A Teen Who's Spent Her Life In Foster Care Finds A Home In This Touching YA Novel

Fans of Six Feet Over It and Up to This Pointe have a reason to celebrate, because Jennifer Longo's new book, What I Carry, is coming out in January. Bustle has an exclusive excerpt from the novel for you below, as well as a peek at its stunning cover.

Dubbed "not only a necessary book — [but] a charming, honest, and hopeful one" by A Heart in a Body in the World author Deb Caletti, Jennifer Longo's What I Carry centers on Muiriel, a self-described "foundling" approaching her 18th birthday in the foster-care system. She has become an expert at moving, because she's bounced around to nearly two dozen foster homes. With her emancipation from the system on the horizon, Muiriel just needs to keep herself out of trouble until her birthday. But when her home city of Seattle can't place her anywhere, Muiriel is shipped off to a remote island in the Puget Sound, where she finds people who complicate her personal philosophy against attachments.

Jennifer Longo's new book, What I Carry, is out Jan. 21, 2020 from Random House Books and is available for pre-order today. You can take a look at the cover and read the first chapter of Muiriel's story below.

One

You will never, in all your life, meet a person who packs a better suitcase than I do, and I’ll tell you right now, the secret is not organization — it is simplification. Get rid of your crap. Do not own things in the first place. Surrender the weight of what you carry and the wild, wide world is yours.

Pack. Light.

Which sounds easy — "when in doubt, go without" and all that — but to achieve true freedom you must be brutal as a consumer. Is dental floss on sale two for one? Don’t fall for it — one extra thing taking up room to pack and repack, and, besides that, what if your teeth all fall out before you ever need to use it? Now you’re the dummy hauling around extra floss for no reason.

My packing credentials were passed to me from my namesake and honed since my birth, straight into foster care and never adopted.

Yes, floss. Insignificant weight until you add it to that pen you bought, the T-shirt you had to have, the non-travel-sized thing of shampoo, until one day you wake up dragging the weight of a rolling suitcase taller and heavier than your own body and you’re exhausted trying to keep track of all these things you’ve convinced yourself you need — Where did I leave that? Did someone take the other? Why can’t I find my socks underneath all these stupid boxes of floss? Trapped.

My packing credentials were passed to me from my namesake and honed since my birth, straight into foster care and never adopted. The longest I’ve lived in any house is eleven months, and now I am seventeen years old, so you do the math.

At school people sometimes ask me what it’s like to live this way, which, I suppose for kids who lost or were removed from a family they once lived with and maybe loved, is a legit question, but for me is like asking a person born blind what it’s like to not see — it’s not like anything. I’ve got no objective context because I was left newborn, nameless, cord still attached and jonesing for meth at John Muir Medical Center in California. A "foundling." When no one came to claim me, the NICU nurses named me for him; Child Protective Services let them put Muiriel on the birth certificate, and I have grown into it.

On my eighth birthday my social worker, Joellen, took me for ice cream, and we walked a wooded Seattle path along the shore of the Salish Sea, and she told me how lucky I am to carry the honor of this name: Muir, a Scottish naturalist, father of our national parks, a guy who slept outside nearly all his life. We sat beside the water, and I unwrapped her gift to me: not a toy or the glitter hair barrettes I’d secretly hoped for.

I skipped rocks, and she told me Muir’s story like it was mine, his days a timeline of my own.

The Wilderness World of John Muir. A weighty, hardback anthology of Muir’s best writing about nature, curated by another naturalist, Edwin Way Teale, who arranged the essays in a way that makes them also a biography of Muir’s life.

I mean... birthday dream of eight-year-old girls everywhere.

The transcendental nature and half the vocabulary of the book were beyond me, of course, because third grade, but Joellen has, all my life, been more about what I need than what I think I want. I skipped rocks, and she told me Muir’s story like it was mine, his days a timeline of my own.

“Muir’s whole life was about protecting the natural world because nature is vulnerable; it can’t defend itself against people. ‘Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away.’”

I nodded.

She read a passage to me, and marked it so I could find it again:

Standing alone on the mountain-top it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make — leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents or piled stone — we all dwell in a house of one room — the world with the firmament for its roof — and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track.

“All living things, we are one family,” she said, “together in one home, sleeping beneath the same stars.”

With my pinkie finger I petted the illustrated black bears hiding in the forest trees on the cover. I did not know then what first edition meant. Joellen put her hand on my head and made me look up at her.

“Muiriel. Do you understand?”

Not that day. But Joellen planted the seed of Muir’s wisdom that grew into the truth that comforts me now: he lived nearly all his life more at home outside than in, and I understand why. Every house I live in smells different; the rules and beds and people are never the same. But one walk outside and I am always home, beneath the same sky. Alone is not lonely. Nothing to miss, nothing and no one to wish or search for. John Muir set me free.

He walked thousands of miles, over mountain ranges and forged rivers; slept in trees and deserts and forests; and carried with him only a washcloth, a bar of soap, a loaf of bread, a compass, and, oddly, a stack of heavy books he felt were as vital as the bread — which I think is ridiculous — so I see his books and raise him one library card. But as Muir loved Thoreau, I love Muir, so every move to each new house, I pack The Wilderness World in with the socks.

