Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.”

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Jamie walks into school the first day of sophomore year with a scowl on her face, a bruise fading on her side, and a heavy heart she does her best to ignore.

Coupled with all of that there's a healthy amount of disdain.

Why is it even called fucking sophomore year? What’s wrong with Year 12? What’s wrong with sixth form? Back in England, she’d been excited to be out of school altogether by now. She didn’t need to go to school after 16. She’d leave care, get work somewhere, take care of herself and Mikey, and she’d be fine. 

Instead, she finds herself in a new all-too-american high school, walking between cheerleaders and jocks, trying to blend into the background of her life. 

Here she goes again. 

⚜️

The only seat available by the time she finds her homeroom classroom, is right at the front.

She takes the blow in stride, used to things going like absolute shit for her. At least it’s right at the edge of the classroom, next to the windows. She’s on the second floor, and gets a view of the massive football field, seemingly the only part of this school that enjoys good funding. 

Jamie slides into her seat a moment before the teacher—a balding man in a cheap looking suit—walks into the classroom. 

She crosses her fingers for him to skip the first day of school routine of making everyone introduce themselves. She’s had to do it more often than most, when she’s gotten transferred to a new foster home in the middle of the school year, and it never gets better.

Come on, mate. These kids all know each other already. Don’t do it.  

“Good morning, everyone. It’s great to see you for another year,” the man says, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief. A few murmurs of agreement float through the classroom. “Well, let’s start by introducing ourselves, shall we?” 

Bollocks.  

Jamie hates this part. Hates being the centre of attention, and she knows she will be, at least for a little while. For better or for worse—and it’s always for worse—she stands out. Her accent singles her out. Her age does too. She’d be fucked even if she didn’t insist on dressing the way she does, with baggy clothes that feel like armour.

She’s a year older than everyone else, although she’s aware she looks younger, is smaller. Her 17th birthday came and went without fanfare a few weeks ago, and she’d gotten the news she’d be leaving the group home and going to a different place only a few days before, so her mind had been consumed with that anyways. 

In any case, she’s not concerned with sentimental shit like that. There’s no meaning to a birthday apart from what it does for her in the real world. She’s one year closer to aging out of the system and being able to pave her own way. She’s 17. Just one year to go. 

The introductions drag along and take up the better part of the homeroom hour.

In a small act of fortuitous mercy, the teacher starts by the opposite side of the classroom, which means Jamie will thankfully go last. 

She hears each student state their name, their age, what they did that summer, and what they’re looking forward to this school year. It’s mind numbing.

Jamie doesn’t make an effort to learn any names, knowing that she most likely won’t be finishing up the school year with these people anyway. She lets the words wash over her, meaningless. 

Michael Davis, Danielle Clayton, Jessica Miller, Abner Gutierrez, Rebecca Jessel ...on and on. 

She fantasizes with the bell ringing before it’s her turn, but she’s never been what you’d call lucky. 

“Thank you, Mr.Hall, I’m sure we all enjoyed that riveting story of how you got a growth removed this past summer. Next. An unfamiliar face!”

Jamie rolls her eyes, and gets up.

“Name’s Jamie Taylor. I’m seventeen years old. I read a couple of books this summer. Was nice.  I’m looking forward to learning new things this year.” The answer is practiced, bland, cookie-cutter perfect.

She’s about ready to sit back down when the teacher waves his hand.

“Is that an accent I hear?” he asks. Jamie clenches her jaw. No shit, Sherlock. This is the worst part, every time. “Well, where are you from Jamie?”

She looks out the window, then somewhere towards the whiteboard. 

“Uh, was born in England. Yorkshire. Moved here when I was ten. Haven’t gotten rid of the accent quite yet.”

In fact, it is as thick as ever, like the day she left. Like this one aspect of who she is won't allow itself to be erased. 

“That’s so interesting!” the teacher exclaims. “In all my years teaching here I don’t believe I’ve ever had a student from England.” 

  Christ, he’s a talker . 

“What brought you here, Miss Taylor?”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. 

“Parents wanted to move. I was ten.” 

It’s the truth, the barest bones of it. If those parents are no longer her parents, were not her real parents from the get go, if they discarded her as soon as they could and kept her baby brother—well, that’s another thing entirely.  

Some of her new classmates seem to think her answer—dry and deadpan—is funny, and she gets a few chuckles.

The teacher opens his mouth to say something else, and that’s when the bell rings. 

⚜️

The day drags by in similar fashion as homeroom, class after class of introducing herself, and going over the syllabus for the year. A few people try talking to her, and Jamie does her best to appear engaged, polite if not interested. 

No point in making enemies on day one. That will surely come on its own later. 

Before she realizes it, it’s time to go home—or as close to that as she can get. 

Jamie doesn’t take the school bus.

Instead, she walks, getting acquainted with the streets of her new city. She’s only been here for 5 days, and most of those were spent in a whirlwind of meeting Mrs.Quint, getting her meagre belongings together and moving, signing up for school and buying supplies. 

It’s always jarring, moving. She can pretend it slides right past her, but deep down it always knocks her off balance, at least for a few weeks. She was at the group home for 11 months, her longest stint in any one place. Before that, she was doing her time at the jolly ol’ Polk County Juvenile Detention Center.

She’d begun to think she’d age out at the group home. She and the two other girls she shared a room with—Claire and Rosa—had learned to exist in the same space without getting in each other’s way much. There were 12 kids in the house total, so it was a bit crowded, but not unbearably so. And where the food was shite, the supervision was great—meaning very light . She could sneak out, every once in a while. Meet up with people, every once in a while. She’d begun to get comfortable with what her life was. Thought it would stay that way until she turned 18.

