Chapter Four

Emma knew she should have expected it. Giselle hadn't pretended that Emma was going to stay here, but she'd thought maybe, if they were trying to find out where she'd come from and ship her back there, she could still stay here until they did. Maybe they'd have more important things to worry about and they'd just forget about her and she could stay here until she was old enough to be an emancipated minor and not have to go back into the System. She should have known better. She never should have got her hopes up. She shouldn't have thought that Giselle would only want to take her shopping—at a real store, not Goodwill or some charity bazaar—if it looked like Emma could stay here for a while.

Without a word, she turned her back on Giselle, opened the dresser drawer, and took out her new clothes. Then, hesitantly, "Do you want them for the next kid my size?"

She didn't turn around, so she wasn't sure if the long pause was because Giselle was thinking about it or because she was either nodding or shaking her head as though Emma could see it. Finally, she heard Giselle say gently, "I bought them for you, Emma. They're yours to keep."

Emma nodded. Then she hauled her knapsack out from under the bed and unfastened the top flap. She could tell at a glance that there little room inside. Sighing, she turned back around. "Do you have a garbage bag?" she asked. "They won't fit."

"Why not just use the shopping bag?" Giselle suggested, jerking her head toward the bed, where the empty bag lay.

Emma blinked. Then she nodded cautiously. She should have thought of that, but every other time she'd left for a new placement, it had been garbage bags. She'd guessed that they were standard issue for kids in the system. Maybe it was different here.

"Emma?" Giselle asked. "You know, once you get settled, you can always call or pop by for a visit. Let me know how you're making out."

Emma sighed. "Every time I think I'm settled, I get sent away," she said. "I'll probably be back in—" She stopped. "Back where I came from," she finished, not saying where that was.

Giselle shook her head. "Well," she said, "you can still call, wherever you are. Collect, if you want to."

The bag rustled as Emma opened it wider. "Sure," she said, even though she knew she wouldn't. By tonight, this place would be a part of her past and she'd already found out that things hurt less if you never looked back.

By the time she'd finished packing up, Giselle was gone. Emma shrugged. Looking down, she saw the edge of the Mr. Cluck bag poking out from under the bed. The fries were soggy and disgusting, but she ate them anyway. The cookie was better… but not even close to as good as the two she'd had at breakfast. When Giselle came back upstairs a bit later to call her to lunch, Emma told her she wasn't hungry.

"Emma?" Giselle was at the door again. Not her door; not anymore. The door. The door of the room she'd slept in last night, which wasn't going to be her room after all.

"I guess you want me to leave the pajamas," Emma said dully without looking up.

Silence greeted her comment and stretched for an awkwardly long time before Emma cautiously raised her eyes. Giselle was still standing in the doorway. "You can take them with you, if you like," she said. "I don't usually have to find anything in your size."

Emma nodded. "Thanks."

"Supper's in an hour," Giselle continued. "You really ought to eat something."

"I'm not hungry," Emma said. Then a moment later, "Thank you."

Giselle sighed. "I'm sorry you're leaving us," she said. "If it helps, the department doesn't usually take a kid away from us if they haven't found a stable placement."

Emma shook her head. "I've never been longer than six months in any home, so I don't know why I thought things would be any different here."

"I'm not going to tell you it will be," Giselle admitted. "I can't see the future any more than you can. But I can't tell you it won't be either." Her gaze fell on the blanket on Emma's lap. "That's beautiful," she said. "It looks handmade."

Emma shrugged. "It's the only thing I had when they found me on the side of the freeway."

"What?"

"I was wrapped in it," she said, her voice steady and almost devoid of emotion. "I was a baby. Only just born, they said."

"Was there a-a car accident?" Giselle asked. "Babies can be pretty resilient; almost like… ragdolls. It's not impossible that you were thrown clear of the wreck—"

"There was no wreckage," Emma said. "No sign of my parents. Just me, wrapped in this. If it weren't for the name on it, they'd have called me something else," she added, holding the knitted fabric out so Giselle could see 'Emma' stitched in cursive onto a white triangle in one corner of the blanket in dark yarn. The girl's lips twisted in a bitter smile. "Sometimes, I wonder if maybe they just grabbed the blanket out of a Goodwill bag and my name's really Anna or Leia or something. Doesn't matter, I guess. If it came from Goodwill, so'd most of the things in here," she patted the knapsack on the bed beside her."

"I'm sorry," Giselle said.

Emma shook her head. "You didn't chuck me on the side of a freeway." She hesitated. "Did you?" she asked, sounding very small.

"No," Giselle assured her.

"I didn't think so."

Giselle sighed. "I'll let you know when supper's ready. Just in case you feel hungrier then. And if you'd rather eat up here, I can bring you a tray."

Emma nodded, but it wasn't until Giselle had one foot in the hallway outside that she called a soft 'Thanks' after the woman's retreating figure.

