Looks Like Daylight by Deborah Ellis

— about an hour each way — but I didn’t mind.
    I kept getting sore throats. They thought it was tonsillitis, then strep throat. Over and over it was happening. I constantly felt sick.
    I came home from school one day to learn that black mold was in the house right where I was sleeping. We were given an hour to pack up and get out. Black mold is dangerous. We were taken to a crisis center and stayed there for a couple of months. The people who ran the center were nice, but it’s not the sort of place where you can have a normal family life.
    The day finally came when my tonsils were supposed to come out. I went into the hospital and on the same day my sister was in an accident on her bike and crashed her skull. She was put into another hospital and my mother went frantically between the two. I had an allergic reaction to the anesthetic, which delayed my recovery.
    We went back to the crisis center and I started the new school year.
    We finally left the crisis center and moved to a new house in the suburbs at the far end of North Bay. I was lonely. I don’t make new friends easily, but I was glad to be out of the center. That is until there was a big drug bust across the street and we realized what a bad neighborhood we were in. There was violence all around us. One of my brothers was badly beaten up by some of the guys.
    It got worse when my mom and her white boyfriend started dealing drugs out of our house. I think it was cocaine maybe, but I’m not sure. There would be all this money around that I knew was not supposed to be there.
    All this stress made my grades slip. My teacher kept going at me to get my grades up. She had no idea about my life.
    Around this time it came out that my brother Skyler had been badly abused by his foster mother. Constant hitting, slapping, punching and pushing. His foster dad had no idea this was happening. The foster dad was a good guy and was devastated when it all came out.
    My mother was really angry about it. She was going to sue Children’s Aid, but she started doing the drugs she was dealing and that made her fall apart. When she went into withdrawal she got very foul and angry and took it out on us. One time she was going after my sister. I told her to stop, and Mom threw me out of the house. I had no shoes on and the weather was bad. I had to walk a very long way to get to a friend’s house.
    The police came, and then it was off to another foster home. Then back with Mom and her boyfriend.
    I started high school, a Catholic school where we wore uniforms. I went home from school one day to see the police outside my house. The house had been trashed — broken plates, drug needles everywhere, busted lightbulbs. A real mess. I didn’t see much because the police wouldn’t let me. They wouldn’t even let me change out of my school uniform. So I was wearing the uniform when they took me to the hospital where my mom was in the emergency room.
    She was all beaten up, black eyes, swollen all over.
    She said the police were taking her boyfriend’s side because he was white.
    Then, of course, we got taken away to another foster home. We were split up again too.
    I was sent to a really strict foster home. I wasn’t used to having rules and I was not in good emotional shape. I asked to be moved to a home I’d feel more comfortable in. The worker kept promising but nothing would happen. Finally I took a bunch of Tylenol. Not enough to die. Just enough to wake up my worker. After I got out of emergency, they found me a new home. A good one. With really great people.
    My grades went up. I got sent to a new foster home with a single woman heading it, and this one was good too.
    One weekend a month, I’d get sent to a relief home. This is a place for teens who are hard to place — dropouts and runaways and kids with challenges. We’d go there to give our foster parents a weekend off. The relief home staff were always glad to see