No such luck. 

Now she’s another happy inhabitant of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Maybe next time she’ll get bounced out of middle America, Jamie muses. A state change would be nice. She hasn’t had one of those in ages. 

Soon enough, she finds herself in front of the small, old two-storey house belonging to one Mrs.Anne Quint, her current foster parent.

Jamie adjusts her ratty backpack strap against her shoulder, and climbs the few steps up to the front porch. She has a house key, but finds she doesn’t need it when the door handle easily turns. Genuinely, how can people be so trusting?

She steps inside, minding her footsteps. Becoming invisible was something she quickly learned when she entered the system back in England. It usually helped.

She’s not sure how useful it’ll be here. This is the first house she’s been in where she’s the only kid, and it’s a welcome change. Usually, she’d take it as a bad sign—easier to get away with shit if there’s no one else to walk in—but Mrs.Quint has no husband. It’s a relief. 

So far she’s had food on the table, Mrs.Quint hasn’t gotten up on her shit, and this morning she got a decent amount of money to buy lunch at school—which she pocketed in its entirety and forced down a shitty free lunch instead. 

It’s as best a situation as she can hope for. Better than the group home, even, although Jamie knows to be cautious and never get too comfortable. But it really seems like for Mrs.Quint she’s a paycheck, a way to fill an empty room in a more lucrative manner than hosting a college student or renting an airbnb. 

Jamie can work with that. It’s pretty perfect, even.

She can keep her head down, save up for when she ages out, and stay out of the woman’s path. It’s—

“Jamie, you’re home!”

The words greet her as soon as she walks past the kitchen. 

She stops, and forces herself to walk back to the kitchen. 

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How was your first day of school? Make any friends? Well, I guess you’re too old for that question. But it was nice, yeah?”

Jamie nods. 

“That’s good. I know with signing up for school and everything, well, it’s been a whirlwind, hasn't it?”

Jamie nods again, aware that the woman is waiting for some sort of response from her. 

“So, before I let you get settled, I bought you some things.” Mrs.Quint stands up. She’s not a tall woman, but she still towers a good few inches over Jamie. “I got you a new backpack. I think yours is lovely, of course, but it’s looking a bit...well, worn. So this one is the most similar one I could find.”

Jamie looks, and sure enough, there is a brand new brown backpack on the unoccupied kitchen chair. It looks like genuine leather, miles better than the piece of crap she’s been lugging around for the better part of three years. 

“Like it? Well, go on. It’s all yours.”

She hands it over, and Jamie feels the material under her fingertips. Catches a whiff of its smell from the air. It’s definitely real leather. She could sell it, and get good money for it. Christ, she almost wishes they could get this over with already and she would get sent back to the group home tomorrow. She’s already salivating at the thought of the amount of cash she’s gonna get from this backpack—provided of course, the missus doesn’t take it away before Jamie leaves. 

The thought deflates her brief slide into excitement. 

“Everything okay?” Mrs.Quint asks.

“Yes,” she responds. “It’s lovely, thank you.” She’s polite to a fault, has trained herself to be. 

“Wonderful. I got you something else as well. Now, I’m not the most tech savvy woman, but the guy at the store told me this was a great model. It’s not super fancy, because I can’t believe people spend a thousand dollars on a single phone, but it’s a Samsung, like mine, so it’ll last. That’s important. And the guy said it’s even better than mine, so you can take all your pictures, and have your facebook on it, and talk to your friends, and all that. So here you go.”

Mrs.Quint offers her a white box, and Jamie takes it, dumbfounded.

“Now, your caseworker said it might not be a great idea, but I know how teenagers are. You guys need the internet! So as long as it doesn’t affect your grades, I think we’ll be great. And your grades have always been fine, haven’t they, sweetie?”

Jamie forgets to nod. It’s a cellphone. A brand new fucking cellphone. 

Back at the group home, Claire had scored an old one from a boyfriend, and the older kids shared it. She got her share of time each week as long as she took over Claire’s duties for the day. 

But this is her own. What the fuck.

“You don’t like it?” Mrs.Quint asks, and Jamie becomes aware she’s staring at the box in her hand like a fucking lunatic.

“Yes. Yes, of course. Thank you Ma’am. I’ve just...never had one.” It’s the truth. And it’s also good to play the sympathy card. 

“Well, you do now,” Mrs.Quint smiles. “That’s all then, I think dinner will be ready at six.”

Jamie nods, and climbs the stairs to her bedroom in a daze. 

⚜️

(2010. Yorkshire, England.)

Mum and dad are fighting again. 

Their screams echo through the house, and Jamie covers her ears. She knows to stay out of their way. Her mom doesn’t like to see her when she gets like this. She hates to look at Jamie, at how much she looks like her, hates to be reminded she’s a mum at all. Jamie knows this. 

Denny isn’t as smart as she is, even though he’s older. She may be only 8 years old, while Denny turned 12 last month, but she’s the one who knows when to talk to their mom, and when to avoid her altogether. When their dad is in a good mood and likes to look at her drawings, and when he’s too tired from his work at the mine and they should just hand him a beer and leave him be. Jamie knows all these things, while Denny is too thick-headed to realize them. 

Now, Denny walks out of the bedroom they share and gets in their parent’s way, yells like he’s a grown up like them and not a kid like she is. He gets a red welt across his face for his trouble. 

Jamie doesn’t say anything, when he comes back to the room with tears welling up in his eyes. Doesn’t tell him he had it coming. 

She keeps her mouth shut, but her brother must see something on her face, because he pushes her, hard. 

Jamie throws her arms out to stop her fall. Her palms sting. 

