Foster-care grad finds independence a struggle

CHARLOTTE -- For $7.50 a hour, Kristen McClarin peddles chicken sandwiches and nuggets to customers she recognizes by the sauces they like best.

She persuades most of them to upgrade to a fruit cup, forgoing the waffle fries -- a trick that's earned her top marks as a Chick-fil-A cashier.

Her days are bone-aching and monotonous, and even though the paychecks come steadily, she's still broke.

"This is dead-end work," she said, closing her eyes to try to calculate how many extra hours she'd have to pick up to buy a more reliable car.

Kristen's 19 and fending for herself. She spent her teen years in foster care, raised by a woman the government paid to replace a mother the courts deemed unfit. Kristen graduated from East Wake High School last year. In the state's eyes, she was a grown-up, free -- and forced -- to find her own way.

Kristen has shared her journey with The News & Observer in hopes of showing others the steep slope foster children must navigate when the state's duty to them is done. She is one of about 600 foster children in North Carolina forced to strike out on her own last year.

As tricky as independence can be for foster children, Kristen is lucky. A year out, she's beating the odds. She's not living on the streets or pregnant. She has had no run-ins with police or the courts. She's getting started on her college education this fall.

But Kristen struggles. She's poor, often depressed and lonesome for the friends she had in Wake County. Kristen is scared she won't be able to handle college.

"Most days, I feel like everything's still falling apart," Kristen said, staring at oil puddling up beneath her 1992 Toyota Tercel. "Then, there are those days that I think, 'Man, look at everything I've been through, and I'm standing.' "

Finding a job

Kristen settled in Charlotte in June, little more than a week after graduating from high school. She took shelter with Lis Chambers, a woman who mentored Kristen in middle school, before the state took Kristen and her three siblings into foster care.

Chambers is a single mother of two children she adopted from a wayward relative. She knows how hard it can be to get by, so she's tough on Kristen.

"She was barely grown when she came here," Chambers said. "She had no idea what it would take."

Within days of Kristen's move to Charlotte, Chambers chauffeured her to shopping centers, where Kristen passed long afternoons begging employers to take a chance on her. The rejections came swiftly.

Managers at a Target store 20 minutes away gave Kristen a job. Chambers shuttled her there as often as she could, but with gas and Kristen's ever-changing schedule, it took a toll. Kristen began looking for work along a bus route.

Soon, a Chick-fil-A restaurant outside a nearby mall offered Kristen a cashier's job. She mapped a bus route that, at its quickest, would take her an hour each way. Those first weeks, Kristen checked and double-checked her map, terrified she'd end up on the wrong bus, dumped in an unfamiliar section of this new city.

Working two jobs

Late last summer, Kristen and Chambers pored over Kristen's pay stubs. The stack of bills beside them seemed unmanageable. Chambers told her to get a second job. A Harris Teeter store offered her work as a cashier.

For 14 months, Kristen has worked practically every day of the week. Many days, she pulls shifts at both jobs.

Even in her sleep, she hears an erratic series of beeps. A box of cereal sliding over the grocery store scanner. The alarm bell of a car pulling up to the drive-thru window. She looks at bananas and thinks of their produce code: 4011. She finds herself saying "my pleasure" -- Chick-fil-A's mandatory customer refrain -- to everyone she meets.