Age of Ava Tanya Grover Professor Marike Janzen EURS 565 15 December 2016
2 Ava Moore was biting her lip again. It was something a former foster mother had despised, constantly reprimanding her about the habit and trying to make her stop. For Ava it was a bit of a nervous tick, something she found herself doing in stressful situations, and for this reason she maintained that it was not her fault the habit prevailed, as she was rather constantly feeling nervous about something or the other. Like right now, for instance. Her eyes surveyed the room and she caught a glance of herself in the mirror on the wall across from her. Her auburn hair was pulled back into its usual messy bun and through the reflection, her dark brown eyes looked back at her piercingly. She re-crossed her legs and sighed, turning her gaze to the clock. She’d been waiting in the KVC lobby for almost 30 minutes now and Melinda had yet to make an appearance. She understood Melinda was a busy woman as an incredibly overworked case manager, but today Ava was feeling very little patience or gratitude because the next thing Melinda might say to her could change her life. She shifted herself in the chair again. As she bent down to retie the frayed laces of her dirty black Converse sneakers, she saw Melinda’s usual chestnut brown loafers shuffle out of the back room and towards Ava. Abandoning her laces, she stood up quickly to meet Melinda’s tight smile and telling eyes. Ava’s heart sank. She would not be receiving good news today. In her office, Melinda informed Ava what she had predicted, although it hadn’t stopped her from developing a festering hope, nor did it soften the blow. Ava’s mother had yet again failed to pass her drug test, in which case Ava would not be returning to her childhood home on 21st and Rhode Island. This was no surprise, as Nicole Moore had not been clean since Ava’s father disappeared seven years ago. And quite frankly, it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal either, as Ava had become fairly accustomed to the Shelter, Inc. group home, if it weren’t for the
3 fact that today was September 23. Which meant that in 14 days—a mere two weeks—Ava will turn 18 and officially become a legal adult. An adult with nowhere to live.
Back at the group home, Ava sat on her bed hugging her knees and tried to drown out her thoughts with music blasting through her headphones. She had learned that being angry at her mom wasn’t worth it; it didn’t change anything except cause her to lash out and get in trouble. Her earlier teenage years were some dark times but she had been doing a lot better lately, in part she thought because she had pretty much accepted life at the group home. But now she could feel that anger boil back up again, familiar and unpleasant like an obnoxious friend that won’t leave you alone. She had needed her mom to pull through just this once, this one time so that after her 18th birthday she would have a place to stay. But of course, Nicole was incapable of satisfying anyone except her greasy drug-dealing boyfriend. Ava weighed her options. If she made the right choices maybe she’d be able to survive on her own. She’d be able to keep her job at Dairy Queen, so long as she kept showing up and slapping patties onto hard buns. She would try her best to finish high school; there was only a little over one semester left and she’d heard Nancy and the other supervisors preach about the importance of a diploma one two many times to think twice before dropping out. But first she’d have to find somewhere to live, because come October 7, her paperwork would be filed and the group home would no longer be financially responsible for her, Melinda and KVC no longer legally responsible. Simple Plan belted out “I’m Just a Kid” into her ears as she pondered potential living situations and she couldn’t help but smirk at the irony. She recalled Jason talking about a cousin in West Lawrence. His birthday wasn’t until March though. She bit her lip, thinking that life would be easier if she had also been born in the spring. Amongst other things.
4 None of this would matter, however, if she were pregnant. Ava’s stomach turned a somersault as the thought echoed through her brain. She’d been avoiding it all week, worrying instead about her mother’s drug test. She eyed her nightstand, where in the bottom drawer was a pregnancy test she had stolen from Walgreens a few days earlier, carefully concealed underneath her T-shirts. She hadn’t told anyone, including Jason. Especially Jason.
Ava met Jason officially at last year’s group home Christmas party at that church on 20th and Massachusetts. She had seen him around before, a few times at school and once in passing at the KVC office. They were aware of each other’s existence, if only because they were both part of the small population of foster kids at Free State. He had moved into the Shelter, Inc. boys group home earlier that fall after his dad went to jail; his mother had OD-ed when he was younger. He was a troublemaker in the petty kind of way, known for playing pranks on teachers and smoking weed in the bathroom. Ava was eating a brownie and listening to her friend Brittany’s painfully long story when she noticed Jason watching her from across the room. She held his gaze for a long few seconds before looking away, blushing. She finished her brownie and nodded at all the right parts of Brittany’s story, finally looking up again just in time to see the back of Jason’s dark curly head disappearing through the door She often wonders what exactly made her get up and follow him, quickly mumbling to Nancy that she was using the restroom and ignoring not only the annoyed gasp of Brittany as she reached the climax of her tale but most importantly her own sound advice. Until Jason, Ava had been uncharacteristically uninterested in boys for an 18-year-old girl, especially in comparison to the girls in the home who seemed to constantly be swapping hookup stories. She partly attributed the promiscuity of her peers to what society has crudely deemed “daddy issues,” knowing most
5 of the experiences foster girls have with their fathers were nonexistent or abusive. Ava understood this burden as well as any, but for her, a dead-beet dad who she hadn’t heard from since she was 11, her mom’s controlling and nasty boyfriend, and the dozen foster fathers who ranged anywhere from violent to creepy to just plain dull, provided plenty of reasons to have zero interest in the male species. Which is precisely why Ava felt like she was in a dream as she exited the room, as if she wasn’t her ordering her legs to walk, like someone else was responsible for her actions and pulling her strings like a puppet. She turned down the hallway and saw Jason at the end, leaning against a table. “You followed me,” he called as she got closer, noticing his playful smirk. Ava shrugged and laughed nervously. “I was tired of hearing Brittany ramble.” “You wanna ditch?” Jason raised his eyebrows. “I got some cash, we can get ice cream or somethin’.” Ava bit her lip. “Sure,” she said, surprising herself. As it turned out, Jason didn’t have cash but instead a Dairy Queen gift card, in which Ava had vetoed because she had just started working there and would rather not show up with a boy to be obnoxiously questioned about by her co-workers. So instead the two walked to Rock Chalk Park, despite the cold, and sat on the top of the slide, talking until their hands were numb and the party was almost over. She hadn’t “run” in a long time and didn’t feel like dealing with Nancy and the repercussions. Jason had laughed when she told him this, and she remembered thinking about how much she liked the sound. She smiled and then Jason’s face was growing closer and closer and Ava was biting her lip and suddenly they were kissing and she was biting his lip and his hands were so cold on her face and in her hair but she didn’t even mind.
