The Kid
Lori WhiteThe kid tells me she’s dreading going home. It’s 1:00 a.m. We’re barreling north in the Prius after a concert in LA, still thirty minutes away from where I drop her off. The evening’s glittery girl-power excitement has dissipated into the darkness. She’s eaten the sandwiches I packed and the frosted cow-shaped cookies she requested, her favorite sweet treat to finish the night. I have just enough time to talk her back from the disappointment, drawing on the same reassurances I’ve used over the past three years.
One more year, I tell her, until we’re driving her to college, the Prius packed with her clothes and books and bedding. We share her dorm room list on our phones, adding essentials she’ll need—a bullet blender, a microwave and mini fridge, a new laundry hamper—for her new home, the first home of her own making.
None of this helps for very long.
I wait in the driveway for her to let me know she’s inside, but the door is locked and she still hasn’t been given a key. She texts me that no one is answering her knocking, even though there are six people crammed inside the tiny two-bedroom apartment, one who’s sleeping on the couch just inches from the front door.
She tries calling her father but he doesn’t answer. Of course, she writes. She’s locked out of the one place she doesn’t even want to enter.
Knock louder, I suggest. It’s quarter-to-two now and another twenty minutes till I get home.
Finally, she’s in, and I take off, back onto the dark freeway.
The kid admits she’d wanted someone younger; I say I’d wanted someone older, which makes us both laugh. I credit her reading for our successful match. A social worker noted this in her file: She likes to read, a rare detail for kids, especially in the court system, but enough to interest me in a 14-year-old, even though I’d requested no less than eighteen—an age I thought would spare me most of the angry teenage years, or worse, a younger adolescent, who might need more than I could give.
I called the kid’s father to arrange a time to meet. He wished me luck, said his daughter probably wouldn’t talk much since she didn’t want a court-appointed special advocate (CASA) to begin with, another stranger assigned to her case, another reminder that she’s back in the system, another child with parents who still didn’t know how to keep her safe.
But the kid wouldn’t stop talking that first day, detailing the plot of a book she was reading, the first in a series of fantasy novels that follows three teenage warriors battling to rid the world of its demons. We walked for miles that hot August afternoon, masked and six-feet apart, from the trailer park to the nearest Starbucks.
Eventually, she asked me to explain what a CASA does, and I stumbled through an explanation: I’m a friend, her advocate, appointed by the court, someone to help her through this time with her mother in prison, and her father, unemployed and living in a dusty travel trailer with his pregnant girlfriend and three other kids who came and went, depending on their custody agreements. The icy Frappuccino probably helped convince her to give me a chance, or maybe it was the steak she ordered during my second visit—Well done, she told the waitress, not the best choice, I explained to her as she struggled to saw off the first bite.
Steak is still her favorite meal—filet, medium rare, with a side of asparagus—what she orders to celebrate acing her AP tests or scoring editor-in-chief of her school paper.
The fact that I don’t get paid to be with the kid made her suspicious for a while, uncertain of how long I’d be around. In her world, money was unreliable, a sputtering stream that dried up each month before the rent was due.
I said, I’ll be here as long as you want me, which was a lie. Since losing my own parents, I’ve learned that want has nothing to do with how long we’ll have the people we depend on.
My answer seemed to satisfy her, but still there are moments over the past three years when she’s been afraid I’ll get mad at her and disappear—and I do get mad sometimes, more irritated, really, like when she loses her water bottle for the seventh time or leaves her math homework on the bus. Until I remember she’s just a kid, and I apologize, something none of the adults in her life do, with the exception of her mother—for the crystal meth years, for the chaos, and for the car accident that killed a six-year-old, the kid’s younger sister, and landed her mother in jail.
Consistency is most important: this is the focus of my CASA training. Sometimes a CASA volunteer is the only anchor these kids have. Admittedly, the court’s bar for kids in the system seems pretty goddamn low to me: adequate shelter (including a car); adequate food (usually chicken nuggets and pizza); and adequate clothing (regardless of how worn or dirty).
