And being a kid, a black kid, in foster homes in Maine, and burn-the-world angry, there’s not a lot of foster homes that wanna hang on to you for very long. I started going through ’em pretty quick. I learned the magic number was five. If you get to five foster homes, you’re marked. You’re trouble. So you can’t get placement, and you are homeless. And then you go into shelters. You can only stay in a shelter for thirty days, and then you’re on to the next, and on to the next. This is affectionately called the “shelter shuffle.”
