CLEAN || Taylor Swift Adoption

TWENTY-EIGHT

'I don't want to lose this with you...'

~EVERLEIGH~

August 14, 2019

I felt like I was sitting on the edge of my seat for the entire car ride back to the house. I kept waiting for Taylor to say something about the doctor's appointment, to start yelling at me, to do anything that showed her disappointment in me. Wasn't that what every foster parent, or parent in general, was supposed to do when they found out that their kid needed to see a therapist? I mean, honestly, who wanted to keep a kid that was messed up enough that they needed to talk to someone else?

Maybe she's thinking herself, I thought. Maybe she was thinking about how much she regretted fostering me, now that she was learning how screwed up I was. Maybe she was trying to figure out how she was going to tell Ashley that this arrangement wasn't going to work out, and that she needed to get rid of me as soon as possible.

I wouldn't have been surprised if that was what Taylor wanted to do. It hadn't happened directly before to me, but I knew for a fact that it happened to one of my roommates at a group home I stayed at a few years back.

The door to our room opened, and Ayla, Miller, and I looked up as Penny walked through the door with a girl that we had never seen before. For someone that we could only assume had been living in the system, she looked relatively well-kept; she was wearing a white cable-knit sweater and light jeans, and her short brown hair was neatly brushed and pulled away from her face by a thin headband.

"Girls, this is Emery Peters," Penny said. "She's going to be your new roommate. I trust that all of you will make her feel welcome."

Miller smiled at Emery, pointing towards the bed in the far corner in the room. "You'll sleep there," she said. "You can decorate it however you'd like."

Emery gave Miller a small smile in return. "Thanks," she said, walking over to the bed and setting her backpack down on the mattress. That was strange. Most kids in foster care didn't have backpacks and stuff to travel with, and Emery's looked new, something that was even more surprising about the situation.

"This is so dumb," Emery muttered to herself as she pulled out some of her belongings from the bag, setting some stuff down on the dresser next to her bed.

"You good?" Ayla asked, looking over with a worried look on her face. All three of us were trying to gauge some of how Emery's personality was, and how it was going to impact the dynamic that had already been established between the three of us. While we weren't necessarily close enough to be considered friends, we all got along well and knew how to operate so that our room didn't turn into a teenage hell.

Emery sighed, rolling her eyes. "It's just..." she started, tucking a strand of hair behind her ears. "Why did I have to end up so screwed up?"

"You and me both, girl," Ayla commented.

"I had a foster family," Emery started, pulling her knees up to her chest as she spoke. "And they were good. At least, I thought they were going to be good. But then the mom found my journal, showed it to the dad, and it had... stuff about how I wasn't eating. How I hated the way my body looked. Stuff like that. And the dad tried to push it off and say that it was just a bunch of hormonal teenage girl stuff, but the mom insisted that I needed help. So she took me to see a therapist, and the therapist said that I should start coming in twice a week. Anyway, the family didn't want to spend the money for therapy twice a week, and the state wasn't giving them any more money for fostering me, so now, here I am."