The legal aid organization was called the Sibling Advocacy Network, and their website looked like it had been built in 2009 and updated reluctantly since. The homepage had a stock photo of children holding hands that Jerrica found mildly offensive in its simplicity — as though the whole complicated machinery of sibling separation could be represented by small clean hands interlocked against a white background — but she clicked past it to the resources page and spent two hours reading everything there was to read.
She did this on Thursday night, her laptop screen the only light in the room after Bella and Maddie had gone to sleep, the brightness turned all the way down so the glow wouldn't wake them. She read case summaries and legal definitions and a PDF titled Know Your Rights: Sibling Contact and Placement for Youth Aging Out of Foster Care that was forty-three pages long and written in the specific dialect of legal documents that required translation even when you spoke the language reasonably well.
She took notes. Four pages of them, her handwriting getting smaller and more compressed as the night went on, as it always did when she was concentrating hard — as if her thoughts were crowding the letters, pressing them closer together.
What she learned, distilled: there was a thing called a sibling bill of rights that existed in some states and not others and whose actual enforcement was, as far as she could tell, largely dependent on the goodwill of individual caseworkers and judges and foster families, which was to say it was dependent on exactly the kind of thing she'd learned not to depend on. There were contact agreements. There were — in rare circumstances, circumstances whose rarity the document was careful to emphasize — cases where an emancipated youth had successfully petitioned for legal guardianship of younger siblings. These cases required proof of stable housing, stable income, and what the document called demonstrated capacity for care, which were three things Jerrica currently had in quantities of zero, zero, and arguable respectively.
She closed the laptop and lay in the dark.
The gap between where she was and where she needed to be had a shape now, which was better than it having no shape — a problem you could see was a problem you could work on — but the shape was large and the six months were not.
She thought about college applications she'd already sent. Three schools, all with strong pre-law programs, all with financial aid she'd spent weeks calculating. She'd told no one about the applications. Not her sisters, not Mrs. Holloway, not the previous caseworker. She'd filled them out at the school library and submitted them from there and checked her email only on the school computers, which was a level of secrecy that she recognized as disproportionate and that she couldn't fully explain except to say that wanting something felt dangerous. That wanting something specific for herself felt like a structural weakness she couldn't afford.
She hadn't heard back yet from any of them.
She added this to the list, in the notebook, in the dark, writing from memory because she'd long since memorized where the lines were.
Things I want that I haven't told anyone: law school. A room of my own. To stop being the person who figures it out. To figure it out anyway.
She stared at that last line for a moment, then added:
Those two things are not as contradictory as they sound.
Then she closed the notebook and made herself sleep.
The Sibling Advocacy Network had a phone intake on Friday afternoons between two and five. Jerrica arranged to leave school during her free period, walked to the library two blocks over — the one Bella claimed to visit and often didn't — and called from her cell phone in the back corner of the periodicals section where no one under sixty ever went.
The person who answered was named Rosa, and she had the voice of someone who had learned to be warm without being soft, which was a distinction Jerrica understood and appreciated. She introduced herself and explained the situation in the compressed, accurate way she'd practiced — ages, placement status, Jerrica's upcoming birthday, the Holloway preference request — and Rosa listened without interrupting, which was rarer than it should have been.
"Okay," Rosa said when she finished. "First thing I want to tell you is that you're ahead of most kids who call us. You've already identified the timeline, you've already made contact with your caseworker. That matters."
"Does it change anything practically?"
"It changes how much runway you have. Which is the main thing." Rosa paused, and Jerrica heard the sound of typing. "Let me ask you a few questions. After you turn eighteen, do you have a housing plan?"
"No."
"Income?"
"I have forty-three dollars."
A brief pause that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "Employment history?"
"Babysitting. Some tutoring. I did data entry for a law office last summer through a school program." She hesitated. "I've applied to college. Three schools. I haven't heard back."
"Okay. If you get in and get financial aid, that changes things — dorms, meal plans, work-study. That's a foundation." More typing. "The hard truth about kinship guardianship petitions is that courts want to see stability before they'll consider it. Stable housing, stable income, a realistic plan. Without those, even a sympathetic judge is going to have concerns."
"I know," Jerrica said. "I read the PDF."
"Which one?"
"The forty-three page one."
