Physiological Web•

I'm shoving the last of my shit into a black trash bag when the door opens behind me.

"You're making a mistake, Casey."

I don't turn around. Keep stuffing my three t-shirts around the two pairs of jeans that actually belong to me. The bag is one of those cheap black ones from under the kitchen sink, already threatening to split at the bottom. Figures.

My name is Casey. I'm eighteen years old as of six hours ago, and I'm getting the hell out of this house.

I'm not here for your sympathy.

I'm not writing some sad little diary so you can feel sorry for me. I'm just puking out the truth because if I keep swallowing it down, it's going to kill me slower than anything else ever could.

"Casey." Linda's voice has that flat edge that always makes my back teeth grind together. Five years in this house and she still talks to me like I'm a line item on a spreadsheet. "I'm speaking to you."

"I heard you."

She steps into my room, and her rubber-soled shoes squeak against the floor. That sound follows me everywhere - every house, every hallway. She's wearing that white cardigan she always wears, arms crossed, and the smell hits me. Sharp and clean and wrong somehow, like bleach mixed with something chemical underneath that I can never quite name.

"The state stops payment today," she says.

"I know."

"So you understand—"

"That means you don't have to pretend anymore." I yank the drawstring tight and spin around. "We're done here, Linda."

Her mouth goes tight. "After everything we provided for you."

Provided.

My mother gave me up the day I was born. No hesitation, no teary goodbye, nothing. I was a crack baby. Tiny, twitching, lungs barely working under those bright fluorescent lights that hummed constant and loud. Nurses told me later that my so-called family didn't even stick around to see if I'd live.

Straight to the foster system. Welcome to your life, kid.

I wish I'd died in that hospital. Real peace. No memories. No pain. Just gone. Instead I lived, and living turned into one long lesson in how many different ways people can break you.

"You won't last a week out there," Linda says.

Down the hall, something hums. This low mechanical sound that lives in the walls of this house, always there, always just under everything else. I stopped noticing it the same way you stop hearing traffic outside your window.

"Move," I tell her.

She doesn't budge. "You have nowhere to go."

"I've had nowhere to go my whole life. At least now it's my choice."

The social worker they assigned me - everyone called her The Bitch behind her back - always carried this manila folder and clicked her pen nonstop. Click, click, click through every meeting, every time she sat across from me and promised the next placement would be better.

She told me my first foster family was perfect. Couldn't have kids of their own. They cried when they saw my picture. Painted the nursery pink with little ducks on the walls.

I don't remember any of it. Not the ducks. Not their faces. Not one second of being held by someone who wanted me.

They died before I was old enough to talk. Drunk driver, date night, car turned into metal confetti. The system shrugged and moved me to the next box on the list.

By the time I was two, I landed with family number two. They weren't evil. Just careless. One afternoon they left the cleaning closet open while some show played loud in the living room. I saw the bright yellow Clorox bottle and thought it looked like juice.

Fire and broken glass going down my throat.

I screamed until my voice shredded. They rushed me to the ER, crying, swearing it was an accident. Maybe it was. Didn't change the burning. Didn't change weeks of every swallow feeling like sandpaper on raw meat.

I survived. They called it a miracle. I called it the first joke in a very long series.

"Casey." Linda steps closer, and that clinical smell gets stronger. "Be reasonable."

"I am being reasonable. I'm leaving before I do something unreasonable."

I hitch the bag up on my shoulder. My right shoulder twinges - that deep ache that never really goes away. You remember the exact moment your bone pops out of its socket. Your body files that shit under WARNING forever.

Family three showed up when I was nine. Elderly religious couple who looked like they belonged on a church greeting card. Bible Bitch, I called her in my head. She had rules. Prayers before meals. Bed by eight. Break one and she'd drag me to the bathroom by my hair.

Cold water in the tub. Her hand fisted tight. Full submersion while she prayed in tongues over my head.

I'd thrash and kick, lungs screaming, world going dark and bubbled. Then nothing. I'd wake up coughing on the cold tile with her standing over me like God's personal enforcer.

"This is how we wash the devil out, child."

The cigarette burns came later. Little perfect circles on my arms and thighs for every sin she catalogued. I learned to wear long sleeves in July.

The Bitch finally noticed during one of her wellness checks. Took pictures. Filed reports. But by then the damage was already burned into my skin.

"You're going to end up dead out there." Linda's voice follows me as I step around her toward the door.

"Already feel dead in here."

Family four had the drunk and his scared wife. He smelled like stale beer and something meaner underneath. She was kind in these tiny, secret ways. After he passed out she'd come to my room with chocolate milk and whatever library book she'd hidden in her coat.

Cold and sweet and safe for exactly thirty seconds.

Her drugstore vanilla lotion mixed with fear. His wet snoring through the wall. Her fingers brushing my hair back while she read in whispers. That chocolate milk became the only warmth I carried for years.

But she never stopped him when he grabbed my arm hard enough to leave purple flowers under my skin. Never made a sound when he twisted until my shoulder popped. I lied at the hospital. Said I fell off my bike. The cast was ugly green and itched like hell.

He threatened to kill her if I told the truth. I believed him. So I protected the only person who'd ever given me chocolate milk at midnight.

Nobody protected me.

I walk down the hallway. The fluorescent light overhead buzzes loud and annoying. Everything in this house is painted this pale, sick beige color that makes my eyes hurt.

Family five were meth addicts. They didn't beat me. Didn't pray over me. Barely knew I existed while they worked in the basement. It was the closest thing to peace I'd ever known. No expectations. No rules. I could just breathe.

Until the night the lab blew.

Heat slamming up the stairs. Flames eating the walls. The man screaming until he stopped. I stood frozen in the hallway, bare feet on carpet, watching fire devour the only almost-peace I'd known.

They took me away. Again.

Last stop was here. The voucher people. Five years of knowing my exact dollar value. Two thousand a month from the state, and still Linda made me earn every glass of water with chores. Their real kids had birthday parties and opinions that mattered. I had a laminated chore chart and a room barely big enough for a bed.

"This isn't your home," Linda said every morning without fail. "You're temporary. Earn your keep."

So I did. Kept my head down. Stayed quiet. Survived it the same way I survived everything else.

By outlasting it.

I reach the front door. Heavy metal with chipped paint around the handle. There's a panel on the wall beside it that I've never really looked at directly. I don't look at it now.

"Casey." Linda is at the end of the hall, voice different. Quieter. "You don't have to do this."

My hand closes around the cold metal lever.

Six different versions of hell dressed up as homes. Six different lessons in what it means to be disposable.

I push down and the door swings open.

Outside is grey morning and exhaust fumes and cracked concrete. Twenty-three dollars in my pocket. Holes in both shoes. I step through and the door closes behind me with this heavy, final sound. Not a slam. Something more definitive. A click. Electronic and absolute.

I stand on the sidewalk with my trash bag and my shoulder ache and my thirty-second chocolate milk memory and all my burned skin, and I breathe.

Everyone acts like turning eighteen is magic. Like the number changes something about what you are and what's been done to you.

But standing here on this cracked concrete with grey sky pressing down, I already know the truth.

Freedom is just another door they forgot to lock.