Don't Fail Me Now Read Online Free Page A

of here as soon as possible.” She smiles at Denny. “I’ll start with an easy one: How old are you?”
    â€œI’m six,” Denny says proudly.
    â€œThirteen,” Cass mutters, barely audible.
    â€œSeventeen,” I say, then quickly add, “But I’ll be eighteen in July.”
    Janet raises her eyebrows and writes something down. “Okay,” she says. “And you live with your mother, correct?”
    â€œYes,” I say quickly. I don’t want my sister and brother to say another word to this woman. I feel familiar tingles climbing up my neck. Ever since I was little I’ve had episodes—not attacks, exactly, more like tidal waves that I drown in for just a few seconds at a time. It’s like I get paralyzed, only it’s my brain that shuts down, not my body; my anxiety reaches some max-fill line and overrides the system. I close my eyes and focus on my heart beating, reminding myself that I’m still alive. When I open them again, Cass is being her usual stone-cold self, staring off at a wall poster outlining the steps of the Heimlich maneuver, and Denny is immersed in coloring in the legs on a dinosaur.
    â€œThere’s no other adult in the home?” Janet asks, not looking up from her notebook.
    â€œNo.” I splay my fingers out on the tabletop, feeling my weight pressing into the scratched black vinyl, trying to root myself like a tree without soil.
    â€œIs the other biological parent deceased?”
    I wish.
“No.”
    â€œAnd does your mother have a boyfriend or significant other?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAny living grandparents?”
    â€œNot that I know of.”
    â€œBut you do have an aunt.”
    â€œYeah, my mom’s sister.”
    Janet licks her thumb again and flips back a few pages, looking for something. “That would be . . . Samara Means?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œAnd she lives locally?”
    â€œYes.”
    Scribble, scribble, scribble
.
    â€œAny other aunts or uncles?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAnd you’re all in school full-time?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œDo you depend on your mother to take you to school?”
    â€œNo, she takes the bus and I drive us.”
    Janet frowns, sending a web of lines running down the sides of her mouth and off of her cheeks like tributaries from a river. “You know,” she says, “it’s in violation of your provisional license to have other minors in the car without supervision.”
    Shit
. “I . . . um . . .” The truth is, I
am
familiar with that particular passage in Maryland’s DMV manual, but what else am I supposed to do? Mom works—well,
worked
, anyway—from seven thirty to six, and we all have to be at three different schools spanning six miles between seven forty-five and eightfifteen, and Denny gets out at two forty-five and then Cass at three ten, and I have to bring both of them to Taco Bell by four for my shift so they can do homework and eat the edible-but-messed-up-looking kitchen errors for free, so we’re all screwed unless I take a little creative license with the driving laws.
    â€œWell, I’m sure you can find a suitable alternative for the next month,” Janet says with a thin smile.
    â€œI’m sure,” I parrot hollowly.
    â€œWould you say your family is . . . isolated?” she asks. I wonder how long this checklist is and whether she has some key at the end that’ll tell her where we fall on the spectrum between the Cosbys and the Mansons.
    â€œNo, we’re right here in the city, over in Berea.” Our house is one slightly busted-looking brick row house on a block of dozens. Like most of low-income Baltimore, our street has a few abandoned, boarded-up lots, places you have to stomp by after dark so the rats won’t dart out from under the rotting stairs and scare the bejesus out of you. But it’s not the