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I’d sold my stereo—the one nice thing I had, purchased with cash my maternal grandmother had sent for my birthday before she died.

“The difference was night and day with the right formula.”

“But formula is expensive.”

“Sure is. And I got good as hell at stealing it.”

“That’s… so much for a kid to have to go through.”

“Baby, I’m just getting started,” I admitted.

“What the hell else could they have piled on?”

“Babysitting. Apparently, I was so good with the kids that my parents thought they could open an unlicensed, under-the-table, child care situation.”

That whole summer, I had my five foster kids—including a toddler and an infant—and a revolving door of different kids from infant to ten, dropped off by parents who had no child care to get them through the summer break.

“There was no one you could talk to?”

“I wouldn’t have had the fucking time even if I did know how fucked up the situation was. And for a long time, I didn’t.”

I got good at being a single parent, though. At making a penny stretch because, despite more money coming in by the day, the grocery budget didn’t increase.

On occasion, a child care parent would see me playing with the kids when they showed up to retrieve their kid, assume I was just being a good kid, and tip me.

That money went right into groceries.

I learned quickly to keep kids fed on a lot of basics: rice, pasta, potatoes, eggs, and beans.

“I’m amazed that you managed to make little kids eat beans and rice.”

“There was a lot of cheese, ketchup, or ranch dressing involved,” I admitted.

“Well, whatever works to keep bellies full.”

“That was my thinking too.”

“How long were these kids with you?”

“The first set, the three of them, that was over a year. The second set was about eight months. But they were quickly replaced. By a larger sibling group. A set of four-year-old twin boys and two girls: ten and twelve. This is where the tallies come into play.”

“The tallies for the… bodies?”

“Yeah.”

“You killed people as a teenager?”

“No, I learned about people worth killing. Those two girls, they came with a speech to my parents about trauma. And weekly shrink visits. Their mother’s boyfriend had been… doing some shit grown-ass men have no business doing to little girls.”

“Oh, those poor girls.”

“Yeah. They were terrified of my father. When they were with us, it was lucky that he was rarely around. He was fucking around on my mom at the time. But she was too sloshed to notice those days.”

“Geez. Coast. This is all too much. What happened to the girls?”

“They were moved to another foster home with their brothers. We got another group.”

“How many arrows are we up to now?”