Chapter Text
Even as a child, Jamie Taylor never felt like her name suited her. The Jamie part, yes. But Taylor? No. It felt odd, out of place, like it didn’t fit. She didn’t really know why. She just knew that it wasn’t right. It meant that she was related to the Taylors, and even as a child of five years, she didn’t like it.
At age five, Jamie was just starting school. Her whole life before this, she had been at home, with her mother and Denny. Her whole world was playing outside with Denny, eating whatever food Mommy had tried to cook for meals, and running to greet Dad the rare times she got to see him come home from the coal mines.
Denny was two years older than her, but he acted like he was an adult and apparently the only authority on what the real world was like. Mommy was always busy with something else and Dad was never home, so she supposed Denny was right. Before her first day of school, Denny tried to explain to Jamie exactly how to act in school and who she had to be friends with. It was unclear to her why he was so determined to do this, it was just school. But, according to him, it was a lot different than home. Better, sometimes. Sometimes not. The way Denny had painted it, Jamie thought that everyone would be perfectly nice and kind and fun to play with. It seemed that her assumption was wrong. What Denny hadn’t explained to her was that the other kids could be mean sometimes. And sometimes, they would pretend to be nice only to turn their backs on her later on. The friends she made when she first started school would not be her friends two years later.
It happened when Jamie turned seven. Well, not the exact day, but certainly that exact year. She had a new sibling, her little brother Mikey. He’d been born a few months after she turned seven and suddenly everything changed.
“He’s not even your brother, really.” A girl she had thought was her friend, Lucy, told her one afternoon during school while they worked on a project.
“‘Course he’s my brother. Why wouldn’t he be?” Jamie asked, not understanding.
“My mum says he’s only half your brother. He’s not from both your parents, just one.”
“That’s not true!” Jamie replied, her cheeks reddening. She’d never really gotten the ‘birds and the bees’ talk, but she knew enough too know that this was quite a heavy accusation. And she knew Mikey had been in her mother’s tummy, so that only left the father to be a different person. She didn’t know exactly what this meant, but she knew it wasn’t good. When she looked back on it years later, she would hate the fact that she’d found out about her mother sleeping with another man through some girl at school.
Jamie went home that day and questioned her mother, whose non-answers all but confirmed it. She tried to forget about it. She did. She loved Mikey just the same as if he was her full brother, there was no reason that had to change. But the kids at school didn’t let her forget. They didn’t let Denny forget either, but he fought back. Jamie didn’t have the heart to do that. When the other kids, Lucy included, bullied her and called her and her family horrible names, she just kept her head down. She tried to ignore them, tried to hide the tears that inevitably streamed down her cheeks. But the other kids saw, and that was the reaction they wanted, so the bullying kept going. The worst was a year later, when Denny started bullying her too. It confused her at the time. After all, home had been the one place where she had felt like she could hide and be safe from the horrors of the world outside. Not anymore, though. Not with Denny repeating the names that she was called at school, not with the way that he picked on her and their mother seemingly because only girls could cause such problems. He blamed them for everything. And even though Jamie had no idea how she was at all responsible for this, she was starting to believe him.
The worst, though, came when Jamie was ten. Denny was twelve, Mikey was three. Their father was in the coal mines again, having been around less and less after he found out that Mikey wasn’t his. Thankfully, his paycheck was still used to help the three children survive. And what of their mother? Where was she in all of this? She was gone. Not dead, just gone. Jamie had come home from school one day to find Mikey all by himself, crying. Jamie hurried to him, wide eyed and horrified that no one was around to help him.
“Mikey, what’s wrong? Where’s Mum?”
The boy shook his head, unable to speak until he calmed down a little. Jamie went to the cupboards to search for some food, not that they ever had much. She knew he’d probably cheer up a bit if she gave him a snack. She found a box of crackers and handed a few of them to him. He chewed on them for a few minutes until he stopped crying, then spoke.
“Momma left.”
“She left? Where’d she go?”
“Dunno.”
“Did she go to the store? How long has she been gone?”
“All day. Since before lunch.”
Jamie frowned. That meant that Mikey probably hadn’t eaten since that morning. As she glanced around the room while she figured out what to do next, she spotted a few things that were a little odd. Certain items from around the house were gone. Things that had belonged to their mother. Her jewelry box, a few pictures in the shelf, small knick knacks. Jamie left Mikey’s side and bolted to the bedroom that her mother usually occupied. It was empty. The bed was freshly made, but all the clothes, the personal items, all of them were gone. Mikey was right, she was gone. And she wasn’t coming back.
The next few days were chaos, and years later Jamie would never remember the exact order that things has happened. What she did know, though, was that Denny refused to help take care of Mikey because it was apparently Jamie’s job as a girl, and that their father was going to be working extra hours in the mines to try and make them some extra money. In other words, he was leaving three kids under the age of thirteen alone without supervision for weeks at a time.
It didn’t last long, for better or for worse. Only a few weeks into the whole arrangement, there was an accident. Denny had been spending more and more time with his friends, which left Jamie alone with Mikey most of the time. This particular day was a Saturday, which meant that Jamie had to cook lunch. Was it even cooking if it was just a can of soup that had been in the pantry for months? It was what they had and she knew her brother could eat it, so she put it in a pot and onto the stove. Easy enough. She got distracted, though, that was where the trouble started. She had fallen behind on her schoolwork and had wanted to use the weekend to catch up a little bit. So, she set out her worksheets on the table and got to work. What she didn’t realize, though, was that she had turned the heat up too high. It wasn’t long before the pot boiled over and there was a mess of soup bubbles slipping over the top. Jamie yelped and grabbed a towel to clean it up, momentarily forgetting about the flame under the burner. The next part seemed to be in slow motion. Mikey, quite hungry, got impatient and went to Jamie’s side to see what was taking so long. Jamie used the towel to clean up the mess, forgetting to turn off the stove first. The towel caught fire. Jamie screamed. She shooed her brother away, but didn’t put the fire out fast enough. The flames on the towel jumped and spread up to her shoulder. Mikey screamed. Jamie shrieked with terror. She was lucky enough to put it out quickly, but the burn marks were there, and they were there for good.
The three kids got split up by Social Services after that, each of them getting sent to different foster families. Jamie wasn’t sure what luck her brothers had, if any. She didn’t have much of it, that was for sure. She started having anger issues, emotional problems. She wasn’t sure if it was the situation or just the fact that she was getting older and therefore prone to mood swings, but it was awful nonetheless. She got moved around to a lot of different home over the next several years. The families got their fair share of praise from the neighborhood for taking in the poor girl, then things became far less sunshine-y and Jamie started to act out, and then they gave her up soon after that. Jamie felt she wouldn’t have had to act out if those families had actually been good to her. But, of course, that was wishful thinking. It was always wishful thinking that anyone would actually care about her enough to treat her like a human being.
She had a plan for after public school, though. The second she was old enough and had finished school, she ran. She’d been saving up money from odd jobs she’d done and had aplan to run to London. She had enough money for a train ticket, at least. She didn’t want to wait long enough to save up more.
Without a glance back, she left that damn town, running as fast and as far as she could.