Soldier Girls by Helen Thorpe Page A

She got bumped back down to the beginning of the program. Later she stumbled across a group of friends and forgot about the time and missed curfew. Then she got caught smoking. “I spent ten months in a five-week program,” said Desma with a long raspy laugh. “I learned how not to get caught smoking, and where to hide your cigarettes—that’s what I learned in the group home.”
    Halfway through eighth grade, a caseworker placed Desma in a second foster home, belonging to a couple named Mike and Diane Lewis. Again, she became the fifth child in a busy household: Mike and Diane had two children of their own and were fostering two boys when Desma arrived. But she soon grew to appreciate Mike and Diane. “They were good people,” she said. “They held jobs and they went to work and they took care of the kids. Made sure you hit the appointments you needed to. It was a normal household.” Desma would stay in contact with both sets of foster parents for the rest of her life, but she always consideredMike and Diane the two people who had really been there for her when it had mattered most.
    Halfway through freshman year of high school, a caseworker announced that it was time for Desma to go back home. Her younger brother had already returned to their mother’s care and seemed to be thriving. “Semester break, I went back to—ugh—I went back home,” Desma said. Her mother still could not run a household and Desma missed Mike and Diane’s orderly routines. The following year, Desma contracted a protracted case of strep throat, which turned into tonsillitis, and then a doctor recommended surgery. By the time she returned to school, she was not able to understand what was going on in her classes. Desma had thought she would get extra help to catch up, but that assistance did not materialize. She went to the principal to complain. “He basically told me that he had better things to do with his time than worry about me,” Desma said. “So I told him to piss off. I threw all my books at him and I left. Told him I quit, I’m not coming back. And I didn’t.”
    In the area where she lived there were no jobs for a carless teen, so Desma left home and moved to Jasper, Indiana, where she shared an apartment with friends she met on the streets. “I immediately started looking for work,” she said later. “Not much you can do at fifteen. But I turned sixteen the following January, and then I got a job.” Over the next few months, she worked as a cashier at Hardee’s, then began making pizzas at Papa John’s. “It was a job. I got a paycheck. Paid my rent.” After that she found work with a construction company that assembled mobile homes. Before a year had elapsed, however, she learned that she was pregnant. All she ever says about that is the child was born of a not so good situation; her son Joshua was born on March 16, 1993, two months after Desma turned seventeen, and immediately became the central source of love and affection in her life.
    Desma moved back in with her mother again, and asked for a birth-control implant to be surgically inserted into her upper arm, to make sure she did not have any more children. Josh had colic and during the night Desma read Gone With the Wind while pacing around her bedroom with the fussy baby in her arms. When he was about four months old and finally sleeping, Desma enrolled in a program to get her GED. She obtained her high school equivalency degree a full year before she wouldhave finished high school. When she took the GED exam, she scored in the 90th percentile, compared with the rest of the state. She also wrote an essay that won her an invitation to breakfast at the Governor’s Mansion in Indianapolis with Governor Evan Bayh. She had never been to Indianapolis, but studied a map to learn the way. She put on her Sunday best—a pretty brown and white patterned dress, carefully