The room had no doors, and floodlights in the hallways remained on all night.
She noticed a streak of mascara on her pillow, which she took as a sign that the previous occupant had been crying. She was taken to her bedroom, which she would share with four other girls. It was called Teen Challenge, and she would remain there for at least fifteen months. She was informed that this would be her new school.
Emma was escorted inside the second house and told to strip naked and bend over while she coughed, to prove she wasn’t hiding any drugs. About thirty yards behind the house was a much larger one, with white shutters and a brick fence. Her mother sometimes told her, “If I have to love you from a distance, I will.”Īfter a three-hour drive, Thompson pulled up to a ranch house in Lakeland, a small city in central Florida. “There was always a sense of exile,” Emma said. Emma worried that her parents, who had three biological children, considered her a burden. To keep the ending upbeat, she found herself straying from the facts of her life. To avoid attracting her parents’ attention, she used the light from the street to work on a novel that told a story similar to her own life: a young girl spends her early years in foster care, where she is abused, until a Christian family saves her. She often read romance novels late at night, when she was supposed to be asleep. She watched lesbian pornography and had lost her virginity to an older boy. Her parents, whose lives revolved around their church, admonished her for being aggressive toward them and for expressing her sexuality too freely. Part Scottish and part Puerto Rican, Emma was slight, with long, wavy blond hair. In his notes, Thompson wrote, “Emma voiced that she was confused as to why her mom was sending her away.” She was on the track, volleyball, and soccer teams, and she didn’t want to miss any games. Emma, who was fifteen, tried to remember every exit sign she passed, so that she could find her way home, but she was crying too hard to remember the names. Thompson drove Emma away from her house, in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, and merged onto the highway. Her parents, who had adopted her when she was seven, stood by the doorway, watching silently. “She was very verbal, resisting,” Thompson told me. He and a colleague instructed Emma to put on her clothes and follow them to their car. The man, Shane Thompson, who is six and a half feet tall, wore a shirt with “Juvenile Transport Agent” printed on the back. She reached for her cell phone, which she kept under her pillow at night, but it wasn’t there. She was facing the wall and saw a man’s shadow. Someone had turned on the lights in her room. In the spring of her freshman year of high school, in 2011, Emma Burris was woken at three in the morning.
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