Janea Barton gyrates across the parquet with her fiery-red dyed hair and three-inch platform shoes, thrusting her ample hip into a spike-haired boy flapping around in a donated suit.
Around her, a crush of teenagers wiggles and wails to the depth-charge beat, tearing up the church hall dance floor as a DJ spins the "Thong Song" on a toasty June night.
"The Grind," Janea explains. "I taught myself. I watch a lot of MTV."
Any illusion that this is a typical high school dance is shattered by the circle of social workers and plainclothes probation officers clinging to the walls.
The hundred or so teens are Orange County's newest foster-care graduates, shuttled to Irvine's Mariners Church for a daylong pep rally before the system cuts them loose to fend for themselves.
These are the foster-care leftovers--kids who were too old and too troubled to be adopted by parents looking for cuddly babies, but too vulnerable to be returned to their unfit families.
Passed from relatives to foster families or institutionalized group homes, they have ridden the system to the very end--an 18th birthday or high school graduation. Within days, many will be on their own.
They include kids like Janea, a former chubby-cheeked Girl Scout who started her six years in foster care after she tried to bludgeon her aunt with a claw hammer.
And Monique Luna, the castaway child of a heroin-addicted mother. She became a mother herself at 15.
And Jesse Equihua, sheltered in group homes since sixth grade, when his father put a diaper on him and paraded him around his school as punishment for not doing homework.
At the dance, optimism reigns. Gene Howard of the Orangewood Children's Foundation assures the teens that "things are going to open up for you from now on."
But for many of the nation's 20,000 young people who "age out" of foster care every year, what opens up is the floor.
About 40% fail to graduate from high school, and an equal number wind up on welfare or other public assistance at some point. Within two years, a third have children, usually out of wedlock, and 18% spend time behind bars.
The darkest futures await the hardest cases: those children who arrive on the government's doorstep as victims of unspeakable abuse and neglect, only to be weaned into adulthood on a steady diet of pharmaceuticals to keep them under control.
"Some of these kids don't really have a chance," said Mark Courtney, director of the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children, one of the nation's leading experts on the topic. "If you want to identify a high-risk group for just about any social phenomenon, you'll have a hard time finding anyone more vulnerable than kids aging out of foster care."
Since the mid-1980s, $1 billion has been poured into programs nationally to prepare foster children who outgrow the system. They are taught to shop for groceries, rent apartments, open bank accounts and earn high school diplomas.
It's a start. All the same, they are entering the world without so much as a driver's license, and they'll have no one to fall back on if things go sour.
Beginning in the summer of 2000, The Times tracked Jesse, Janea and Monique during their first year of freedom, when they faced homelessness, violence, drugs and poverty; when the choices they made began to define them as adults.
Orange County Juvenile Court Judge Robert B. Hutson opened their court files--the details of abuse, neglect and violence that delivered them into a foster care system that eventually sent them back to the outside world.
On this summer night, they get a little coddling by the church volunteers. The girls are being lavished with free make-overs and bags of "Big Sexy" hair products. Before they go, each teen will collect an Amway gift certificate and a duffel bag stuffed with such essentials as a toaster, an electric juicer, socks, towels and a toothbrush--all courtesy of the Orangewood Foundation.
When the dance ends about 9, white vans pull up to ferry the teens back to foster homes for their final days.
Orangewood's Howard, who had spent weeks planning the grand send-off, knows what lies ahead.
"The system just drops them like a hot rock."
JANEA: Summer 2000
It starts with a scramble to find a place to live, on the very day Janea graduates from La Quinta High School in Westminster.
"My group home says I have to be out by midnight," Janea says in the school parking lot, still wearing her cap and gown. "I'm homeless."
She's taken in by the aunt whom Janea, as a young teenager, attacked with a hammer--and letter opener and baseball bat.
Born March 15, 1982, at Long Beach Memorial Hospital, Janea was given up by her mother three years later and left to the care of a father who abused drugs.
"About 99.9% of the time, he was loaded on something. If he wasn't drunk, he was spracked on whatever drugs he may have done," Janea says a decade later. "Our house had no electricity, had no running water, had no heat--had no nothing."