The cover of her hands no longer a protection, she finally makes out what today’s fight is about. 

Her mum is having a baby. 

⚜️

Before Jamie realizes it, it’s friday.

An entire week at this new school, already passed as uneventfully as possible. The alumni of Cedar Rapids Jefferson High seem to be a step further in evolution than the kids from the last few schools she’s been in, and by Friday Jamie is no longer news.

Someone had asked if it was true she was adopted. Someone else had said they were a foster kid, too, and offered a table at lunch. Jamie declined. She isn’t sure how the details of her life got out, and doesn’t really care.  

Taciturn and quiet as she can be, speaking to the lot of them only when spoken to, the student body seemed to quickly decide she wasn’t worth the excitement or time, and Jamie prefers it like that.

Her Biology teacher steps out of the classroom, and Jamie—like most of the other students, and for the first time in her life—takes out her cellphone to entertain herself. 

It seems too good to be true, that she’d lucked out like this. Her brand new leather backpack rests at her feet, and her cellphone is bright and shiny and useful in her hands. Mrs.Quint hasn’t taken any of them away, hasn’t toyed with her or thrown in her face that she has these things out of the goodness of her heart—even when Jamie had to be reminded that they do laundry on wednesdays.

It’s mental, is what it is. 

Every night this week, Mrs.Quint has had dinner with Jamie. She’s asked about school, and accepted Jamie’s curated one-liners. She hasn't asked about her phone at all, or what she’s doing on it. She knocks on her bedroom door before she comes in if she needs to talk to her. She hasn’t gone through her stuff that she knows of, even though she could, even though privacy is never guaranteed and your possessions, meagre as they are, are never fully your own. 

Jamie has a lock on her door. She hadn’t dared use it her first week here, but yesterday, she’d finally done it, making sure to set her alarm much earlier than when Mrs.Quint wakes up just in case. 

Best night of sleep she can remember having in years .

Jamie can’t help waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Decent dinner every night, few dollars of lunch money every day, a nice backpack, a fucking phone . A lock on her door. Everything about Mrs.Quint invites her to trust her, to trust in this, and Jamie can’t allow herself that.

She knows what trust entails. How dropping her guard down can be the start of a nightmare.

She remembers the last time she trusted a foster parent, remembers the kind smiles and comforting words that so quickly turned into the creak of a door opening in the dark, heavy hands and heavier breaths—

“Taylor?”

She looks up, aware she’s still holding her phone in her hand. She hadn’t even noticed the teacher was back. 

“Yes?”

“I said, have you chosen a lab partner?”

“I, um, no.”

“Who are we missing? Where are Jessel and Clayton?”

Someone pipes up with something about cheerleading. Jamie furtively drags her hand below her desk, slipping her phone out of view.

“Well, who doesn’t have a partner—”

“I’ll go with Rebecca!” A guy exclaims, raising his hand like a drowning man, the poor sod.

“Very well. That leaves Clayton with Taylor,” the teacher writes something down. “Everyone, change seats to be with your partner. This person will be your partner for the rest of the semester, which is why I’ve let you make the choice. I don’t want excuses later on. No partner changes allowed. Learn to work with people. Now, write this down.”

Jamie wracks her brain, trying to remember who Clayton is, but nothing comes to mind. She wasn't paying attention during any of those introduction sessions the first day of class.

The teacher has them go over their first project, and Jamie dutifully writes it all down, feeling adrift. She hates it. She detests group work. She makes it a point to keep her distance from people, easier that way, and being forced to work closely with someone shoots her routine to hell. 

The bell signaling the end of the class finally rings, and she’s picking up her notebook when the teacher calls her out. 

“Taylor, Smith,” he says, and poor sod—Smith, apparently—also looks up. “Look for Jessel and Clayton and get them up to speed, will you?”

Fuck.

Jamie nods. 

⚜️

She keeps an ear out for the name Clayton in one of her next classes, and doesn’t find any. She has Jessel, first name Rebecca, in her math class before lunch, so at least she can put a face to that name. Rebecca Jessel is a beautiful girl with brown skin and kind dark eyes, and well, Jamie understands poor sod’s desire to be paired up with her. 

Jamie sees her chance, and stops Rebecca Jessel right after the bell rings. 

“‘Scuse me. Do you know a Clayton? She’s my biology lab partner and I'm looking for her.”

“Dani? Of course! Eddie here’s her boyfriend,” she says amicably, waving her hand at a tall guy with curly dark hair and round glasses.

He pushes his glasses up his nose with the tip of his finger.

“That is not...accurate,” he says.

Fucking weirdo , Jamie thinks. Rebecca laughs. 

“She’s our friend,” Rebecca says. “Come along, we’ll introduce you.”

Jamie follows after the odd pairing, damning her biology teacher to hell. It makes her itch, having so many people around. Reminds her of the group home, just kids stacked on top of kids with no one having enough room to breathe .

“Dani!” Rebecca exclaims, and that is when Jamie gets her first look at Dani Clayton. 

Shit. 

All she sees is a short pink skirt, a white sweater tucked into it. An impressive mane of blonde hair. Clayton looks up, and Jamie takes a look at blue eyes. Has she ever seen blue eyes like that? Not bright, not pale, just...a soft blue. Like bluejeans of the ocean after a storm.

Jamie suddenly feels like poor sod her damn self. 

Christ, that’s a beautiful girl. 

Rebecca introduces them, and Jamie goes through the motions. 

Her hand is soft and her smile is kind. Jamie feels the instant need to turn her nose up at her, at this obvious display of softness. Danielle Clayton looks and talks and moves like a kitten displaying a tender underbelly towards the world, trusting that if she’s nice enough nobody will hurt her. 

