If switching harbor homes five times has taught me nothing else, it’s taught me that bathrooms are always the best place to hide, for an hour or so at least. If you want to avoid a conversation. If you want to let yourself pretend for five or ten minutes that you’re not being taken away again. I could tune out the voices and know Judith would never tell my harbor givers to ask me to hurry, assuming I was rehydrating instead of doing the exact opposite.

It can get impossible to find peace - hard to find quiet - but that’s why you learn every way to snag it - even for seconds at a time, in the most distasteful of places...

It seems dichotomous, the things I’ve learned to crave. Silence when there is none. Human conversation when there is none beyond meals brought. Doors locked and unlocked. Passing shadows and whiffs of perfume in eternally empty hallways. 

I would cry when they were staring at me. 

I would cry when I slept through the unlocking of my room and went a day without seeing anyone at all.

But today, anyway, the escape isn’t just a false front. Ignoring Therese.

It’s killing two birds with one stone, I suppose, though at this point I’m never not multitasking.

There’s rarely enough time in a day to sit around doing nothing but looking over your shoulder. 

We used to plan escapes for every possible outcome while looking like we were doing something as monotonous as house chores. Weeding a flower garden. Judith would teach me every new rule and updated protocol while I filled out yellowed coloring pages.

My skin is so dry it almost seems dusty.

Then again, it might actually be dusty. It hasn’t rained since I moved in with the Georges, but stress always leaves me running hotter, anyway, and I dry out like a grape under the light of a car windshield.

I smell…burnt.

Grammy used to tell me that I needed to learn to stay cool in the face of danger, but I don’t think she meant it this literally…

Or maybe she did.

I feel like my skin is choking.

Setting the tub to run, I shed my sweaty clothes like loose scales and swipe them together into a pile with one grimy foot before settling myself down in the swelling puddle at the bottom of the tub.

The water in this household runs so slowly sometimes. 

But I just tilt my head back and let the dribble from the faucet rinse the outdoor grit from my cheeks and the corners of my eyes - the minerally odor of the hard water muting the lingering scents of aftershave and herbal body wash that swim through the air and worm their way onto my tongue.

I’m not going to complain. As long as there’s water, even slow water, we’ll all be fine.

It just seems a little odd, I guess. Judith is usually so strict about the families I get shipped off to. Nobody who smokes, nobody who has dogs. I need my own room, with enough space. A minimum of one working bathroom for every three people in the household.

If there hadn’t been such a shortage of harbors these last few years, I probably never would have ended up in a house this far below her standards.

I was just grateful the George’s don’t smoke.

Now I’m confused whether I should be counting my lucky stars that Judith had to send me here as a last resort or starting to panic.

If that really was the Actaeon …

I’d recognize that awful dog anywhere…at least…I think I would…but it’s been so long…

…And now I’ll have to be relocated again. 6 weeks into relocation - into readjustment - into getting used to heaven…with sluggish faucets-

And I know - though I don’t think Judith ever meant for me to know - that there’s nowhere else to relocate me to. 

Nowhere left.

I’ve made a run of the whole “circuit” and it’ll be back to that claustrophobic box of a building they call ‘Rookery…’

More like a wildlife preserve…

…Until another harbor home is onboarded. Maybe 3 months, maybe six, maybe never. It took two years for them to find me the George’s - I think I’d lose my mind if I had to go back to the Rookery again and just wait - pacing - being walked like a dog - forever-?

-Or until I age out of The Sanctuary, anyway.

And then I’ll just be alone yet again, but without anyone to care whether I’m so much as “safe” or not.

Until I’m not.

But I don’t even want to imagine that far ahead because it’s way too close.

In two years and two months, there will be no such thing as sanctuary, but I don’t want to go home- I mean…away from this home- period - but especially not to go back to that torture.

I know it’s stupid to fall in love with a harbor family. Judith has been telling me that since I was 8. Since the first time I cried over losing something I should never have believed I even “had” in the first place.

“Less than 13% of children ever get to stay.”

I know.

“They are not your family, Mora. Don’t forget that. These are just nice people who said you could stay with them for a time.”

I know.

But I guess there’s a part of me that still can’t help imagining, no matter how many times I repeat the propaganda back to myself, that I could be part of that 13%.

You can tell me something but you can’t make me believe it. I can tell myself something but I can’t make myself believe it, it seems. As long as I keep believing a maybe is possible, I’ll keep believing in a maybe that’s never coming. It’s never coming!

 Maybe I’m just tired of leaving harbor and moving, like some kind of homeless hermit crab. 

I don’t like meeting new people and trying to get comfortable around them. Therese and Verner made that so much easier than it usually is - made it feel like I was always meant to be here - but who knows what a new family would be like? Or worse - just one caregiver to work all the time and always be busy - always leave me at home to microwave myself a dinner and watch satellite TV sitting on a couch that smells like staleness and air freshener and off-brand laundry detergent, because it’s not safe to go out when there’s no one home to know whether you make it back by curfew.

Or if you’re…wherever men like the Actaeon take people like us. 

Judith would never tell.

So the only thing a harbor family - or harbor giver - ever is for certain is better than Rookery.

Harbors feel a whole lot less like being lied to. 

But they’ve never been as good as the George’s before now. Only once were they even close.

Probably because kids like me are the bane of white picket fences.

Affectionate homes, loving homes, have never been a requirement, just safe ones. ‘Good enough’ ones for Sanctuary standard. 

Maybe it would be adding insult to injury to even try to give us that, after all the time they’ve spent telling us to never open our hearts or trust, or hope for…what?

The bath water has barely reached up to my chest by now, but I slide down the tub walls until my head is below the surface and the water closes in over my hair like a trembling ceiling.

I try not to cry because that would make this take longer. 

Be practical. Be Mature. You’re almost 16.

Stretching my fingers to their full length, I watch the bluish cracks appear along my arms, split my chest in two - like a diagram of a heartbreak or ‘How to shatter a body.’ I can feel the little fractures forming wormy channels splintering off from each other on my neck and face too, but I close my eyes so I can’t imagine my reflection, as my skin swallows the water almost as quickly as it can drool out of the faucet.

I feel alive-ish at least, listening to my heart pounding in my ears so vigorously that the water seems to sprout a heartbeat of its own around me, little pulsing currents shivering with ‘butterflies.’

The anxiety I was waiting for surges into my chest like a rush of electricity- as I listen to the metamorphosis taking place in time-lapse - every sound quickly becomes footsteps- somebody coming toward the bathroom door - and knocking.

Then I realize that Christopher actually is knocking, shouting to be heard through the thick maple wood door, “Mora? Are you in there? I want to wash up before dinner.”

In…two years or twenty minutes there will be no such thing as sanctuary.

***

“What are all these little papers for, Judith?”

“Ohhh, well, they’re just a lot of fairy tales, I guess. The Sanctuary has been collecting lots of accounts from all around the world about your kind…I mean…about people like you. They're all a bunch of nonsense stories of course. ‘Cinderella,’ ‘Snow White and Rose Red,’ ‘The Odyssey.’ You can read some of them if you like. Not that one. But this one is pretty. It’s a short story written in Greece, or, in the place we call Greece now, at around 3000 BCE which they called ‘The First Mother.’