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front of me. “You’re probably starving,” she said, and even though I was, I shook my head. I didn’t want to take anything from her; it felt like giving in.
    My bedroom had a dresser, a small bed, and a comforter with cherries printed all over it. There was a television and a remote. My parents would never let me have a television in my room; my mother said it was the Root of All Evil. I told Mrs. Ward that, and she laughed. “Maybe so,” she said, “but then again, sometimes The Simpsons are the best medicine.” She opened a drawer and took out a clean towel and a nightgown that was a couple of sizes too big. I wondered where it had come from. I wondered how long the last girl who’d worn it had slept in this bed.
    “I’m right down the hall if you need me,” Mrs. Ward said. “Is there anything else I can get you?”
    My mother.
    My father.
    You.
    Home.
    “How long,” I managed, the first words I had said out loud in this house, “do I have to be here?”
    Mrs. Ward smiled sadly. “I can’t say, Amelia.”
    “Are my parents…are they in a foster home, too?”
    She hesitated. “Something like that.”
    “I want to see Willow.”
    “First thing tomorrow,” Mrs. Ward said. “We’ll go up to the hospital. How’s that?”
    I nodded. I wanted to believe her, so bad. With this promise tucked into my arms like my stuffed moose at home, I could sleep through the night. I could convince myself that everything was bound to get better.
    I lay down, and tried to remember the useless bits of information you’d rattle off before we went to sleep, when I was always telling you to just shut up already: Frogs have to close their eyes to swallow. One pencil can draw a line thirty-five miles long. Cleveland, spelled backward, is DNA level C.
    I was starting to see why you carried those stupid facts like other kids dragged around security blankets—if I repeated them over and over, it almost made me feel better. I just wasn’t sure if that was because it helped to know something, when the rest of my life seemed to be a big question mark, or because it reminded me of you.
    I was still hungry, or empty, I couldn’t tell which. After Mrs. Ward had gone to her own bedroom, I tiptoed out of bed. I turned the light on in the hallway and went down to the kitchen. There, I opened up the refrigerator and let the light and cold fall over my bare feet. I stared at lunch meat, sealed into plastic packages; at a jumble of apples and peaches in a bin; at cartons of orange juice and milk lined up like soldiers. When I thought I heard a creak upstairs, I grabbed whatever I could: a loaf of bread, a Tupperware of cooked spaghetti, a handful of those Oreos. I ran back to my room and closed the door, spread my treasure out on the sheets in front of me.
    At first, it was just the Oreos. But then my stomach rumbled and I ate all the spaghetti—with my fingers, because I had no fork. I had a piece of bread and another and then another, and before I knew it only the plastic wrapper was left. What is wrong with me? I thought, catching my reflection in the mirror. Who eats a whole loaf of bread? The outside of me was disgusting enough—boring brown hair that frizzed with crummy weather, eyes too far apart, that crooked front tooth, enough fat to muffin-top my jeans—but the inside of me was even
worse. I pictured it as a big black hole, like the kind we learned about in science last year, that sucks everything into its center. A vacuum of nothingness, my teacher had called it.
    Everything that had ever been good and kind in me, everything people imagined me to be, had been poisoned by the part of me that had wished, in the darkest crack of the night, that I could have a different family. The real me was a disgusting person who imagined a life where you had never been born. The real me had watched you being loaded into an ambulance and had let myself wish, for a half a second, that I could stay behind at Disney World. The real me was