It’s ridiculous. It’s the type of person Jamie can't stand. But her smile is so honest, so earnest, she feels like a twat for just thinking it. 

“You’re the british girl,” Dani Clayton points out.

“That’s me, I guess. I, um, I’m your lab partner? So the teacher wanted me to get you the notes for today. And well, to let you know about the group and the project and such.”

“Oh, I was hoping I'd be paired with you, Becca!” Dani exclaims, turning towards the other girl. 

“I’m with Tommy, can you believe it?” Rebecca says. 

They laugh. Jamie just stands there. Behind them, Freddie or whatever his name was—Jamie mentally starts calling him glasses— adjusts his goddamn frames again, looking just as out of place as Jamie suddenly feels. 

She’s standing right there, and all this Dani person can think to do is tell her friend how much she wishes she wasn’t stuck with Jamie. It makes her blood boil, that old familiar feeling of being shown just how unimportant, how unwanted she is, takes over her in a hot rush. 

Dani seems to remember Jamie is right in front her, and is her actual partner, and an actual person.

“No offense, Jamie!” Dani exclaims. “None at all. I'm happy you're my partner. We’re gonna have a lot of fun.”

“No worries,” Jamie tells her, sweet as anything. “Not so great to be stuck with you either. Don’t seem like you’ve got much going on in your head.”

She turns on her heel and walks away, ignoring the outraged “ Hey! ” from glasses, the whispered “What the fuck? ” from Rebecca Jessel, and Dani Clayton’s stunned silence. 

⚜️

(2011. Yorkshire, England.)

Mikey is the loveliest thing Jamie has ever seen. 

He’s small, so very small. He’s all big blue eyes and a surprising shock of blonde hair that no one else in their family has.

He’s special. And when her mum lays a hand on her shoulder and asks if she’s ready to be a big sister, Jamie feels special too. 

She’s going to be the best big sister in the world. 

⚜️

People stare at her more often that day, as the hours drag by. 

Looks born from gossip, and not just general curiosity for the new kid. Clayton must have talked, shared with everyone what a shitty person she is. That’s fine with Jamie. As long as people stay out of her way, she’ll be fine. 

She walks home again, cherishing the 30 minutes of solitude and silence. 

It’s a good routine, one she wasn’t allowed at the group home. They’d been carted from the school gates into the school bus, straight to the house. Mrs.Quint hasn’t said anything, if she’s even noticed, and Jamie plans on taking advantage of that for as long as possible. 

A gentle, warm breeze ruffles her hair. The streets are mostly empty, not yet the time for the work day to let out. The freedom beckons Jamie, whispers playfully in her ears. 

She thinks about running away. She’d be better equipped for it now. She’d been desperate when she first tried it at 12, acted like a wounded animal gnawing its own leg off to survive. She’d been stupid, at 15, thinking she could stand a chance, that she could live on her own looking like such a child still, that they wouldn’t find her. But now...Now she’s almost of age. She’s got things she could sell, a steadily growing stash of cash tucked between the leather of her backpack and the inner lining, pushed through a slit she sliced open with a kitchen knife a couple days ago. 

She’d stand a much better chance now.

But Mrs.Quint hasn’t given her reasons yet, hasn’t showed her hand, and it’d be just as stupid to run away from 3 meals a day and a lock on her door for no reason. 

Jamie craves freedom, but she also isn’t stupid. 

It’s not the time. Not yet, at least.  

⚜️

(2011. Yorkshire, England.)

Mikey’s crib is shoved against one of the walls in Jamie and Denny’s bedroom.

Denny slams doors for days, yelling to their mom about how it’s bad enough he has to share a room with Jamie, and now he’s stuck with the bastard, too. 

Jamie doesn’t know what the words mean, but they make her throat feel tight. 

She doesn’t mind sharing with Mikey. Prefers it, really, after sharing with Denny for as long as she’s been alive. Mikey smiles at her, these days. He’s finally learned how to do it, and Jamie seems to be his favorite person to do it for. 

Denny only smiles when he’s made her cry. 

So she doesn’t mind sharing with Mikey, but the only bad part is that he’s a baby and babies cry.

Some nights, Jamie is the one that has to get out of bed and peek inside the crib, check if Mikey needs his diaper changed. She’s the one that has to go to her parent’s bedroom if it seems he’s hungry, and wake their mum up. 

Some nights, she finds her mum already awake, and Jamie doesn’t understand why she hasn’t gotten up and tended to her little brother already. 

Wonders if, just like with her, she already wants a break from being his mum. 

⚜️

Jamie huffs as she sits up.

She’s always done well in Physical Education, but the tender bruise on her side—almost 2 weeks old, but still prominent, still fading—it’s hindering her movements today.

Usually, she can ignore it. Not so this morning. 

This one’s on her, she knows that. She was leaving the group home, and she’d thought she could give herself the best chance possible at her new house—so she’d taken the phone. Nobody would report stolen items they shouldn’t have in the first place. 

She hadn’t counted on Claire finding her as she stashed it in her backpack. 

Hadn’t realized it would hurt, either, that betrayed look on the other girl’s face, as if sharing a room for 11 months had made them friends , and Jamie had betrayed that. As if they were anything but people thrown together by chance, learning how to survive around one another. Jamie’s never had time for friends. 

The knowledge that she was a betraying little shit hadn’t hurt as much as the punches, though, that Claire had delivered while two of the older boys held her down, and which had directly resulted in the greenish bruise still marring her side, from hip bone to ribs. 

Jamie closes her eyes, takes a breather.

She’s psyching herself up to finish her reps when she hears a set of footsteps which stop right by her side. 