Another pause, longer. "You read all forty-three pages."
"I took notes."
This time Rosa did laugh, short and genuine. "Okay. I want to refer you to one of our staff attorneys — her name is Patricia Wen, she does pro bono work specifically on sibling preservation cases for aging-out youth. She's in your state. She's very good and she has a waiting list, which I'm going to put you at the top of because—" she paused, as though making a decision. "Because I think you're going to do the work, and the kids who do the work are the ones she can actually help."
Jerrica held the phone and felt something move through her that wasn't quite hope — she was too careful for hope, had learned to keep it on a short leash — but was perhaps the precursor to it. The physiological state that preceded hope, the loosening of something that had been braced.
"Thank you," she said.
"Don't thank me yet. This is going to be hard. Even with Patricia, even with the best circumstances, you're trying to do something the system isn't designed to make easy." Rosa's voice was level, not unkind. "The system is designed to close cases. You're trying to keep one open. That's upstream work."
"I know what upstream work is," Jerrica said.
"I believe you." A pause. "One more thing. Is there anyone — a teacher, a counselor, a neighbor, anyone in your immediate environment — who knows your situation and could potentially serve as a character reference or support contact? Courts like to see community. They like to see that someone outside the family is paying attention."
Jerrica thought about Daniel Yoo and his pen set down on the desk. She thought about her AP History teacher, Mr. Brennan, who had written her a recommendation letter she hadn't asked to read but that he'd told her, with the quiet pride of a man who chose his words carefully, was the best he'd written in twenty-two years of teaching. She thought about the periodicals section of this library and the librarian, an older woman named Jean who always saved new arrivals in the history section for Jerrica without being asked.
And she thought, unexpectedly, about a yellow house with a porch light that came on early and a wind chime that sounded like an unfinished conversation.
"There might be someone," she said.
She went to Mrs. Okonkwo's on Saturday morning, which was not her usual time — that was Maddie's territory, Maddie's relationship, and she'd been careful not to encroach on it. But Maddie was at the park with Bella, or purportedly with Bella, and the house felt large and hollow in the way it did when she was alone in it, every sound belonging to someone else.
She knocked. Waited. Heard movement inside, unhurried.
Mrs. Okonkwo opened the door and looked at her with the direct, unperformative attention that Maddie had described and that Jerrica now understood firsthand. She was wearing a house dress and slippers and reading glasses pushed up on her forehead, and she looked at Jerrica the way she presumably looked at her garden — assessing, patient, waiting for the plant to tell her what it needed.
"You're the oldest," she said.
"Jerrica."
"I know your name. Maddie talks about you." She stepped back from the door. "Come in. I'm making tea."
The inside of the house was warm and smelled of something Jerrica couldn't immediately identify — spiced, slightly sweet, layered. The hallway was narrow and the walls were hung with photographs and a few framed pieces of fabric in colors that seemed almost aggressive after the muted tones of the Holloway house. Everything was old and well-kept in the way of things that are loved rather than maintained. There was a distinction, Jerrica thought, following Mrs. Okonkwo to the kitchen. Between things kept because you couldn't be bothered to get rid of them and things kept because getting rid of them was unthinkable.
The kitchen was small and extraordinarily organized, every surface purposeful. A pot was on the stove. Mrs. Okonkwo moved to it without asking Jerrica what she wanted, which Jerrica found she didn't mind.
"Sit," Mrs. Okonkwo said.
She sat.
The tea turned out to be not tea exactly but a dark reddish liquid with pieces of something floating in it that smelled of ginger and something else, ferrous and warm. It was put in front of her in a white mug with a small chip on the handle, and Jerrica wrapped both hands around it and felt the heat move through her palms.
"Maddie says you are the one who holds things together," Mrs. Okonkwo said, sitting across from her with her own mug.
"Maddie says a lot."
"She observes a lot. The saying is just the overflow." She sipped her tea. "Is she right?"
"Yes," Jerrica said, because she was too tired for the modest version. "I'm the one who holds things together."
Mrs. Okonkwo nodded, as if confirming something. "What happens when the person who holds things together needs holding?"
It was the second time in a week someone had asked her a version of this question. Daniel Yoo: what does Jerrica want. Mrs. Okonkwo: what happens when the holder needs holding. She was beginning to feel that the universe was making a point, with all the subtlety of a brick.
