Everyone makes choices, even if one chooses not to make them.

Leslie Francis Love latched the motel door then walked back to the rollaway bed, his feet bare on the concrete floor. He shivered as he crawled beneath the cold sheets and thin blanket. He lay there with the lights on and looked across the room at the empty full-size bed on the other side.

Midnight had come and gone, and his parents had not come back to the motel yet. “They’re drinking,” he told himself, “same as they always do on Saturday night. We might as well have stayed home.”

But he knew that wasn’t true. His parents had many reasons for moving, sometimes in the middle of the night. This time had been a little after noon. “It’ll be like a vacation,” they’d said when picking him up from school.

At thirteen, Les had already achieved a level of cynicism and defeat worthy of someone four times his age. His parents had promised that things would be different in a new city. They would do fun things together, visit museums, theme parks, take a boat ride.

Instead, after driving for hours, they had parked him at a motel with ten dollars in quarters for the snack machines and gone out to “unwind,” promising to be back and take him to dinner. “Some vacation,” he muttered.

He dozed resentfully until an insistent knocking at the door woke him at almost four in the morning according to the cracked face of the motel clock. Yawning, he got out of bed and padded toward the door, his feet getting rapidly cold again. “Must have lost their keys,” he muttered. It wouldn’t be the first time he had to let them into where they were staying.

But when he reached for the door, the knocking came again, along with a voice saying, “Police! Open up!”

Startled, he reached for the door handle then hesitated. His parents did not like the police, and he had no real reason to trust them. More than once, he’d gone down to the jail with one parent to get the other one released on bail and the cops, as he thought of them, had never been friendly.

He put the safety lock on before he asked the door. “What’s this about?”

“It’s a kid,” a voice said on the other side of the door.

“Open up kid, this is the police,” said another voice.

“How do I know that?” Les asked. He didn’t doubt it was the police, but they hadn’t made him believe he should open the door.

“Look through the peephole,” said a voice.

“I’m too short,” said Les. He wasn’t really, not if he stood on tiptoe, but they didn’t know that.

“Come to the window then, we’ll show you our badges,” said one voice.

But the other voice interrupted, almost snarling. “Open the door, kid! It’s your parents. They’re dead.”

Les opened the door. One of the big burly cops snatched him up and carried him to a cruiser, putting him inside and closing the door while the other one searched the motel room.

He sat in the darkness of the locked back seat in his pale yellow pajamas, crying without making a sound and thought somehow he had always known this would happen.

Except it hadn’t.

He didn’t find out until after hours of sitting on a bench in the police station, but his parents weren’t dead. No one told him anything or answered any questions, and when he asked, he got only silent glares. “Sit down and shut up, kid,” one man with chevrons on his sleeves finally told him. “The social worker will get here when she gets here.”

The sun came up while Les dozed on the bench until someone shook him awake. He sat up.

A plump woman with a briefcase in one hand and a colorful cup of hot chocolate in the other smiled down at him. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Les responded, using knuckles to rub sleep from his eyes.

“Want some cocoa?” she asked, holding out the festive paper cup.

Les nodded. “Thank you,” he said, but the liquid was still too hot to drink, so he just held it, warming his hands.

The woman sat down beside him. “I’m Mrs. Madison. Your social worker.”

“Uh, huh,” said Les. He’d met social workers before, nice ineffectual people for the most part; vengeful bureaucrats with obscene amounts of power in a few cases.

“What’s your name, honey?” she asked, taking a notebook and pen out of her briefcase.

“Leslie Francis Love,” said Les, taking a cautious sip of the cocoa. Good.

Mrs. Madison scribbled away. “Are your parents Leland Ormond Love and Rachel Frances Love?”

Les nodded. “The c-officer said they were dead,” he added. His eyes were dry. He had cried himself out when he first arrived in the cop shop.

The SW shook her head. “They’re not dead. Your mom is in the hospital, and your dad has been arrested for an incident at a bar.”

Les didn’t know whether to be relieved or angry. Mostly he felt tired. “Okay,” he said. He sipped more cocoa, pushing his too-long hair out of his face. Like a lot of things they wouldn’t spend money on, Les hadn’t had a haircut in months. Spending money at the barber would have cut into their drinking.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Thirteen,” he answered. She wrote that down, too. She asked more questions and wrote down more answers. Les didn’t give her any information she didn’t ask for.

She folded her notebook around her pen and looked at him for a bit. “You’re short for your age,” she suggested. He shrugged, finished the cocoa and looked back at her.

“I’m going to ask you another question, but first I want to tell you something. It’s going to be a few days before either of your parents can come get you, so you’re going to have to stay somewhere.”

Les began unrolling the curled edge of the paper cup, waiting.

“Normally, you’d go to a juvenile holding facility, but those are all full up. So the choice is a juvenile detention center for youthful offenders or a foster home. Thirteen-year-olds who go to the JDC are put in with the older kids, instead of the younger ones.”

She’s telling me I’m going to get beat up, thought Les. He had unrolled the edge of the cup and began tearing it in strips down to the round bottom.

Mrs. Madison took a deep breath. “The only foster home I have available right now only takes in girls,” she said.

Les blinked at her. He had turned the paper cup into a raggedy, cocoa-stained flower.

The SW looked at Les. “I hope you’re not a boy,” she said.

Les shook his head. He used a fingertip to give each petal a curl, then set the pseudo-origami creation on the bench beside him with the brightly colored outside up.

“Pretty,” said Mrs. Madison.

He nodded and smiled at her. “Thank you for the cocoa,” he said.

“You’re welcome. Are you hungry?”

“No,” he said. He’d eaten Pringles and Little Debbie cakes and drank a Red Bull back at the motel then thrown it all up like he often did when stressed. He hoped he could keep the hot chocolate down.

She took her notebook out again and wrote in it with the pen. He leaned over to look, and she let him. He saw that she had spelled his name wrong, but he didn’t say anything.

“They can feed you at the foster home,” she said.

He nodded.

She stood, taking a brush from inside her briefcase. She brushed his hair, parting it in the middle. She put the brush back, taking out a tube of cherry lip balm. “Let me put this on,” she said.

She applied it to his lips, and he let her do so.

She took his arm and he stood beside her, though several inches shorter. “Let’s go find you something to wear besides pajamas and dirty feet,” she said.