She opens her eyes, and she sees clean white sneakers, the smooth legs, then—Jamie looks away before she finds out what a cheerleader wears under those criminally short skirts. Through the glare of the sunlight, she can make out blonde hair and a somewhat familiar face.

It’s Dani Clayton. And she’s staring at her—at her body.

Jamie looks down to find her t-shirt has ridden up, exposing the massive green and yellow bruise on her side. 

She hastily pushes her shirt down, which seems to bring Clayton out of her trance. 

“Can I help ya?” she asks, and Clayton nearly jumps. 

“Yes,” she finally says. “We need to talk about biology.”

Jamie sits up, uses the time to wipe the sweat from her forehead. 

“What about it?” As long as she’s calm, she’s in control. She knows Dani Clayton’s type, has dealt with dozens of her before. She stares up at her, in her pristine cheerleading uniform, and the feeling from a few days ago simmers in her gut.

Think you’re better than me, don’t you?

“We have to hand in our first assignment next week,” Dani says. “And I’m not about to get a bad grade because of you.”

It sounds practiced, to Jamie’s ears. Weak. 

“It’s not joint work now, is it?” She’d gotten that much from the last class, although admittedly, she’d been distracted by her phone beneath her desk, looking at the cost of apartments in different cities. “You can do your bit, and I’ll do mine.”

“We have to hand it in the same folder, and both our names should be on the first page. We can’t just throw anything together.” Dani drags her hand over her already perfect hair  and tightens her ponytail. “Look,” she says in a softer voice. “I’ll print it. Just send me your part, will you?” She hands Jamie a post-it. She grabs it from her from her spot on the ground. “Here’s my number and my email. Just text me when it’s done.”

Jamie watches her go.

⚜️

(2011. Yorkshire, England.)

Things change at home, and it isn’t just because of Mikey.

Her mum talks to her less and less, is around less and less. When she is, she looks different, prettier, and she smells like perfume. A man she’s never met picks her up, and Jamie has to babysit Mikey until her mum comes back. 

Denny is supposed to babysit both of them, but he never does. It’s up to Jamie. She doesn’t mind. 

But that’s not the only thing that changes.

Denny’s usual shoving and picking on her turn into bitter, angry words.

“Whore,” he calls her, as he brushes past her on his way to the kitchen. 

“Stupid bitch,” Denny whispers, when she drops her plate of cereal one morning before school.

Jamie’s ears burn. Their dad hears him, she’s sure of it, but he doesn’t say anything. He leaves for work right after, and doesn’t come back until after Jamie is in bed, day after day. 

Jamie misses the sting on her palms from catching herself before she hit the ground, whenever Denny shoved her. She misses the bruises from brawls she never used to win.

Somehow, the words from the kids at school and from her brother at home hurt way worse. 

⚜️

“How are you today, Jamie?”

Jamie sits on the comfortable leather couch of Theodora Crain, her newest mandated therapist. It’s only her fourth session with the woman, her second after moving to this new city, but she’s already made peace with the fact that the weekly therapist sessions will be a staple of her life for the foreseeable future. 

Tamara, relentless as she had been, had gotten her to talk when she was in juvie. She’d kept seeing Jamie afterwards, and through the last year, they’d made some leeway with her nightmares. It was the only bad part, she thinks, of moving away one more time. New therapist.

But Tamara had talked to her about Theo, had sung her praises, pretty much. And Theo had told her she’d had a long conversation with Tamara about her, and they’d be working together to continue helping her. She’d even made the trip to Jamie twice, just to meet her and start getting to know her. That had to count for something, Jamie thinks, even if it wasn’t much.

Jamie had grown used to feeling like her life was a game of hot potato for adults to play, but there was nothing to be done about it.

“How are you settling in with Anne?” Theo asks, ignoring the fact Jamie hadn’t answered her first question.

“S’okay,” she says.

“I hear you have a cellphone now,” Theo mentions. “And is that a new backpack?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel about all of this?”

“It’s nice.”

Theo observes her. 

“Okay, let’s cut the bullshit, shall we, Jamie? Give me three real answers. That’s all I’ll ask of you today, and then you’re free to go.”

Jamie blinks. “Are you supposed to curse in front of kids?”

“You’re 17 years old and have mastered the art of single sentence answers. For some reason I think your internal monologue could rival mine when it comes to cursing.”

She doesn’t have an answer to that. This is nothing like what she was expecting. 

“You’re old enough that we can be honest with each other. I think I can really help you, and I also know you don’t think you need help, or you don’t want to be helped. And that’s fine. But I need you to give me something, so we can both do what’s required, and move on with our lives, yeah?”

Jamie is speechless.

“So? Is this place better or worse than the last one?”

Her answer slips out, automatic. 

“I’ve got a phone. ‘Course it’s better.”

“There we go, that’s a start,” Theo says, looking at Jamie. She almost wishes she would jot things down like Tamara did, so her blue eyes wouldn’t be trained on her. It’s eerie. “So would you say you’re more comfortable now? Mrs.Quint agrees with you?”

“I think you know by now nobody agrees with me, but yeah, she’s fine.”

“Okay, and how are you feeling? Really?”

Jamie can do back and forth, she can do this with Theo, but she’s not fully buying the cool therapist routine. The diplomas on the wall show her Theodora Crain has a Phd, and you don’t get a fucking Phd unless you have the money to. This woman doesn’t understand her, can’t understand her, below this cool act she’s putting up. So Jamie decides to test her. 

“Like shit.”

“Why’s that?”

Jamie tugs her shirt up, exposing part of the green bruise on her side.

To her credit, Theo barely reacts.

“Did you get into a fight at your new school?”