Socks are important. Warm, dry feet are key to movement, and therefore to freedom. Socks are packed pressed flat together and rolled, tight, like well-made sushi. Two pairs of shoes (indoor and outdoor), one raincoat, one lightweight warm coat, seven sausage-rolled shirts, three pairs of pants, one pair of shorts, two sets of pajamas, three bras, seven rolled-up pairs of underwear. Basically, your suitcase should look like a grocery store deli platter of cotton-pinwheel party sandwiches, exactly a week’s worth of outfits — laundry on Sunday. No new item of clothing is allowed in unless an old one is removed; anything reversible is twice as welcome in any well-packed case. Seriously, I could give a TED Talk on this shit and, oh, let us not forget the Holy Grail of packing: the toiletry kit. Flat, water-resistant nylon and plastic, four refillable bottles for soap and shampoo, pocket for a nail clipper, razor, tampons, hair ties, toothbrush, toothpaste, and your one floss.

I can pack and be out of any house in four minutes flat.

Except this day: eight minutes, twenty-three seconds.

Dying in sweltering summer heat in a bedroom crammed with bunk beds the day after my seventeenth birthday, I kept Joellen waiting while I debated for the hundredth and maybe last time the merits of abandoning a secret I carry that renders my “John Muir Packing” TED Talk a bunch of hypocritical garbage.

Hidden among the sushi socks and sausage shirts is a stash of compulsion in a blue-and-white-striped pillowcase tied in a knot. A sieve of burden and humiliation that in each house catches new things I collect and carry with me year after year, and I don’t know why.

Besides, these things I carry are not loved — a ship does not love the barnacles clinging to its hull.

Muir would be so disappointed. Or maybe he would understand.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

“Little blackbird nest,” Joellen said the one time she saw it, while helping me pack in fifth grade. I rushed to hide it. “Not everything has to be useful to be loved,” she said.

In my experience, that’s debatable.

Besides, these things I carry are not loved — a ship does not love the barnacles clinging to its hull. Still, even on this August day, I could not bear to let them go. I held the bag of worthless loot and agonized until Zola, the small girl who’d slept in the bunk beneath mine for the last few months, came in.

“Here,” she said, and put a small metal thing in my hand. Allen wrench.

“In case you get lonely,” she said. “Okay?”

I nodded. “How was swim class?” I asked. “You put your head under yet?”

“Didn’t go.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged.

“Oh, Zola.” I sat on the bed. “You have to remind her.” This foster mom was well intentioned but forgetful as hell. Especially, it seemed, with Zola’s very few activities.

“Will you come see me ever?” she asked. “Can I write you?”

I rolled the wrench around in my palm. “Not sure writing is allowed,” I lied. “But you never know when you’ll see someone again.”

Zola’s face fell. My eyes stung.

I didn’t want to keep Joellen waiting, and besides, if she had her way, this was maybe the last of packing, unpacking, packing, unpacking, so I dropped the Allen wrench into the pillowcase, removed one of the things and slipped it into my pocket, retied the knot, and carried it all in my perfect suitcase to her waiting car. To one more — one last — foster house.

“You want to come out?”

Zola nodded and trudged beside me.

Joellen was in her usual spot at the curb to give the foster mom time to say goodbye to me because she always thinks parents will miss me, which is not entirely true; it’s just the older I get, the more help I am around the house, and that is what they will miss. I don’t blame them. Most foster parents are overworked and exhausted, and I am not only not a burden but often useful. Sometimes I feel bad for leaving, like I’m ditching a job knowing there’s no new employee to take on my duties.

This foster mom hugged me, said she wished I didn’t have to go. “Maybe you’ll be back, though.” She sniffed. “A bad penny always turns up.”

I ran back into the house and fetched a wad of toilet paper from the bathroom for her because she was crying a little and the house tissue box was empty. On my way out, I added Kleenex to the magnetic shopping list on the fridge and Zola Swim Class 8:00 a.m. to every August Tuesday square on the paper calendar tacked to the wall.

I let Zola squeeze me a few seconds more. I put my hand on her head for a moment, then took the porch steps two at a time.

Zola hugged me around my middle, and I let her and felt my throat swelling tight, so I turned to the newest kid, a boy whose arrival this morning made my being here untenable — no more room at the inn; he’s younger and needs it more; our ages and genders can’t share a bedroom — who did not hug me because he is ten years old and scared and also doesn’t know me, so I waved to him, alone on the porch swing.

I let Zola squeeze me a few seconds more. I put my hand on her head for a moment, then took the porch steps two at a time.

Joellen popped the hatch of her worn-out Subaru, the car I’ve ridden in since I was still in a five-point car seat, and I tossed in my suitcase. Leaning across the passenger seat, she — small white lady, permed brown curls framing her round, middle-aged but unlined face — unlocked my door and smiled up at me. She’s shorter than me, and I’m barely five three. She sits on a pillow to drive. “Ready?” She smiled again.

“What’s a bad penny?” I asked. “Why would it always turn up?”

She took her hand off the wheel. “Who said that?”

“No one. Just wondering.”

“Well. It’s like... bad decisions come back to haunt you. Or a bad person keeps showing up where they’re not wanted. Like that. Why?”

I looked forward to the road, not back at the house. Not at Zola alone on the porch. She’ll be okay. She’ll be fine. She’ll go home soon.

One more year, starting today. All I have to do is stay unnoticed and not adopted until my eighteenth birthday and I’m free.

“Let’s go,” I said, and buckled in.