That worked out OK for a while, but eventually my mother got wise. One time I didn’t bring Phil home until nine o’clock at night, and she knew the zoo wasn’t open that late. Then this other time, I got caught shoplifting at a record store, and by the time I talked my way out of it, the library where I’d left Phil was closing. One of the librarians found him in the stacks and reported him abandoned.

It was after that that my mother and I really went to war with each other. She started calling me her bad seed, saying I must have gotten all my genes from my no-good father. Looking back on it now, I don’t blame her—in her shoes, I’d have done some name-calling too—but at the time, my position was “Hey, I didn’t ask for a little brother, I didn’t volunteer to be deputy mom, and if you think I’m a bad seed now, just wait until I get busy trying to earn the title.”

You say the fights turned physical.

Yeah. Slaps and hair-pulling, mostly. I gave as good as I got—we were about the same size—so it wasn’t like abuse. More like scuffling. She had more anger than me, though, and every so often she’d escalate to weapons: belts, dishes, whatever was handy. And like I say, I gave as good as I got, but long-term, that wasn’t a healthy trend.

What about your brother? What was your mother’s relationship with him like?

Oh, she loved Phil. Of course. He was the low-maintenance kid.

Did she display affection towards him?

She didn’t throw plates at him. Beyond that, I don’t know, maybe she kissed him on the forehead once in a while. I wasn’t jealous, if that’s what you’re asking. The only thing that bugged me about their relationship was having to hang around for it. She expected me to help mind Phil even when she was home, which struck me as totally unreasonable. We had a bunch of fights about that.

Was it one of these fights that led to you being sent away?

No. That was a different incident. Phil was involved, but it wasn’t really about him.

What happened?

It was kind of funny, actually. There was this big vacant lot across from our apartment building that some hippies had turned into a community garden. You could sign up for a plot of ground and raise vegetables or whatever. My friend Moon had some marijuana seeds, so we decided to try growing our own pot there.

In a public garden?

Not the brightest scheme ever, I know. But you have to understand, we’d only ever seen pot in baggies before, so we had no idea how big the plants got. We figured, it’s a weed, and weeds are small. We thought we could grow bigger plants around it as cover, and then harvest it before anybody noticed what it was.

So I signed us up for a plot, but under Phil’s name. The garden was one of the places I used to leave him; he didn’t care about plants, but he liked animals, and there were these stray cats there that he could play with. That’s what he was doing, herding cats, the day our marijuana patch got raided.

You’d think the hippies would have been the first to spot it, but it was a beat cop. The guy’s name, I swear to God, was Buster Friendly. Officer Friendly’s vice detector went off as he was walking past the garden one afternoon, and the next thing you know he had every adult in the place up against the fence, and he was waving the sign-up sheet in their faces, wanting to know which one of them was Phil. Then Phil came up and tugged him on the sleeve, and the officer asked him, “Are those your marijuana plants, son?” and Phil said yes, but without me right there whispering “gypsies” in his ear, he wasn’t a very convincing liar, so it only took about ten minutes for Officer Friendly to get the real story out of him. Ten minutes after that, I came back from Moon’s house to pick up Phil and got nabbed.

Did the officer arrest you?

He took us back to the police station, but he didn’t book us. He ran us through the Scared Straight routine: showed us the holding cell, introduced us to some of the losers they had locked up in there, told us some horror stories about how much worse the actual jail was. Once I realized he wasn’t actually going to do anything to us, I wasn’t impressed, but I pretended like I was, because I figured I might need this guy in my corner once my mom showed up. So I called him “sir” a lot, and tried to come off like a little rascal instead of a little bitch.

Eventually my mom got there, and she went right for me, no preliminaries. By this point I had Officer Friendly halfway liking me, but he still needed me to learn a lesson, so if my mother had just smacked me around a little he would have let it go. But she was in full fury, screaming about the bad seed, and she started, like, throttling me, and then I lost my cool and started fighting back, and it turned into this big drama scene, with cops running in from other rooms to help pull us off each other. After they got us separated they called in a social worker, and we had this three-hour encounter session, during which my mom made it clear that if they sent me home with her, she wasn’t just going to send me to bed with no supper, she was going to drown me in the tub. So they had to come up with a Plan B.

What finally happened, my mom agreed to see a shrink for anger management, and in exchange she got to take Phil home. I stayed at the police station while Officer Friendly went with them to pick up a couple bags of my clothes, and then he drove me out to my aunt and uncle’s place in the San Joaquin Valley. It was the middle of the night by now, and it was at least a hundred-mile drive, but he insisted on taking me himself. So at first I was thinking, wow, he really bought my little-rascal act. And so I kept it up, kept playing him, until at one point I was in the middle of this completely bogus story about my mother, and he gave me this look, and I realized: he sees through me. He knows I’m bullshitting him, but he’s cutting me this huge break anyway, not because he’s stupid but because he’s a decent guy. So that shut me up for a while.

Were you grateful, or just embarrassed?

Both. Look, I know what you’re thinking: absent father, and now here’s this male authority figure going out of his way for me, blah blah blah, and there is something to that. But also, him being smarter than I figured, that was a change in plan.

I mean, I had no intention of staying with my aunt and uncle. The way I’d already worked it out in my head, I’d let Officer Friendly drop me off, I’d spend the night, get some breakfast, maybe steal some cash, and take off. Hitchhike back to S.F. and see if Moon’s parents would let me crash at their place. But now it turned out Officer Friendly had a brain, so of course he knew I was planning to do that.

We were almost there when he said to me: “Do me a favor, Jane?” And I said, “What?”, and he said, “Give it two weeks.” And I didn’t have to ask, give what two weeks—he definitely had my frequency. So instead I said: “Why two weeks?” And he said, “That should be enough time for you to cool down. Then you can decide whether you really want to do something stupid.” That pissed me off a little, but not as much as I would have expected, and I said, “What are you, my foster dad now?” and he said, “Is that what it’s going to take?”, which shut me up again for a few seconds. Finally I said, “Twenty bucks,” and he said, “Twenty bucks?” and I said, “Yeah. That’s what it’s going to take.” But he shook his head and said, “For twenty bucks you’ve got to give it at least a month.”

We spent the rest of the ride haggling. A part of me was thinking, this is ridiculous, but in spite of myself I was warming up to the guy, so it was a serious haggle. In the end we settled on twenty-five dollars, plus I promised that if I did decide to run away when the month was up, I’d call him first to give him a chance to talk me out of it. Getting me to agree to that last part, that was a sharp move.