"It's not laundry day," Joellen exclaimed, seeing Jerrica coming down the hall with her arms full of bed linens. Then, hesitantly, "It's not, is it? Because if it is, I must've missed it."

Jerrica shook her head. At seventeen, Joellen was one of the last of the 'original' Starlight girls still in her care. Deirdre and Krissy still lived here while they attended college and helped out when they could, but they were both over eighteen and out of the foster system. The other girls had moved on. Jerrica heard from one or another from time to time, but she had other children in her care now, and one more was due to arrive this evening. "Actually," she said, "if you're not too busy, maybe you can give me a hand. We have a new girl coming. I was thinking we could put her in Terri's old room."

"Oh," Joellen said, with a frown. "But what if Terri…" She stopped. "Okay, I guess she's not going to pop in from Rutgers every weekend, but maybe when she's on vacation?"

"We'll worry about that when it happens," Jerrica said. She was proud that Terri had earned a full scholarship to college, even though she was a little sorry that the college in question was clear on the other side of the country. Rutgers had one of the best psychology programs in the country, though, and while Terri had overcome many of the superstitions and phobias that had plagued her when she'd been younger, she also had a burning desire to understand why she'd developed them in the first place and help others in her situation get beyond them. "Here."

Joellen took the pillow at the top of the bedding pile out of Jerrica's arms and followed her down the hall. "Do we know anything about the new girl?" she asked.

"Just a name," Jerrica replied. "Maybe that's better."

"How come?" Joellen asked, stopping in front of one the doors and, since she had one hand free and Jerrica didn't, turning the knob.

Jerrica sighed. "Because files don't always tell the whole story. When Ba Nee came to live with us, she was very shy and she'd just left a war zone less than two years earlier and her English wasn't very good yet. Her file said that her intelligence was below average. Actually," she added, "the report stated it was a bit worse than that—"

"Ba Nee?" Joellen exclaimed. "Are you kidding me?"

"I wish," Jerrica said. "When Dad agreed to take her, the social worker wasn't sure if Starlight house was going to be able to accommodate a girl with that level of disability—"

"Ba Nee?" Joellen repeated. "She used to help me with my spelling, even though she was two grades below me!"

"Yes," Jerrica said. "And once she got used to us, and started to come out of her shell, and once Dad found someone who actually spoke Vietnamese to test her properly," she added in an undertone, though one Joellen was clearly meant to overhear, "we realized how… inaccurate that initial assessment was. What I want you to understand is that they only tested her once and then, the results from that test impacted every other placement she had going forward. The people assigned to foster her assumed she wasn't very smart, so they treated her like she wasn't. Sometimes," she said, "people just… see what they expect to." She shook her head. "It helps to know the facts going in," she added, "but only if they're actually facts. So, let's get things ready for our newest foster girl, and we'll see what she's like when she gets here."

"Phyllis," Phyllis and Ashley both looked up to see a short woman, her dark hair cut in bangs with a high ponytail on either side, like the blonde in that new British girl band Phyllis had heard on the radio on her way in to work today. "Mind taking care of one last job on your way home? If your address is up to date, I think it'll be on your way."

Phyllis took the folder—a far lighter one than usual—with a raised eyebrow and glanced at the name. "This the kid you had me trying to track down yesterday, Azevedo?"

"It is," her supervisor confirmed. "We still don't have any leads."

"No missing persons report?" Phyllis asked. "From anywhere?"

"Two more besides the sixteen you left on my desk," Azevedo replied with a slight eye-roll. "But none of them for a female matching her description, even when you consider that blonde might not be her natural color."

Phyllis opened the folder and stabbed her finger down on the photograph. "My money says that's natural," she said flatly. "It's a lot easier to turn light hair dark than the opposite; trust me on this. If this is a dye job, it's either professional, or she started prepping for it a couple of weeks ago; it'd look brassy if she'd only started bleaching yesterday."

Ashley started to say something, but stopped. Phyllis looked at her. "Got something to add?"

Ashley scuffed her shoe on the carpet a bit nervously. "Just that I don't think professional dye jobs are in the cards for most girls in the system. At least, not here; I don't know if it's different in other jurisdictions."

"You're not wrong," Azevedo nodded, giving the intern a friendly smile. "Older kids might have part-time jobs and save up for something like that, but this girl doesn't seem to be older than thirteen, and she might be as young as ten."

"She's five-seven," Phyllis said, noting the detail on the top sheet. "Ten's kind of young for that kind of growth spurt."

"Agreed," Azevedo nodded again. "But it's not impossible. Unfortunately, the girl refused to tell us anything that might help us find out where she came from apart from her name."

"Which might be phony," Phyllis pointed out.

"Well, for now, let's act like it's not or we'll have even less to work with," Azevedo groaned. "Anyway, the cops brought her to Haven House yesterday, but that was just temporary. Mrs. Harmon's made some inquiries and you're to pick her up from there and bring her to Starlight."

