II
Blank File
The rhinestones on the new social worker's green glasses had been glued on crooked, her nail polish was cracked, and she was wearing too much perfume. Her smile reminded Beth of pictures she'd seen of a horse. She looked Beth up and down and laughed a loud, nervous laugh. Then she looked back down at the datapad on her chipped, fake wood desk and her drawn-on eyebrows crinkled. "Beth Shepard?"
Beth didn't answer.
"What a pretty name," Ms. Brown tried again. "We're going to try to get you adopted. How would you like that? A nice family of your very own. But you're going to have to answer a few questions for me, Beth. Can you do that?"
Beth nodded.
"Your file's . . . well, it's rather thin, dearie. Born April 11, 2154?"
"That's my birthday."
"You're six?"
Beth didn't answer.
Ms. Brown cleared her throat and tapped her nails on her desk. "Your birth certificate says you were born at the East Sixteenth Charity Clinic, but there's . . . there's no record of a mother. Or a father. Do you know anything? Have any of the people you've lived with told you anything? The Hills or the Hollises? Mrs. Tyre?"
"They just want me for the money from the state. They don't know anything. Even if they did they wouldn't tell me, probably."
"Oh, I'm sure that's not true."
Beth stared at Ms. Brown's shiny glasses. Behind the glass, the watery, blue eyes were looking everywhere but at Beth.
"Have you ever had any communication? A letter or an e-mail? A message of any kind?"
"No."
Ms. Brown spread her hands over the desk. Tap, tap, tap, went the nails again. She chewed her purple lip. "I . . . I . . ."
"You're new at this, aren't you?" Beth asked. "Not just new here. They didn't tell you what to do with a kid like me."
"Yes, this is my first day on the job, but I assure you, I will take the best care of you I can, dearie. I'm sure we'll fill out your paperwork somehow and find you a family."
"Tommy at school says no one would want me anyway. He's probably right. Mrs. Hollis sent me away. And so is Mrs. Tyre, right? That's why I'm here. You're moving me again."
"It's not that they didn't want you, dearie," Ms. Brown said quickly. "Mrs. Hollis's license got revoked, and now that Mrs. Tyre will be having her own child, she's expressed concerns about her ability to care for the rest of you. It's got nothing to do with you, Beth. Don't worry a bit. We'll find you a new place to stay for now, and I am on your case! Before you know it, maybe just in a few months, you'll go someplace else, someplace permanent."
Beth was not filled with confidence. "Did you have more questions, Ms. Brown?" she asked.
Ms. Brown blinked behind her green glasses, and her purple lips opened in surprise. "Well, I . . . no. That's all for now, Beth. You can wait outside in the playroom. I'll come get you and your things when we're ready to take you to your new caretakers."
Beth slid off her plastic chair and slipped out into the playroom without a word. Later, when she was building holo-mazes for the holo-ships to fight through on the sim-interface (nicer than any she'd played on before, she'd be sad when she had to stop), playing Shanxi, she heard Ms. Brown talking on her comm.
"I don't know what to do, ma'am. I've never seen this many blanks in a file before. This case—not only are there no parents, there aren't even any of the other usual relatives. No aunt or uncle, no grandparent. No communications, no official records, neither the child nor her previous guardians have made any report of so much as an informal word-of-mouth message by proxy. I can't even trace the name to get parentage—it was given her by the nurse. Just invented off the top of her head. And you know what that means. No parents means no health history, no genetic mapping . . .
"No. I don't even have her ethnicity to make a ballpark guess at what might be going on inside. I can't get a DNA test without sufficient cause or a relative's signature, and there are no relatives," she continued. "The kid seems healthy enough. Nothing to worry about in the medical records. She broke her wrist last year. Fist fight. She has a history of violence, but all of them do down here in one way or another."
Beth had thought Ms. Brown was talking about her. Now she was sure. She'd broken her wrist last year. She listened more closely, making sure to keep the turians and the humans fighting on the sim-interface in case the secretary was watching.
"Why don't I have ethnicity? Ma'am, it could be anything. She looks like she might be part aboriginal. Dark, you know. But it could be Latin, or Black, or Greek. Except her eyes are gray and her hair is yellow, I swear. Yeah. Witchy looking little thing. And skinny as a wraith. All elbows and knees. But she could be pretty, maybe. In the right clothes."
Ms. Brown listened a moment, then said, "The real problem is she's got her eyes open, and she's already been in the system too long, ma'am. She's . . . I mean, they told us the children develop trust issues in training, but I never thought . . . she's hard. Six years old, and hard. I promised her I'd find her a family. Well what could I say? But with her file, all those holes in her information? Especially the lack of genetic information . . . no idea what diseases she could develop, or what modifications she might have had. Probably none: the mother gave birth in a charity clinic, probably standard homeless junkie. But no boosters is just as bad as any illegal tailoring, ma'am. I don't know. I just don't know."