“No,” Jamie says, pushing her shirt back down and feeling stupid after not getting the reaction she was hoping for. “That’s, huh. A parting gift from the group home.”

“What happened?”

Jamie gives her a look.

“If nobody is in immediate danger, I’m not telling,” Theo says. “I promise.”

Jamie doesn’t believe in promises.

We’ll be a family now, I promise, her adoptive mom had said when she was just 10 years old and upended her life, taking her and Mikey all the way across the ocean to the states. That had lasted fuck all of time before she’d found herself back in the system, now in a completely different country, young and trembling and alone, this time. Without her baby brother, this time. 

Promises are worthless. 

But consequences are what really matter here. What happens if Theo talks. 

They might take Claire’s phone—and why would she care? Jamie knows she had the beating coming, can’t really argue with the logic of action and reaction, but still, there’s no love lost there. If Theo tells Mrs.Quint, and she decides she doesn’t want a thief in her house—then all the better. If she can take the backpack and the phone she’ll be so much better off when she goes back to the group home.

Jamie quickly calculates all the risks of trusting Theo, and makes her choice. 

“One of my roommates, Claire, had a phone stashed away in the group home. We all sort of shared it. I tried to take it when I was leaving. She found out.”

“Why’d you try to steal it?”

Jamie rolls her eyes. They talked about this last time, about calling things by their name. 

“Thought I could give myself a good start at the new house. Thought by the time Claire noticed I’d be long gone, in a different city.”

Theo nods. 

“I can’t prescribe you anything, but would you take something for the pain? That looks gnarly.”

Jamie feels a smile play at the corner of her lips, and smothers it down. 

“So, I’m a woman of my word. You’re free to go. But before you do...is there anything else you’d like to share with me? Anything at all you’d like to say out loud?”

The freedom outside the door beckons her, but before she automatically says no, Jamie realizes there’s a little nugget of truth begging to be let out.

“I got a lock on my door, at Mrs.Quint’s house. I can lock the door.”

Theo nods. “And how does that make you feel?”

Jamie shrugs, swallows past the tight feeling in her throat. 

“Safe.” 

⚜️

(2012. Yorkshire, England.)

When Jamie gets home from school that day, she finds Mikey screaming his little head off in the playpen in the living room. 

Her dad is at work, and she hears the loud music coming from Denny’s bedroom that means he’s probably smoking cigarettes and ignoring everyone around him. 

It’s not the first time. 

But it feels different, this time.

She picks Mikey up, and gets him to calm down. She sets him down on the floor, and he happily crawls around. Jamie wonders how long he’s been in the playpen by himself. 

Dread growing in her chest, she looks around the house. It feels...different. 

When she enters her parent’s bedroom, her mum’s clothes aren’t in their usual spot. Her jewelry isn’t there anymore either.

Her mum’s gone. 

⚜️

Their first biology assignment is a genealogy tree, because she’s an unlucky motherfucker. 

She’s forced to write down names that she’d rather forget, such as Dennis, Louise, Dennis jr.  Michael. She tries to disconnect from it all, but still ends up shedding a couple of hot tears in the shower later that night. 

Just when she thinks some wounds are closed, they’re picked back open. Such is life. 

The next day, she stays in the library after school hours to use their computers, unwilling to break the quiet routine she’s got going with Mrs.Quint to ask if she has a laptop she can borrow. She puts the thing together, sends it to Dani Clayton, and then texts her to let her know. 

Thanks , is the answer she gets. 

She takes the bus, forgoing her favorite part of the day—walking home—to get there at more or less the time she usually does. Keep the peace, she tells herself. Mrs.Quint has been fucking golden so far, but Jamie is all too aware how the smallest mistake can get a foster parent bent out of shape. 

It’s not until she gets off at the stop nearest Mrs.Quint’s house, that she realizes Dani has sent her a few more texts. 

All printed up and ready to be handed in.

And then,

Any folder color preference? I’ve got red and blue.  

And then, 

I’m going with red. 

And finally,

So what are you doing now? 

As if they were friends. As if they didn’t sit beside each other in biology class in absolute silence, as if Jamie hadn’t pretty much called her an empty-headed bimbo the first time they’d talked. As if Dani qhadn’t said to her friend, right in front of Jamie’s face, that she didn’t want to be her partner for the class at all.

Jamie doesnt answer her. 

⚜️

(2012. Yorkshire, England.)

A few weeks pass, and Jamie keeps waiting for her mum to walk through the door, but she never does. 

Mikey turns one.

Her dad brings home flour and a tub of icing from the store, and asks Jamie if she can put a cake together for him. She doesn’t know how. In a rare act of mercy, Denny looks up a recipe in his computer and prints it for her, and she does her best but it still doesn’t taste right.

They sing happy birthday to Mikey, even though there are no candles ‘cause her dad’s forgotten them. 

The weeks turn into months, and her mum doesn’t come back. Jamie begins to understand she never will. 

They settle into a new life of sorts, after she’s gone. There’s an old lady that looks after Mikey for a few quid while Jamie’s at school, and when she’s home, her brother is her responsibility. 

Jamie puts dinner together, and when Denny is at home she has to serve him a plate too, but he spends less and less time with them anyways. 

She feeds Mikey, and changes his diapers, and on the days that the old lady that looks after him gets sick, Jamie has to skip school. 

Mikey learns to walk, and Jamie is the only one there to cheer him on. 

She’s 9 years old now, but some days she feels much older. 

She makes mac and cheese on the coldest winter afternoon she can remember. The heater is not working properly, and she writes herself a note to remind her dad about it. She bundles Mikey in one of her old coats, and wears gloves while she stirs the cheesy dinner. 

