By Sal Eigh

“I don’t want to live at my dad’s house,” I tell the lady from the government.

She said I can call her Dina, but Alyssa calls her The Gray Lady. Government people like that never have a real face, Alyssa says.

Even though Children’s Services sounds like it’s one of those departments that are supposed to serve and protect, Alyssa says that I should learn not to believe everything I hear. In the end, we’ll just be given up to whoever has the most money and the least amount of crimes, in that order.

“Then who do you want to live with?” 

“Foster parents.” I keep my fingers crossed. 

“But you have two perfectly serviceable parents already.” 

Alyssa would probably say something like, “Ursula and Geppetto are about as serviceable as a couple of nuclear warheads.”

That’s what she calls Mom and Dad when they’re not around. Sometimes I feel bad, ‘cause they’re kinda nice to me—especially lately. But just for even thinking that, I can hear Alyssa saying, “Listen kid, they just want you to pick a side, not that they really care.” And then I feel more bad.

The Gray Lady asks me why I don’t want to live with Mom and Dad, but I don’t say anything. She doesn’t say anything either. Alyssa says that they don’t really want shared custody (or any kind of custody) of us at all, but they have to pretend to love us and stuff, since they both want my patents so bad. She said it’s ‘cause Geppetto was so good at making me into a real kid, that now, the government has to treat me just like one.

But Alyssa already told me The Gray Lady wouldn’t say any of that stuff, so I might as well be difficult. One time I heard her say to our cousin Massie that even though I’m really not all that important to them, on paper, I’m the biggest asset in Geppetto’s portfolio. Which means that I’m also Ursula’s biggest investment.

Alyssa says that whoever gets to have me more of the time—even if it’s just by one teeny, tiny percent—will come out the winner in all of this.

Ursula does not like to lose.

“How come they don’t care who you get to live with? Is it ‘cause you don’t have any patents?” I ask Alyssa after we’ve both had our turn with The Gray Lady for the day and are walking out of the government building to go for ice cream.

“Sweetie, do you even know what a patent is?”

Alyssa lights a cigarette and waves at The Gray Man who pretends not to see, even though he’s been following me around for months and months in case someone tries to take off with me. It’s a different-looking Gray Man every week, but Alyssa says that they’re more or less all the same person.

We stand exactly nine meters in front of the government building while Alyssa smokes and The Gray Man watches-not-watches us. The old people walking around all stare when they go by, but I think that only makes Alyssa smoke harder, ‘cause she lets out a big gray cloud of dragon’s breath.

“So? How come—”

“God, you’re lucky you’re such a cute kid. You know that? Here, you wanna try one?”

“But I’m not old enough—”

Alyssa sighs and throws her cigarette pack at me. “Catch.”

I think maybe she’s mad at me, ‘cause she gives me a Gray Lady smile, which is like a smile without smiling. She stops to let out another big cloud of smoke. It gets all mixed up with the pink puff from the vaping lady who’s just passed us. Alyssa says only old people vape, but I kinda sorta like the pink puff and how it smells a whole lot better than the real kind of smoke.

“I’m gonna be eighteen in a few weeks. You know what a formality is?”

“No, but hey! You’re not old enough to smoke either! It says here, ‘for nineteen years of age and older!’”

I wave the pack at her so she can see.

A video of a disgusting yellowy-green man coughing up clumpy, black blood switches to a different video of an even more disgusting pasty-blue old lady showing off a real live hole in the middle of her real live neck. But under the video, it says the whole time that Alyssa isn’t supposed to be smoking. Except by the time I show it to her, the banner’s changed and instead, it says you can get two whole packs of Vibrant Lites for just $209.99 plus tax.

She laughs and laughs and laughs.

I start laughing too ‘cause Alyssa has the best laugh in the whole wide world. Sometimes when she laughs super hard, just like right now, she honks like a goose. Then it makes the both of us laugh and honk even harder. And then we have to stop from being out of breath.

And then she’s crying and crying and crying.

I cry loads of times, even over little things. Alyssa only ever cries when she gets really mad. She also has the best scream in the whole world, but that’s just her indoor voice for when we’re all at home. (You’re not supposed to scream outside the house and stuff unless you want the cops to come arrest you and put you in juvie, which is the special jail for when you’re not an adult yet.)

Alyssa lights up another cigarette.

“Don’t you get it, kid?”

She wipes her eyes with her sleeve and sniffles up the snot dripping down her nose.

“They don’t want me because I’m one of Them.

The Unplanned.

Flesh and Blood.”

(It sounds just like something out of an old-timey movie.)

“But you—you’re their real baby, baby.

You’ll never be nineteen. Or eighteen. Or sixteen. Or eleven. 

Haven’t you figured it out this time?

You’ll always be ten.

You’ve always been ten.

A perfect ten.”