6 She often wonders what her life would be like today, September 23 and two weeks away from her 18th birthday, if she had not followed Jason that day.
She is sure, for one thing, that had she not begun seeing (dating? They weren’t really into labels) Jason, Ava would not be currently burning a hole with her eyes through the bottom drawer of her nightstand and picturing horrifying visions of herself and a baby sitting on the corner of Massachusetts Street with an upside down hat. Chastising herself angrily and lost in thought as a Taylor Swift song comes up on her Pandora station that she quickly changes, Ava wonders how she could have let this happen. She pictures an 18-year-old Nicole sitting on a bed, listening to music and wondering the same thing. Had she become her mother? Nancy always talks about the cycle and how easy it is to succumb to parents’ mistakes and the importance of breaking out blah blah blah, but after years of developing a fairly decent GPA, for having a steady job (no matter how shitty) for almost a year now, and for staying mostly clean when getting drugs was easier than getting Advil, she could be nine months away from following in her mother’s footsteps. She supposed this was her punishment for not always having safe sex, but condoms were expensive and getting on the Pill seemed like a long shot when nailing down a dentist appointment while in foster care was considered an accomplishment. Abruptly Ava yanks out her headphones and crosses the room to the nightstand. She is tired of worrying about something that might not be true when she could be spending her time worrying about the likely possibilities that could occur in 14 days. Unwrapping the T-shirt, she glances behind her to make sure Sarah still wasn’t home yet and surveys the hallway ahead. The coast clear, she sticks the box between her pants and stomach and heads for the bathroom.
7 Approximately seven minutes later, Ava stares at the stick as its one pink line stares back at her. She swallows and exhales, carefully wrapping it in toilet paper and throwing it away. She looks in the mirror and thinks about how fucked up it is that a tiny part of her feels disappointed that she isn’t pregnant, because if she were, someone (Shelter, Inc.? Melinda? The government?) would have to think twice before kicking her out of the group home with nowhere to go.
Three months later Ava wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and then pulling her hair back, tries to gag up Cody’s semen into the sink, making sure the water was running so he wouldn’t hear. Glancing at herself in the mirror, her eyes are dry. By now, she doesn’t even tear up or get that choking feeling while trying to hold back tears. In the first few weeks she had sobbed uncontrollably, whenever she could, whenever he wasn’t watching. But surviving turns you cold; it makes you feel nothing about things that should make you feel everything. Feeling is dangerous, she had learned. She knew this to be true before she aged-out, too; as a foster kid, turning off your emotions can keep you sane. But once you’re out of the system, feeling is what prevents you from doing what you have to do to survive. And that’s different. It’s harder. When she first moved into the second bedroom of Cody’s apartment, Ava had actually thought things might work out. Cody was supposedly a longtime friend of Jason’s father, which should have been enough for Ava to deem it a bad idea, but then again she had little choice. But Jason swore that Cody was a good guy, the one who showed up and took care of Jason as a kid when his father was on a bender or on the run after a drug deal gone wrong. Ava’s mother, as the grand finale of her parenting role, had lost the house and moved in with her boyfriend in Eudora, so Ava truly had no other option. She was always skeptical about Cody telling Jason she could live there for “free,” but with Jason’s assurance, she had moved in around mid-October.
8 From the beginning, Cody had made his expectations clear. His friends (including Jason’s piece-of-shit father before being incarcerated, unbeknownst to Jason) ran the ruthless human trafficking business in Lawrence. Should Ava not oblige with Cody’s every demand and desire or divulge the truth to Jason, Cody could have her sold to someone who he liked to point out would treat her a lot worse than he did. He reminded her of this daily. It has to be rock bottom, Ava thought, when due to the stipulations of a governmentregulated system, she ultimately can choose between sucking off her boyfriend’s dad’s best friend twice a day or living on the streets of Lawrence in the middle of December and subjecting herself to human trafficking. What would you do if a choice between sexual exploitation and homelessness was your only way for survival?