I ask Syesha if that's her dad. Thank God almighty it isn't. We take another look at the house, the wooden boards striped across the broken windows, the trash so deep around the stoop it looks like a garden, and the faint smell of pee, kinda like the metro.
We turn around and keep walking. Dara asks if Syesha's hungry. She's about to ask when's the last time Syesha ate, but I stop her. Sometimes, you just don't wanna hear the truth.
We ended up having burgers and fries, but Syesha ate her food, Dara's fries, and my burger [Though I had to prompt Trace to give that poor girl his food. She's still growing, and he would have let her starve. -Dara]. Probably made up for all the food she hadn't eaten the past few days. It couldnt'a been that long since she got abandoned, she was still pretty clean, and her braids were tight to the touch when I patted her head.
I asked where her mom was, and she said that they spent time at the shelter until they kicked the two of them out, then she lost track of her mom. She adopted Tabitha, started living in the crack house. That guy on the stoop was the only one there now. He was too sleepy to care.
Child Services wouldn't pick up the phone when Dara tried to call. We had to wait until the next morning. Syesha came back with me to the office. I sat there reading the paper, she sat there petting her cat. Her head kept bobbing forward, her eyes kept drooping. She kept sitting up straight awake, then started nodding off again. Wasn't until I left the room for a few minutes to use the bathroom and came back that she fell asleep. Cat started strutting around like it was the one paying rent.
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