He's in good hands — John drives him to appointments and the library, while Linda is ready with a listening ear and keeps the refrigerator stocked. "They told me I could stay," Kevin says. He sounds ashamed to accept their help. "I didn't ask."
He never names the biggest failure in his upbringing, his mother. "One day, I asked him what he wanted to drink in the morning," Linda says. "And he goes, 'Mrs. Campbell, when I grew up, my mother never even had milk in the refrigerator for us.'
PHOTO BY CATHERINE GREEN
Linda and John Campbell: "We just felt like, Kevin is brilliant," Linda says.
PHOTO BY CATHERINE GREEN
Kevin: "My first foster father stole my birth certificate."
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"Yet she went and ran into a car and came up with $15,000 cash to pay that," Linda Campbell says. Her eyes are pleading as she asks, baffled, "How do you do that and never give your children milk?"
Kevin doesn't say whether his mother was on the list of people he called in desperation after being "emancipated." At the time, he turned to his mother's former boyfriend, a man he calls his stepfather. He stayed with the man for a short time but, thanks to his job at the plastics factory, soon got his first apartment. He was making progress.
But the coalescence of trouble at school, physical health problems, disintegrating relationships and overwhelming grief in the wake of his friend's suicide dragged him down into a dark place.
"When he lived on his own and he became homeless again, I think he lost a lot of faith," says Stacy Peters. After Kevin missed a few of the class meetings due to the flu, "He came in early, he made it up, he did his work — usually, when people miss class I dock them," Peters says. "But Kevin was different."
He's a regular at the library, nearly fluent in Japanese, and is advanced in C++, Python and JavaScript programming. He has studied Latin, and plays drums and guitar, though he insists he's no good.
Kevin has learned all this on his own. "Lone wolf," he says with a smirk.
While many foster kids pushed out of the system are doomed to low wages and menial labor, Kevin is taking steps to one day become a medical researcher. He will begin classes at Los Angeles City College on Feb. 4 — retaking math he failed during his downward spiral at Rio Hondo. He's saved money for books by working construction. "I don't think there was ever a doubt in my mind that I wouldn't make it," he says.
"He might try for some on-campus work, too — you know, he worked as a math tutor at Rio," John Campbell says, pride edging into his low, gravelly voice.
Months after the "couple days" that Kevin was supposed to stay, the Campbells spent the holidays with their temporary son.
John says that Kevin "takes up space at our house, but we're used to that. It's not good for him, though — he needs to branch out. But he's feeling good about going back to school." He thinks Kevin will thrive.
Kevin's story is far from the worst-case scenario among L.A.'s thousands of former foster kids. Instead he's trapped in limbo, relying on others while learning to stand on his own. As foreign as the concept of family support might be to him, the Campbells are in it for the long haul. "We told Kevin, 'We're gonna see you to the finish,' " Linda says. "Whatever that is."
Reach the writer at catherine.s.green@gmail.com.
