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“I know you have lots of questions,” she finally continued. “Your foster parents will be happy to answer them, if you ask politely.”
The phone on her desk beeped, and she rose to get it.
If you ask politely. The words echoed in my head like a ghostly voice from some place and time far away and long ago. Growing up, though I had learned to say please and thank you, and to follow the Golden Rule, more or less, the idea of politeness hadn’t really played any role in my education.
“Yes?” Mrs. Brown said into the phone. “Lovely. Thank you. You can send the next girl in.”
Thinking about asking politely, and feeling like I could probably manage to do that to the satisfaction of who-the-fuck-ever they were sending me to live with, had calmed my heart a little and let some of the blood ebb from my face. When Mrs. Brown turned back to me with a whole new wattage of a smile, my body went into panic mode again. I could see in her face that the test of whether I had it in me to behave myself was about to begin.
“Mr. Carpenter is here, Grace,” the older woman said. “You may go out and meet him.”
I walked from Mrs. Brown’s office back to the reception area on legs that wouldn’t keep from trembling despite all the disgust my brain heaped on them, and on my still-blushing cheeks.
What the fuck are you worried about? If he’s your ‘foster father,’ that means he’s supposed to take care of you. Don’t you get it? You did luck out with this program.
The ‘courtship’ thing… well, it wasn’t like they could force me to get married, right? And, you know, I liked boys. I hadn’t gone further than second base with any of them, and the ones I liked tended to come from the Goth side of the boy spectrum, but I had to admit I didn’t mind the handsome farm boy types who seemed to populate the reality series these days.
The moment I laid eyes on Mr. Carpenter, though, I knew I had good reason to feel anxious. First, he was much too handsome. Neatly trimmed black beard with flecks of gray, covering a square chin and emphasizing the light brown color of his eyes. A hint of silver at the temples. Tall and lean, with muscles that didn’t bulge but filled out his flannel shirt so as to give an unmistakable, easy impression of physical power.
Second, his face had a stern impression on it that seemed to say to me—and to the rest of the world—that he had no intention of putting up with any nonsense. I thought I could tell from the slight furrow in his brow that nonsense might include anything from a young woman talking back to a tractor salesman trying to get him to buy a new model when his twenty-year-old machine would do the job just as well.
“Grace Franklin?” he asked, as soon as he saw me. His eyes traveled up and down my body, and I felt more self-conscious than I thought I ever had in my life before. I was pretty—at least people had said so, and I didn’t mind looking in the mirror. After the worst day of my life, though, the ponytail in my red hair had gotten totally disheveled and my ripped blue t-shirt had more than one stain on it from the candy bars Mr. Garrison had handed out for food.
My jeans were fashionably ripped, too, across my slim thighs. I had thought I liked that look, but as I watched Mr. Carpenter’s eyes take it in, and saw him apparently note my braless state too, with a disapproving little twitch of his hard-set mouth, I wondered why I had spent my money on clothes that had already had their usefulness lessened with those ‘fashionable’ tears. I could see in the face of the man who would apparently serve as my foster father that ‘fashionable’ rips definitely qualified as a kind of nonsense.
“Y-yes?” I stammered.
His eyes narrowed. I could tell that I had already made my first mistake, and to my dismay I felt my brow furrow despite my best effort to keep my own face neutral.
It’s not fair! my mind shouted. How the fuck am I supposed to know what this guy wants from me?
Conflicting impulses roiled in my head. The desire to get the fuck out of this situation as soon as possible, by doing whatever this Mr. Carpenter or Mrs. Brown or whoever told me to do. The urge to make sure I didn’t show weakness—though part of me knew that weakness represented exactly what these assholes wanted from me. Sheer exhaustion that made me just want to lie down on the floor and curl up and maybe disappear from the face of the Earth.
Fear that made my heart pound, of what Mrs. Brown had said, about what this big, handsome, older man could do to me, if he decided my behavior didn’t meet his expectations.
His stupid, outdated expectations, said one voice in my mind. I felt the crease in my forehead deepen slightly, though, as I suddenly heard a different voice, too, saying something else. Something like, Maybe I don’t look as cool in the ripped jeans as I thought I did.
As if Mr. Carpenter’s disapproving expression had triggered an idea buried deep down in my brain, one that I had tried to push down and away for longer than I could remember. Some old-fashioned notion about what a young woman should wear, if she wants grownups to take her seriously.
“You’ll call me sir, girl,” he said, his voice flat and matter-of-fact, as if he intended not a command so much as a simple statement of the future. Mr. Carpenter knew I would call him sir because he would take the necessary steps to ensure it turned out that way.
I swallowed hard, trying not to think about Mr. Garrison spanking Frannie up against the gas station wall and finding that the effort only made the mental images all the more vivid.
I looked around nervously, to see if the other girls, still in the waiting room, had clocked it. To my dismay, they definitely, definitely had. They looked back at me, all of them, waiting to see what I would do, what I would say. For a moment I hesitated on a razor’s edge between trying to show Mr. Carpenter I could comply—the path I knew as the smart one—and trying to show my fellow victims of this insane ‘program’ that these fucks couldn’t tame me.
Instinct took over. Something about the way Mr. Carpenter’s expression made me feel—about that troubling, soft voice in my head telling me that he might actually have good reason to look at me with disapproval—refused to let me do anything but what I understood very well represented the wrong, dumb choice.
“In your dreams,” I told him.
The silence that followed, while I looked into his brown eyes as defiantly as I could and he gazed back calmly, one side of his mouth curving up into a tiny, terribly frightening smile, went on for long seconds. The receptionist broke it before Mr. Carpenter did.
“Frances Korda,” she said. “You can go back and see Mrs. Brown.”
Before Frannie even started to rise from her seat, though, Mr. Carpenter reached out his right hand and took hold of my arm, so firmly that I cried out.
“Ow! You’re… you’re hurting me!” I told him.
“I’m sure I am, girl,” said the man who suddenly seemed very much like a foster father. “But that’s nothing compared to how much your butt is going to hurt by the time you go to bed tonight.”