"Jerrica!" Ashley exclaimed. And then, at the supervisor's startled look, she lowered her eyes again. "I lived there for more than five years," she said.

"Liked it?" Azevedo asked.

"Yeah," Ashley said, smiling. "Jerrica was great."

"I've heard good things about her," the supervisor nodded, "but it's always helpful to hear more of them from someone who was living with her for an extended period.

Phyllis cleared her throat. "So I'm putting in a little unpaid overtime after work, huh?" she asked with a sniff. She glanced at Ashley. "Wanna tag along and say 'hi' to the old place?"

Ashley grinned.

Emma ate her supper, barely tasting it. She thought a couple of the girls at the table might have smiled at her or murmured a 'Hey,' or some other greeting, but she hadn't been interested in making small talk. Now that she knew she wasn't staying here, there was no point in getting to know anybody. By a quarter to seven, she was sitting on a bench, her knapsack and shopping bag beside her as she waited.

She thought about running, but she had no clue where to go. She didn't know her way around and it would be dark soon. She didn't have enough money for a hotel and they probably wouldn't give a kid a room for the night anyway. At this point, she realized, her best bet was to go to whatever foster placement the system here had picked out for her. In a week or two, when she got her bearings and knew how to get to the bus depot, she could leave.

Unless things worked out better here, she thought, but then why would they? They never had before. Still, Los Angeles wasn't Boston. Maybe things would be different. Maybe. But she was probably just kidding herself.

"Emma Swan?"

Emma looked up at the two women and nodded at the older one, who seemed to have been the speaker. Not that she was old. Emma guessed she was probably in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, though she wasn't always great at judging ages. The other woman was probably five or ten years younger. Maybe even still in her teens. "That's me."

The first woman gave her a cool smile. "Name's Phyllis. This is Ashley. She's an intern."

"Hi," the younger woman said.

Emma shrugged.

Giselle came out of her office then. "Ashley!" she exclaimed, smiling broadly. Then she did a double-take. "Pizzazz?"

"Not so loud," Phyllis said with a grin. "You want the paparazzi bursting in here? Because I sure as hell don't!"

Emma blinked. She'd never had a social worker who swore before. Not that 'hell' really counted as a swear word, but it still wasn't the kind of language she'd been expecting. And what kind of social worker had a nickname like 'Pizzazz'? Or worried about paparazzi?

"Emma…?" Giselle's voice broke into her thoughts, and she realized that the woman had been trying to get her attention. This time her perpetual smile seemed to speak of relief.

"Sorry," Emma said. "What?"

"Normally," Giselle said, "when someone leaves Haven House for another placement, I don't get told where they're going."

"Policy," Phyllis-Pizzazz nodded. "Of course when someone lets the cat out of the bag…" she gave Ashley a glare, but there was a twitch to her lips that told Emma that she wasn't really upset.

"Sorry," Ashley murmured. "I was just… excited."

Emma's eyes moved from one face to the next as she tried to figure out what was going on and fought to recall any of the conversation she'd been tuning out a moment earlier.

"You're going to Starlight House," Giselle told her. "It's run by an old friend of mine."

"I lived there for almost six years," Ashley said. "I loved it!"

Emma raised an eyebrow. She'd been through more placements than she could count and while a few had been okay, at least at first, most had been forgettable and some had been awful. She'd never had a placement she'd loved. She couldn't afford to, not when she didn't know how long she was going to stay. She'd started to relax her guard here at Haven House, and look what was happening now.

"Yeah, Jerrica's good," Phyllis said, and Emma frowned. The social worker wasn't lying, but Emma had the sense that there was a lot more she wanted to say, and that it wouldn't be entirely complimentary.

"Good" probably means she's another health nut who won't let us watch MTV or eat without saying grace, Emma thought. Then again, Ashley didn't look to her like someone who would have loved living in a place like that. Not with her hair and nose piercing. Emma sighed inwardly. She'd never figure this out before she got there and it didn't look like she had a choice about going.

"Want me to grab your bag?" Ashley asked, as Emma slid off the bench and rose to her feet. "One of them?"

For answer, Emma grabbed both and held them to herself fiercely.

"Sorry," Ashley said at once. "Just asking."

Phyllis sighed. "Well, much as I hate to break up this reunion, the sooner I drop Emma off, the sooner I get to go home and put my feet up." She grinned at Emma. "You ready, kid?"

Emma nodded.

"I'll probably be calling on Jerrica in a week or so," Giselle said. "Maybe I'll see you then."

Emma shrugged. In her mind, she was already relegating Giselle and Haven House to the past. "Maybe…" she allowed. As she headed toward the front door between Ashley and Pizzazz, she completed her thought silently: …but I wouldn't bet on it.