After living with me for eight months, my 17-year-old foster son, Clayton, ran away without warning. He left me a note saying he had gone to find his father in Texas.
When I first met Clayton — not his real name — he was in a temporary foster home. He’d been kicked out of another foster home the week before, and he had all his belongings in three garbage bags, which he loaded carefully into the back of my car, like they were thin-shelled eggs threatening to break at any provocation. He was tall, but he hunched his shoulders and kept his head down, shrinking into himself. The Children, Youth, and Families Department had given me very little information about him; they didn’t tell me why he was in foster care. What I know, I would learn later from Clayton himself or police reports: his mother’s mental-health problems, the domestic violence between his parents, the house that went weeks without electricity because no one could afford to pay the bills.
“Should I sit in the front?” he asked me.
“Wherever you want.”
He sat in the front. He drummed his right heel anxiously against the floor mat.