She serves them each a plate, and plops down in front of the TV to have dinner. She’s been trying to teach Mikey to eat with a spoon, but his chubby baby hands drop it every time. 

She’s taking the spoon up to Mikey’s lips when she smells it.

And acrid, awful smell penetrates her nostrils, and Jamie realizes it’s coming from her and Denny’s bedroom. She leaves Mikey on the living room floor while she goes to investigate. 

As soon as she opens the door, she sees the flames. 

There’s Denny’s cigarettes on his bed, and Denny nowhere to be seen, and flames, bright hot flames licking at the sheets and the window drapes.

Her house is on fire.

Chapter Text

Jamie has always thought the old adage of “time passing in the blink of an eye” was pure shite. 

She’s always felt time more slowly than most, she thinks. Always found more solid meaning in “a day” and “a week” instead of “a semester” or “a year”. 

She logically knows a year is a block of time that contains 365 days, but talking about it as an entity makes no sense. She’s never had an entire year of anything. Not the same roof over her head, not the same school—no matter how hard her caseworker tried (or so he said). Hell, not even the same body, as she’s been growing her hair out, maturing in ways she’d rather hide, and collecting endless scars from skirmishes—memorably, the 3 inch silver line on her leg from jumping over barbed wired, from that time she slipped out past curfew at the group home, and then had to hurry back through a shortcut when Claire got word the foster parents were up and about. 

Donkey’s years, Jamie’s dad would have called it, if he’d cared enough about her not to sign his rights away to the first couple that asked.  

It feels like that, here. She goes to class after class, saves day after day of pocket money, has dinner with Mrs.Quint night after night. 

And then, one day, she wakes up and she’s been here for a month—or rather, 29 days. 

If she gets through today and tomorrow, then it’ll be a proper month. 

Mrs.Quint’s is by far the best placement she’s been in since she was a kid. Sure, there've been houses where the foster parents didn’t hover, didn’t look at her twice, but she’ll give up a small bite of freedom—having dinner with the woman each night and answering questions about school—just for the pocket money and the phone. 

She’s set up here, until she ages out. Just needs to keep her head down and hold on for another 10 months and change until she turns 18.  One day at a time.

So of course, things start to go to shit. 

⚜️

(2012. Yorkshire, England.)

Her house is on fire. 

Jamie stares at the flames, unable to look away. She’s never seen this much fire this close. She remembers one winter, when her dad had built a bonfire outside. Denny had grabbed her by the shoulders and joked that he’d throw her in.

Jamie takes a step forward—and then she feels the heat.

That’s what spurs her into action. 

She runs back into the living room, hoists Mikey on her hip, and runs for the door. Her brother is her first thought. Her clothes are in her bedroom, her school notebooks and her stickers, but Jamie knows all too well that you can replace things, you can’t replace people.

She gets outside, only to see Denny stumble back to the house with a few bags of chips in his arms, his eyes red like he gets sometimes when he smokes.

“Denny!” Jamie yells, happy to see him for the first time in forever. This is too big for her. She is too small. 

It seems her desperation doesn’t immediately register, but then he notices the thick gray smoke floating towards the sky. 

“What did you do?!” he screams. “What the fuck did you do, Jamie?!”

“It was your room! Your—your bed! Your cigarettes.”

She realizes the moment it dawns on Danny, the way his eyes get big and he goes pale.

“Fuck!” Denny drops his snacks and runs inside.

“Denny, no! Don’t go back there!”

⚜️

It all starts the minute she walks into school. 

Dani Clayton is near the water fountain, and comes up to her soon as she sees her.

“You left me on seen last night,” she tells her.

It’s not a lie. 

Clayton had texted her last night to get a head start on their next group project, and Jamie hadn’t answered her. She'd never seen the point of talking to classmates outside of school hours—and either way, there's something about Clayton that she finds unsettling.

“We have class today, plenty of time to talk about our project then.”

She starts walking again, and doesn’t slow down her pace.

Clayton huffs. At least it sounds like a huff. Jamie is quite focused on getting to her locker, and tries not to spare a glance at the blonde, who this morning is wearing her pristine, white cheerleading uniform.

It gets on Jamie’s nerves for reasons she can’t pinpoint. 

“The polite thing to do would be—”

“Not polite, am I?” she asks, and then turns a corner, leaving Dani Clayton standing in the middle of the hallway. 

⚜️

(2012. Yorkshire, England.)

Jamie watches their neighbor walk around with her phone to her ear as she tries to get a hold of their dad. Jamie’s learned about mines at school, she doesn’t think he’ll answer her call so far down. 

Their house continues to burn. 

Their neighbor had told her the fire brigade was coming, and Jamie thinks if she focuses, she can hear the sirens in the distance. 

Mikey plays in the dirt by her side, under her watchful eye. She’s not as scared as she thinks she ought to be. Can’t be, not with Mikey depending on her.

Suddenly, there’s a heavy hand on her shoulder. 

“You have to tell them you don’t know what happened,” Denny says. Jamie looks up at him, at his face covered in soot. He looks a lot like their dad, like this. He looks like their dad, period, and she looks like her mom. She doesn’t know how she’s never noticed. “Better yet, tell them you were cooking, and there was a fire in the kitchen.”

Something dark and heavy grows in Jamie’s chest. 

She’s not a liar. 

She wants to tell Denny, but his hand is on her shoulder, his fingers digging in. She says nothing. 

But her brother notices even that. Her silence. The defiant jut of her chin.  

“Listen, you daft fucking cow. You tell them it was my cigarettes, they’re gonna throw me in the slammer and you’ll never see me again, just like mum. Get it? Don’t be stupid, Jamie. We’re in deep shit. Tell them you don’t know.”