My supervisor told me that the kid’s living conditions in the trailer ticked all the boxes, that my complaints were understandable but not unacceptable, even when the father lost the trailer— Still not homeless , the supervisor reminded me, a response that never soothed the kid’s silence each time I dropped her off in the motel parking lot.
I tell the kid I’m not her mom. She knows this, of course, but her own mother is showing signs of jealousy, asking the kid if she likes having so many women fighting over her. I understand the woman’s pain when she sees me with her daughter, but the rules are strict: an adult must accompany any minors while visiting an inmate. I leave them now and sit outside during visitors’ hours, the most privacy I can give them.
The truth is I’ve never wanted children. The year I started CASA training was the first calm I’d felt in a long while. Enough time had passed to grieve my father’s death and my mother’s decline into dementia, two losses that left me with a surplus of caring. I felt a duty to give, to honor the love and devotion I’d received for over fifty years.
And then I met the kid.
How she explains who I am to others is still a mystery to me. I’m a friend, I suppose, her ride to and from birthday parties, or the person who makes sure her bike gets fixed whenever it has a flat tire. Maybe I’m just Lori, the name she tells her friends when she opens her locker each morning and finds the lunch I’ve dropped off—peanut butter or ham and cheese sandwiches plus some snacks to get her through the day. I started doing this after I learned the cafeteria line was too long for her to get the free lunch and still make it to her next class on time.
I also struggle to explain who she is. Few people understand what a CASA is, or how the family court system operates. But even this explanation isn’t accurate anymore. The kid’s case was closed a while ago, so I’m not even her CASA any longer.
A kid I work with, is what I usually tell people, which never fully explains who she is to me, mostly because I’m still not entirely sure.
The kid says I’m the only adult she can depend on, the one who’s willing to drive her to Taylor Swift singalongs and summer hangouts at the beach with her friends; who picks her up at 6:00 a.m. and gets her to school on time to take her SATs; and who’s organizing the college campus tours this fall, trips to schools as far as a plane ride away.
College has been the kid’s plan since long before we met. Again, I credit her reading for opening up a wider world, feeding her determination for a promising future. She knows college is her best chance to break her family’s cycle—of teen pregnancy and drug addiction; of minimum wage jobs at liquor stores and fast food restaurants; and of tiny apartments crammed with broken toys and dirty dishes in the sink, a line of ants marching across half-eaten bowls of cereal.
Her father’s response to my presence swings from gratitude to distrust, which makes the kid wary of mentioning me too often. Perhaps I remind him of the places he falls short—or maybe I’m giving him too much credit. Sometimes he gets mad if the kid hasn’t cleaned the bathroom yet and says she can’t see Lori anymore. Of course, this never sticks. Though she doesn’t yet realize this, her father’s inconsistency is the one thing she can depend on.
Still, his threats scare me enough to join the kid and her clandestine plans. Their washer died a year ago, so I sneak the kid’s dirty laundry to my car and back again, freshly folded and stacked in plastic garbage bags. Once a month, we’ll splurge at CVS. I hide a box of tampons in her backpack, slip a stick of deodorant into her purse. She unboxes her favorite shampoo and conditioner, clutching the bottles under her jacket until she’s inside.
The kid got her first job over a year ago, waiting tables at a Mongolian barbecue place six blocks from her house, earning more per hour than her father makes. She stashed her tips in her dresser until we got nervous he might find it. A parent or legal guardian has to be present in order for a minor to open a checking account. The kid texted me from the bank. She got the teller alone long enough to confirm her father would never have access to her money.
Perhaps the best way for a kid to learn the value of money is to grow up without it. She rides her bike to the bank after each shift to feed a tidy stack of bills into the ATM. At this point she’s saved nearly ten thousand dollars, more money than her father has ever seen at one time.
