Chapter Text
It comes up on Philip’s thirty third birthday. Lukas had asked him what he wanted—a big party, a vacation, a huge present—and Philip had sworn up and down that all he wanted was an evening at home with Lukas and Ellie and a spaghetti dinner.
“Helen and Gabe are gonna want to to come,” Lukas warned him.
“Okay, fine—we’ll go see them the next day. I really just want a quiet evening at home with you,” Philip told him for the fiftieth time.
“Are you sure?” Lukas asked.
“Lukas, I swear to God—ask me again and— “
“Fine, okay, you win! Evening at home. Spaghetti. Gotcha.”
They’re eating the spaghetti and watching the snow fall outside the kitchen window when Philip looks at Lukas and asks, “Have you ever thought at all about kids?”
“Yeah, I deal with kids all day,” says Lukas, twirling spaghetti around his fork.
“No I mean like, us. Having kids.”
Lukas puts down his utensils and looks Philip in the eye.
“Uh, wow. I... Yeah, I mean, sometimes. Why? Do...do you want kids?”
Philip’s been sort of sitting on this for a couple of years, afraid to bring it up—they’ve got such a good thing going and he’s a little worried Lukas won’t want to change it. But on the other hand, they really do have a good thing going and wouldn’t it be great to share it with someone else?
“Do you?” Philip asks.
“I asked you first,” Lukas responds immediately.
“Okay. Yeah. I kind of do,” Philip says, nodding and looking out the window.
“So do I,” Lukas tells him.
Philip looks back at him and they stare at each other for a minute.
“So that’s it?” Philip blurts out, “We just agreed to have kids.”
“Yeah,” says Lukas, looking confused—like this isn’t really that big a deal and they’ve maybe just agreed on what movie to watch, “Awesome, huh?”
“Yeah,” Philip says, because it is, “How would you feel about fostering?”
“You mean like a baby or teenagers or what?” Lukas asks, then adds, “Either way, yeah—that sounds great. Kinda like coming full circle, right? First Gabe, then you...”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Philip says.
The process of becoming foster parents takes longer than Philip expected—it’s pretty interesting to experience from the other end because Gabe and Helen went through this and it occurs to Philip for the first time that they probably prepared for months before he came. It gives him a new appreciation for them.
The call that there is someone in need of fostering comes during the workday and Philip and Lukas both cancel their entire afternoons immediately to drive down to the city to meet a twelve-year-old named Jordan Harris.
Philip sees the panic in Lukas’s eyes when they walk in and Jordan is a girl and he has to fight laughter—he automatically thought girl for some reason when he heard Jordan, but it’s a unisex name and Lukas must have thought boy. They learn that Jordan has just lost her mother after a long illness and she had no specific objections to moving to the suburbs, so they were called.
“Which one of you is Philip and which is Lukas?” she asks by way of greeting.
“I’m Philip,” says Philip, giving Lukas a second to recover, “He’s Lukas.”
“Nice to meet you,” she says, throwing her hair over her shoulder, “What school district do you live in?”
“Uh...” says Lukas.
“You mean to tell me you guys decided to foster a kid and don’t even know what school district you live in?” she asks. Philip kind of loves her already—that’s a lot of snark for someone her age.
“That’s the first thing we’ll figure out when we get home then,” Philip says. She narrows her eyes at them. He finds himself desperately hoping that she thinks they’re cool enough to agree to give them a try. The last time he wanted someone to like him this badly was when he met Lukas, which was obviously very different, but he feels like she’s scrutinizing them and he tries to think of the most impressive thing he can tell her about them.
“We have a dog,” he blurts, and he wants to slap himself in the face because he’s sure he sounds really stupid. Her eyebrows raise and he can tell Lukas is silently congratulating him for saying the right thing. Yes!
“I like dogs,” she tells them, “What kind of dog?”
“A retriever,” says Lukas, “She’s getting up there but you wouldn’t know it. She fetches and sh—she, uh, knows how to sit and roll over. She only rolls over when she wants to though...”
Shut up, Lukas, Philip thinks. Stop talking.
“Okay,” says Jordan, nodding, “Should we get going?”
She lifts her backpack off the table and Philip wants to do a victory dance. He wonders briefly if Helen and Gabe felt like they’d passed the most important test of their lives when he’d agreed to come home with them.
They load most of Jordan’s stuff into the back of their car—she comes with a lot more than Philip had when he left for Helen and Gabe’s and she’s packed it all neatly into boxes. Philip remembers bringing his stuff in trash bags. This girl clearly has her shit together.
