Pattern: Institutional Indifference
I had a social worker named Diane. Or maybe Donna. I remember she had a lanyard with a sunflower clip on it and she would sit at the kitchen table in whatever house I was at that month and ask me how I was adjusting. I was nine. I don't know what adjusting means when you are nine and someone drove you to a stranger's house on a Tuesday and said this is where you're sleeping now. But I said fine. You always said fine. Fine was the password that made them stop asking.
There were four homes. Maybe five. I lost count of one of them because it was only two weeks and the woman cried more than I did so I stopped counting it. The state called it placement. My aunt called it temporary. Nobody called it what it was, which was a kid sitting on the edge of a mattress that smelled like other kids, waiting to be told where next.
I read that Manson piece on here. The factory line. And I got mad because it's true and because he's the one they made into a movie. What about the rest of us. What about the kid in the next placement over who set a trash can on fire and nobody wrote an article about it, they just moved him to another county. What about the girl who aged out at eighteen with a garbage bag of clothes and a bus voucher. The factory made her too. She just didn't kill anyone famous. So she doesn't get a paragraph.
I'm not saying I'm him. I'm not saying any of us are him. I'm saying the same conveyor belt ran under all of us and the only difference between the ones who end up in a documentary and the ones who end up in a warehouse job is luck and whether someone, once, at any point, looked at you like you were a person instead of a case number.
Nobody looked. That's the whole thing. Nobody looked.