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We continued down the highway, now spread before us like the road to Oz, a streak of silver pointing to the unknown. Everyone was quiet. It was so late it felt like darkness had turned to stone.

"I wish I was there to see his face in the morning," Raven said.

"Not me," Crystal mumbled.

"He'll blame Louise," I said. "He's always accusing her of being too soft with us."

"I feel sorry for her," Raven said. "I don't know why she ever married him."

"She'll be wondering the same thing tomorrow morning," I said. Suddenly, I broke into a loud laugh.

"What?" Raven said.

"I was just thinking about Megan. She'll give him the phony map in the morning so she can be his little hero and then he'll go off in the wrong

direction."

"So?" Raven said. "That's what you wanted to happen, right?"

I looked at Crystal and she smiled. She turned to Raven.

"He'll think she did it on purpose, that she was part of our plan."

"Oh. Oh, that is funny Maybe not," she said after a moment. "He'll kill her."

We were all silent again, contemplating Gordon's rage.

"Maybe we should go back," Butterfly said a few minutes into the silence.

"Back? Back to what? There is no back. There is only forward," I said. "Don't worry, Butterfly. We're all together, all with you."

No one spoke. No one could disagree.

"We did it," Crystal said, amazed. She kept her eyes forward on the road ahead. "We really did it."

"I always knew we could," I said. Above us, the sky blazed with stars.

"Turn on the radio," Raven said.

I leaned over and did so. We found a rock station and Raven turned up the volume and began to sing along, filling the car with her melodious voice.

I grew more confident behind the wheel and accelerated.

Our journey had truly begun.

4 The Road Less Traveled

High on excitement, none of us noticed how tired we really were. The tension was enough to exhaust any of us, and the late hour just made it more difficult to stay awake. Driving at this time of night had one big advantage: there wasn't much traffic. I knew the roads that would take us to the main highway, but after that I had to

rely on Crystal and her maps. Once we were on the main highway and I saw a sign that read, NEW YORK CITY 90 MILES, my heart fluttered. The realization that we were actually doing this, that we were on the highway putting miles and miles between ourselves and the only lives we had known for years settled in and for a few moments made us all quiet, made us all look deeper into ourselves.

All our lives we had been watched over and protected either by adoptive parents for a while or by the system. It was always difficult to make someone who had lived with their parents all their lives understand what it was like to be one of us. Without family, we felt without history, felt as if we had just been plopped down someplace and told to eat, sleep, play and grow like normal children. It was hard to live as a ward of some giant entity called The State. When we were afraid or lonely, when nightmares trickled into our dreams, when failures and disappointments rained down on our lives, we couldn't run home to Mommy or Daddy. We could talk it over with a counselor when our time came, of course. We could be analyzed and given some textbook prescriptions to cure our common sense of meaninglessness, but they hardly ever made us feel better about ourselves.

Once, when someone at school made me angry, I accused her of being spoiled and not knowing what it was like to live without a real family. She just smirked until I leaned into her, our faces only inches api, and said, "Just imagine sitting in front of the television set every night and seeing these

commercials about children with their parents going to Disneyland or sitting around a breakfast table. Just imagine looking at it and thinking as far as you were concerned, it was science fiction."

Her smirk evaporated and everyone around us looked down, ashamed because they had been born luckier than me.