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“Miles to go before I sleep.”
~ Robert Frost
The words are more relatable than hundred-year-old text has any right to be. Yet there it is. Always more distance to go, more miles to traverse, more brambles to shove this way and that, thorns catching and tearing but only ever surface depth, never deeper. No, nothing is ever deeper. He really needs to back off the all-nighters. They are making his brain go positively maudlin. It’s midday but he’s been up since yesterday morning thanks to too many assignments and not enough hours in the day. Or maybe his poor time management skills. One of those.
Speaking of things that might benefit from backing off, he hears voices in the front hall with the overly cheerful tone of new placement incoming. The house mom – yes, she has a name. No, he doesn’t care to use it. – is barreling ahead with the welcome to the house, we hope you’ll be comfortable here speech. It’s a speech that’s cut off by a sharp, snappish voice.
“Not my first show. Just point me to my room and I’ll stay out of your hair.”
Footsteps on a squeaky floor verifies the request is honored. James pokes his head into the hall just long enough to see a huge hoodie and worn out jeans walking down the hall. The black garbage bag of all his own relocations is in house mom’s hands while a duffle is slung over hoodie wearer’s shoulder. Something in the set of those narrow shoulders is familiar from the inside out. James carries an identical posture. Shoulders squared, head up, keep moving or you’ll be sure to drown.
A check of the wall clock indicates it’s late enough for the kitchen to be largely abandoned in that nether-time between lunch and evening food. He picks up his work and heads that way. Coffee is in order, lest he go ambling down another philosophical wormhole by way of an English assignment. It’s not as though he’s that diligent a student. It’s just that keeping his marks steadily in the acceptable effort range keeps guardian of the minute’s helpful advice to a dull roar.
Hoodie kid moves in near silence when no accompanied by the galumphing footfalls of house mom. It’s a discovery made an hour later when a coffee mug hits the table at the corner furthermost from his own. Coffee, black and still steaming when the mug is gulped down. Red curls in a fiery mess around a paleface and trailing just below narrow shoulders. She can’t top 90 pounds, but she’s anything but delicate looking. There’s an intensity to her posture that makes her look near invincible - bruised jaw and black eye aside.
She’s gone before he can speak. James doesn’t make a habit of prying into the stories of new arrivals. They all come with baggage too large and complex to address in small talk and deep conversations just aren’t a thing that he does with his fellow veterans of a system tasked with their protection.
He concludes that the girl might be a ghost by the end of the week. She doesn’t speak unless directly spoken to. She shows up for meals only rarely and her footsteps never make a sound. He hears the house parents addressing her as Natasha but the tiny flinch when they do tells James’ practiced eyes that there is definitely a name she would much prefer to answer to. He watches her, more out of curiosity than anything else. She’s a mystery of sorts, but also eerily familiar. Those eyes know too much, are just too cold and hard to belong to a kid. As the bruises fade and black liner replaces barely effective concealer he begins to see much of himself in her. She’s dangerous. Of that he is certain.
It’s when she turns up at a party James is a good several years too young for himself that he opts out of watch and wait as a long-term strategy. She’s so wasted it’s miraculous she’s on her feet. James watches her slip upstairs hand in hand with torn black jeans and good drugs (Kyle? Keagan? One of those, not that the name matters.) The next time he sees her, there’s definitely nobody home.
She appears in front of him with big, glassy eyes and a shirt that is inside out. “You’re James,” she says. Her blown pupils say she ought to be slurring. She isn’t. She’s no newbie to this scene, that’s for certain.
“Yeah. Natasha, right?” If she wants to play introductions, he’ll go along.
“Just Tasha,” she shoots back, but not before flinching. Definitely not using the given name again, he concludes.
“Should I get you out of here?” he asks. He’s lost for any other reason she’s suddenly decided to acknowledge his existence.
“Nah, I’m good.”
She turns on too steady legs before disappearing into the dim room of drunk kids. He tells himself he doesn’t care. That she’ll be moving on to the next placement long before he figures her out and it’s not worth that kind of effort. Even as he does so, though, he knows he’s screwed. She’s intriguing in all the worst ways.