*
People tell me how lucky the kid is to have me. I think of my parents in those moments, lingering on how random real luck is when it comes to the family we’re born into. I was lucky enough to have parents who went far beyond the bare minimum. My family sat together at the dinner table every night, talking about school or afterschool activities as we ate—guitar lessons and gymnastics, baseball games and cross-country meets. We went on family ski trips and summer road trips across the States, and when we were older, trips across the Atlantic. College was never a question, even though neither of my parents had a degree beyond a high school diploma. When I entered Berkeley freshmen year, all four of their kids were in college or graduate school.
This may be common for children with parents like mine, parents whose goal is to ensure their kids have better lives—easier, fuller, richer—than theirs. Until time and age forces those families to change—when the kids become the adults, and the parents
become the kids. When a daughter must move her mother into memory care or stay the night with her father’s body after he dies, whispering stories about the horse shows he took her to or the first car he gave her, a hand-me-down Volvo station wagon she drove until he decided it was too old and unreliable to keep her safe any longer and replaced it with another.
I don’t tell these stories to the kid. The boundaries a CASA must follow limit how much of my life I can share and how much money I can spend. Even though her case is closed, I’m still careful not to reveal too much, in part because I’m embarrassed by how easy my life has been. She senses my privilege, but never asks directly about my past. Perhaps she’s afraid if she knows too much, gets too close, I’ll be gone. This happened before with one of her father’s girlfriends, a woman who swore she cared about the kid, then vanished one day without any warning or explanation.
Maybe these disappointments are the reasons why the kid rarely shows her excitement for the future I like to talk about—the dorm rooms and cafeterias, the lush lawns and stately trees, and the libraries with high ceilings and marble floors, a world filled with opportunities she’s never had. Even now, senior year, when she’s so close, she mostly nods as I babble on about the thrill of her impending independence, the freedom to go where she pleases— to football games and parties and concerts—without having to ask permission and hear her father tell her no, he needs her to stay home and babysit.
*
The kid tells me she was afraid I was going to die. It’s early January; school starts soon. We’re in the Prius again, parked across the street from a restaurant she’s chosen for dinner, but she doesn’t want to go in just yet. We haven’t seen each other for
several weeks. When she texted before Christmas, I didn’t want to tell her I was in the hospital, then realized she probably already knew from the app we use to track each other on our phones.
I was dehydrated again, but this time I’d waited too long to go to the ER. It took two paramedics and a firefighter to lift me off the living room floor. I’d become a wild animal, thrashing and cursing, the cramping so severe I couldn’t straighten my legs.
The kid knows about my Crohn’s disease, but I don’t think she really understands what this means. It’s a difficult disease to explain, how my body attacks itself, targeting what’s left of my intestinal track, making fluid absorption difficult to maintain.
I tell her I’m not going to die—at least not any time soon. Which is true. But I understand when she looks unconvinced. My father said those same words after his cancer was diagnosed.
The kid says she didn’t know what she’d do without me, and her mother insisted she’d be fine. From her tears now, I can see that answer wasn’t enough.
The goal of a CASA is to help the child build the life skills necessary to lead a productive, independent life. The kid is close— successful at school, working a steady job, able to balance her priorities. She knows how to do laundry and shop for food, how to budget her money, setting aside savings each month. In many ways, her mom was right, but her response didn’t account for what the kid and I share, a relationship that doesn’t fit any of the familiar categories—family, friends, even mentors and teachers.
I can’t reassure the kid the way I’d tried that night she was locked out of her house. And I can’t make any promises—neither of us believe in promises any more.
So, I take her back over the last year, and the year before, and the year before that, reminding her of the challenges she’s overcome and how much she’s learned, how capable she is—how capable she’s always been, long before we met. This is what I want
her to depend on. She can text me and call me; she can ask me to come and I’ll be there for as long as she needs me. I’m just helping her to understand what she already knows instinctively, helping her find where the answer resides, deep inside herself.
It’s starting to drizzle now. Let’s go, I tell her. I’m hungry. We cross the street to the restaurant and sit at a table by the window where she orders the meal I expected her to, steak, medium rare, with a side of asparagus.