"I manage," she said.
"That is not an answer. That is a strategy."
Jerrica looked at her. Then, because she had come here for a reason and the reason required honesty, she said: "I'm trying to fight for legal guardianship of my sisters when I turn eighteen. I have no housing, no income, and six months. I need people in my life who can speak to my character. Who are paying attention." She paused. "An attorney I spoke to yesterday said courts like to see community."
Mrs. Okonkwo was quiet for a moment. Outside, the wind moved and the porch chime made its incomplete sound.
"You came here to ask me something," she said.
"I came here to ask if you would be willing to be part of that. Formally, if it comes to it. A reference. A contact." She looked down at her mug. "I know we just met. I know this isn't—"
"Jerrica."
She looked up.
"I have been watching that house for thirty-one years," Mrs. Okonkwo said. "I have watched many children come and go from it. Some I worried about. Some I did not." She wrapped both hands around her mug, mirroring, Jerrica noticed, her own posture. "I have been watching you three for six weeks. I do not need more time to tell you what I see."
"What do you see?"
"I see a girl who has made herself into a wall so that the wind doesn't reach the younger ones." She said it without sentiment, as a plain observation. "It is good work. It is also expensive work. And it will cost you more than you have already paid before this is finished."
Jerrica's throat felt tight. She looked at the mug.
"I will be your reference," Mrs. Okonkwo said. "I will speak to anyone who needs speaking to. And I will do something else, which you have not asked for but which I am offering anyway." She paused. "I will make sure you eat. Real food, not whatever that woman next door is serving. You have the look of someone who forgets to eat when she is thinking hard."
Jerrica laughed. It came out smaller and more fractured than she intended — the laugh of someone who had been holding something in for a while and whose defenses had been quietly taken apart from the outside, piece by piece, without her noticing until it was already done.
"I had cereal this morning," she said.
"That is not food. That is intention." Mrs. Okonkwo stood, moving back toward the stove with the decisive energy of someone for whom the conversation was settled and the next practical matter was already presenting itself. "Come on Saturdays. I cook on Saturdays. Bring your sisters."
She walked back through the connecting gate between the two properties — she'd started to think of it as a door, a threshold between two different kinds of air — and stood in the Holloways' backyard for a moment.
Her phone buzzed. An email notification. She opened it slowly, standing in the cold yard with the dead winter grass under her feet and the pale morning sky above.
It was from the admissions office of the first school she'd applied to. She stared at the subject line for a long time before she opened it.
Congratulations, Jerrica—
She stopped reading after that word. Just stood there with the phone in both hands, the cold coming up through her socks from the frozen ground, the chime from next door making its quiet unfinished sound.
She read the rest of it eventually. Full academic scholarship. Work-study included. A dormitory room, a meal plan, a path that had a shape she could see from where she was standing. It was in the city — forty minutes by train, which was close enough to matter and far enough to be its own question.
She stood in the yard for a long time.
Then she went inside, climbed the stairs, and sat at her desk. She opened her notebook to the list. Below everything else, below all the careful accounting and the underlined imperatives and the things she wanted that she hadn't told anyone, she wrote:
I got in.
She looked at it.
Then, below that:
Now what.
It was the first time in a long time that she'd written something on the list that wasn't a statement or a directive but a genuine question. She left it there without answering it, which was itself a new thing — the willingness to let a question sit without immediately making it into a plan.
Outside, the chime moved in the wind. Up the street, she could see the distant shapes of Maddie and Bella coming around the corner, Maddie slightly ahead as always, talking, Bella slightly behind, listening or pretending to. The ordinary geography of them. The way they always arranged themselves in space without thinking, the oldest pulling forward, the youngest orbiting, the middle one doing what the middle one always did — holding both ends together while appearing to do neither.
She watched them come up the walk. She did not go to the window. She let herself be still, just for a moment, and watch them without managing anything, without calculating the angle of approach or preparing what to say or arranging her face into the version they needed.
She just watched her sisters come home.
It cost her nothing. It gave her something she didn't have a word for yet. She suspected the word existed, somewhere in the forty-three pages or in Mrs. Okonkwo's kitchen or in the library's periodicals section, and that she would find it eventually.
She was, after all, very good at finding things.