She actually has way more shit together than Philip and Lukas, Philip learns almost immediately. She tells them they’re not eating enough vegetables the first time she opens their fridge, informs them they should bathe the dog more often, and asks for a bigger bookshelf in her bedroom—all within the first fifteen minutes at their house.
Within two hours, he’s ordered the bookshelf, figured out what school she goes to, gone grocery shopping to buy food to her specifications, and set up an appointment at the groomers for Ellie. Her bossiness could easily be grating, but she says it all with such a charming air of authority that it only endears her to them more.
“She’s fucking awesome,” Lukas whispers to him in bed after they’ve bid Jordan goodnight, “What do you even do with girls though?”
“What do you mean, ‘what do you do with girls?’” Philip whispers back.
“I haven’t ever lived with a girl,” Lukas says, “Not since my mom died. Does she need like...special shampoo or something? Don’t girls usually have a lot of girl stuff? I didn’t see any makeup.”
“She’s a person, you know that right?” Philip tells him, incredulously, “If she needs shampoo or...or whatever, she’ll probably just tell us.”
She did tell them. Jordan had absolutely no qualms about informing them of exactly what she needed, and the first problem they encountered with her was actually the opposite of a problem. For some reason, Philip had been expecting her to ditch school a lot more often than she did—which was never. Lukas dropped her off every morning, and every afternoon, Philip was astonished to find her outside waiting for him.
“Is she into something worse?” Lukas wondered aloud. They had taken to spending at least half an hour every night worrying aloud to each other about all the awful, terrifying things Jordan could be getting up to.
“I don’t know,” Philip admitted, “She’s really smart. Either she’s not doing anything, or she’s hiding shit from us and we don’t even know.”
It occurred to Philip that maybe he and Lukas didn’t have the most normal adolescence, but the idea that she could just not be getting into any trouble was so foreign to him that her lack of suspicious activity seemed in itself suspicious.
Jordan had visited the counseling office on the first day of school and gotten herself enrolled in all honors classes, somehow. She came home from school every day, excused herself into her bedroom where she presumably did homework for several hours, then joined them for dinner and hung out with them in the living room until bedtime—which she set her-fucking-self for 9:30 every night, except on weekends, when she stayed up until 10:30.
“It’s important to be on a consistent sleep schedule,” she told them when they asked her about it, “You guys stay up until weird hours on the weekends and always complain about how tired you are on Monday—well, that’s why.”
“God I hope she never asks me for help on her homework,” Lukas whispers to Philip one night, “I looked at one of her math books—we never had shit that hard. It was like reading a completely different language.”
But she didn’t ask for help on her homework. Their first real test as parents turned out not to be academic at all.
Philip is working late one night when Lukas calls him at his studio.
“What’s up? Sorry I’m running so late; I just need to finish editing th— “
“No, no Philip—help me,” Lukas pleads.
Philip’s blood runs cold.
“What’s wrong?” he says, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.
“I was getting groceries,” Lukas whispers, “And Jordan texted me, and she said she just got her period. Holy shit, what do I do?!”
Philip isn’t sure whether to be angry at Lukas for scaring the shit out of him, or laugh at him for being so clueless.
“Uh...probably buy her some pads?” Philip answers, now trying not to sound too amused.
“I’m in that aisle with all the girl stuff,” Lukas whispers—Why is he whispering? Who is hiding from? — “And there’s like a billion different kinds. What do I do?!”
“Why don’t you text her back and ask her what kind she gets?” Philip suggests. That seems reasonable—he’d had to go get his mom pads before when she was too high to do it herself, it really hadn’t been that difficult—he just looked for the same box he’d seen in the bathroom before and bought that one.
“And tell her I have no idea what I’m doing? No. No fucking way. Not happening,” Lukas says.
“Okay then, I guess get her a couple different kinds,” Philip tells him.
“Okay,” says Lukas, and he takes a deep breath, “Okay. Thanks. I’ll see you later.”
Philip tries really, really hard not to laugh when he walks into the bathroom and sees what looks like half the feminine hygiene aisle crammed into the cabinet under the sink. There are nine boxes of pads ranging from light, to heavy, to something seemingly meant for older women with urinary incontinence, six kinds of tampons and something called a cup. Jordan walks in while he’s looking and she seems like she’s fighting laughter too.
“I’m sorry,” Philip whispers to her, hoping Lukas isn’t behind the door listening to them, “I think he just panicked—he’s never— “
Jordan loses the battle against laughter. Her shoulders shake and she giggles silently into her hand, locking eyes with Philip.
“You guys are hilarious,” she gasps, “I never want to leave this house.”
She doesn’t. The adoption process is finalized a year later.