one.
“Hey Jiddian,” she said, using the pet name she secretly had for me. “Catch!”
She tossed me a mandarin orange.
She shoved a few more out from the pillow case, from under the sheets, from under the mattress and behind the bed. She sat up and wiggled her butt into a comfortable position, just as a cat might. She looked at me and smiled with her crooked teeth slicking back her lips.
The blood drained from me. I was terrified to think of what would happen if our foster mom knew she stole from the biological family’s personal share of Cuties and tried to feed me or touch my bed. Our foster mom could tell my case worker. She would report it as theft and destruction of property—they were the first things she warned upon arrival. My caseworker would have to warn future foster homes that I was a thief and highly destructive. I would lose my chances of getting a better foster home or even another foster home. Forget adoption, or even a future—I would have a criminal record instead of a place to live.
“Are you nuts,” I hissed.
She nodded, mostly to toss her pony tail around.
“Do you have any idea how much trouble we could get in for this,” I asked.
She shrugged. “’What she gonna do, send me back to The Foote? Well, probably, and charge me with theft and destruction of property, but hey, I’d get fed and treated a lot better there. You’re probably not gonna hear it any differently that The Foote is better than a foster home.”
Her comparison of a juvenile correctional facility and a foster home reminded me of another foster sister I had, Penny, the first of many after her—I eventually lost count of how many came and went. Penny would cry when she made the comparisons, saying the Foote was better, that she was treated like a human there. She then brainstormed things to do to get kicked out and sent back to The Foote, all to get better food and better treatment.
I could still hear her say goodbye, after sharing her plan of running on the day her case worker would come to pick her up from visiting her grandfather in Texas. I never heard from her again. I wish I knew how far she was able to run—I wish I did.
Dana had an even brighter glimmer, knowing her mom would be able to take her back soon. Knowing made me think of my own mother and her choice of drugs over me. My father was the same as her and no one was well enough to take just me in. I was never clear on Dana’s mother’s holdup with taking her back. I was just happy she had a home to return to.
“You really shouldn’t be okay with that,” I said.
She shrugged again and started peeling one of the oranges. “I love these things. My mama, or, well, mommy, my mommy feeds ’em to me all the time.” She went on to compare the Foote to her home, that sharing Cuties was something she shared with her mother as a sign of unconditional love. She began meowing happily. It was an odd, newer habit of hers, but it was quiet and she didn’t do it in front of the foster parents or their adopted daughter and grandchildren.
We both suspected we were given bad food to give them the excuse to not feed us by punishing us if we got sick, seeing how everyone else got fresh food.
“Well, we aren’t her kids, so she can do that.” I said.
“Neither is Cherry.” Dana said.
She referred to their adopted daughter, Cherish as “Cherry”. I was still worried it was a nickname close enough for our foster parents to hear or recognize, but we didn’t notice any signs that they were coming to check on us.
“Yeah,” I said, “but they chose her, not us.”
Dana peeled her orange cleanly and put the skin and whatever veins she pulled off into her backpack to throw away at school; it wasn’t as messy as normal oranges, but I was still afraid she would leave something behind. I studied the orange in my hand. I never had a Cutie before, but I didn’t want it then. I didn’t want to leave evidence of her crime behind and I didn’t want to eat it and promote her sin of theft.
“Did you know she makes about six hundred for each of us in the least and that our parents have to give the government some of the money to help with that,” she asked. “Fatty makes money off of us, even if they don’t like us. ’Betcha they don’t spend any of it on us if we get fuzzy and squishy fruits that aren’t supposed to be like that.”
She proceeded to do the math, that each lunch was $1.25 for breakfast and lunch five times a week, fifty dollars out of four hundred a month saved. “I think they don’t like us because they’re supposed to feed us or something. But, they don’t hafta be foster parents if they don’t wanna be, but they get free money for it, so they shouldn’t complain and give us the same food Cherry and the brats get. ’Never thought I’d say it, but cafeteria food at school’s better.”
I looked back down at my orange. Seeing how small it was reminded me how hungry I was. I didn’t want to get in trouble. I didn’t want to have them call me a thief. I didn’t want them to report theft and property damage or misbehavior to my caseworker. My chances of finding a better home would be ruined if they found out.
“But what will I do with the—?” I asked.
She pulled her backpack between us and smiled. She twisted herself playfully. “I always throw the skin-peel-things away the minute I get off the bus. I don’t mind if your skin touches mine.” She looked at me and grinned. I wasn’t sure if she was flirting or just trying to be funny or what. I’m still not sure.
I carefully peeled the skin off. The sound of it ripping and tearing made me nervous. I doubted the sound of the peel ripping was loud enough to go through the walls and doors, but I didn’t know if the fruit had a smell that would. The smells of decay and medicine, the ones that radiated off my dying grandmother like a ghostly aura were all I could still smell, even weeks after she had passed. Maybe it was because it reminded me that I was taken from her because of her illnesses, the very thing that killed her and left me to” age out” and emancipate instead of being loved.
Holding the freshly-peeled orange frightened me. If I ate, I would start up the noisy hunger pains.
“It’s really good,” Dana said. “I got a whole bunch so you and I can eat and talk and be like real sisters.”
“You see me as a sister?”
“Of course, Jiddian. That’s why I call you Jiddian. Then again, Jiddian is a fun name to say. And I know you’re hungry. You might eat whatever the kids at school throw away so you can last, but I gotta take care of my big sister when she needs it too. I still have some of your cinnamon bun you gave me yesterday.”
“Really?”
She nodded hard enough to fling her pony tail. “I’m savin’ it for when I get really hungry. I traded a Cutie-pie whenever I eat a piece. I could tell I wasn’t gonna get sick this time, but who knows ’bout tomorrow’s ‘dinner’. If we eat good, then we can be healthy, even if they try feeding us gross food. Plus, it made me really sad when you said you never had a cutie pie before and Fatty wasn’t gonna fix that, so I decided I’d do it. I wanted to be your first.”
My heart began to ache. The fragile skin that held the segments together reminded me of my own. I did my best not to tear it when I took the segments apart, but I did on every piece for the first half. I did my best to savor them and dispose of the evidence at the same time.
The candy-sweet juices squirted out of the thin membranes, each juicier than the last. They weren’t as sour or messy as the oranges I was used to or the same kind of squishy that rotten pears and plums they’d feed me had. I ate the whole thing. I liked it—sweet like the loving sister Dana then became. In the corner of my eye, I saw Dana butt-dancing, excited for my response.
“Want another one?” Dana asked, biting her lip as if to bite off another sentence that tagged along.
I sinned how only a human could—I took another one and then talked about going home, school and boys with my foster sister through the night.
End.