Jamie clenches her jaw. Mikey tries to crawl away from her, and she picks him up and sets him down on her lap.

“Leave the bloody baby alone, and look at me,” Denny, demands. His hand grasps her jaw.

“I’m your older brother, and you’re going to do what the fuck I say, d’you hear me?”

Finally, Jamie nods.

⚜️

Jamie walks down the hallway in the direction of the Biology classroom.

She’s a bit late, but she feels it’s rather undignified to hurry to her mediocre education, so she doesn’t. 

She’s turning a corner when she’s pushed forward, two bodies bumping into her from either side. Her notebook slides out of her hands, and Jamie catches it before it hits the ground. She looks up at the guilty parties, all white uniforms trimmed with light blue. Rebecca Jessel and a redhead whose name she doesn’t know. Push too strong to be an accident. No apology. Their giggles confirm it.  

Jamie clenches her teeth as she walks the rest of the way through class, a safe distance behind Jessel and her friend, less she kills them. 

She slides into her assigned wooden bench behind the table she shares with Clayton, quietly fuming. 

Fucking cheerleaders. Fucking high school cliques. It wasn’t bloody fair she’d gotten so behind from moving around so often she’d had to repeat an entire year a few years back. She should’ve been close to graduating by now. And instead—

“Sent your friends to do your dirty work?” she asks Dani Clayton, taking advantage of the fact the teacher isn’t here yet. 

“What?” Clayton asks, making a damn good impression of an innocent. 

Jamie points with her chin to the corner of the room where Rebecca Jessel sits with Poor Sod, her self-appointed lab partner. Maybe Jamie would’ve done better if she’d ended up stuck with that guy, instead of Clayton. 

Jamie is familiar with men—their anger, their violence. She’s almost comfortable with it. If you’re tough enough they won’t fuck with you, and if they do, what’s a bruised lip? A punch in the kidney? Women are more subtle creatures. Jamie hates to shit on her own gender, but she’s familiar with the whispered insults, the rumours spread under breath. The way cheerleaders like Dani can gang up on a person like a pack of wolves, and cause far more damage than any physical blow. 

And the worst thing—the way a girl can slide between the ribs like curling vines, try and take hold of her heart before she notices it’s really poison ivy. 

When given a choice, Jamie will always go for the sticks and stones. Words can be worth nothing, or mean everything, or hurt like hell, depending on who wields them. There’s a comfort in a bruise—it’s always the same.

“Becca…?” Clayton trails off, and Jamie realizes she’s been staring off into space. “What happened with Becca?” Clayton asks. “What do you mean?”

Jamie huffs. She doesn’t care for liars. 

“Bit middle school to shove people, innit? I prefer an actual fight myself.”

Clayton, still pretending to be confused, lowers her eyes to Jamie’s side. To her ribs. Jamie still walks favoring her other side, pure muscle memory even after the bruise has thankfully faded.

“I could tell,” Clayton says, pursing her lips. “But I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she doubles down. “I certainly didn’t tell them to do anything to you, let alone shove you.”

The teacher walks into the classroom, and everyone straightens up. 

“Yeah, alright,” Jamie whispers, and opens her notebook. 

The class passes by in silence, between notes taken and Clayton’s stares avoided. 

Jamie is on her feet as soon as the bell rings, intent on avoiding Rebecca Jessel and her sidekick. She wouldn’t, not usually, but she’s set up at Mrs.Quint’s. She has a bloody phone. She won’t let stupid, vapid high-school shite be what removes her from a placement that seems too good to be true. 

But of course, there’s someone waiting for her as she gets out of the classroom. 

She doesn’t know the bloke, thinks maybe he’s a senior as they don’t share any classes. He’s wearing a football jacket, as if announcing to the world you’ve got brain damage is a good thing. 

He steps into her path, and Jamie’s heart stops—and she hates that it does. She’s not afraid of him. 

“Hey! You’re the British girl, aren’t you.”

“Guess so,” she tells him, and then pivots to walk a different path instead of telling him to piss off. Her body protests against it, but she forces herself to concentrate on the weight of her phone in her pocket—her first piece of personal property. Just keep your head down. 

“Not much of a talker, are you?”

She clenches her jaw. “Got to get to class.”

She changes course yet again. 

“Aw, don’t leave me hanging!”

Can’t afford to get in trouble with the school, Jamie thinks. Can’t knock his teeth in. 

“Baby! I bet there’s something worth looking at under that jacket, you gonna let me find out?”

Jamie freezes in her tracks.

“What was that, mate?” she asks, turning around and meeting his eyes. 

They’re mocking, cruel—and hungry. He eyes her up and down like she’s a piece of meat, like he can see under her clothes. 

Jamie is about to say fuck it and take a step forward, when the guy laughs, and a moment later, Rebecca Jessel’s redhead friend links her arm with him. More classes let out, and the hallway begins to flood with kids. 

Jamie turns around and walks away, fuck him.

She hears a soft but righteous “knock it off!” and a quick glance over her shoulder shows her it’s Clayton, hand on her hip, something close to scolding the guy and the redhead.

Jamie frowns. Maybe she hadn’t told her friends anything, Jamie thinks. Clayton resembles so much a teacher with naughty kids, as she turns the corner, that Jamie almost gets a kick out of it. Almost, but she can't. Because the guy’s slimy fucking look...she’s still trying to shake it off. 

⚜️

(2012, Yorkshire, England.)

She keeps her word, and doesn’t tell anyone about Denny’s cigarettes—not that they ask her. 

The fire brigade puts out the fire, and Jamie thinks that’s it, but then a few other people show up. A lady steps out from a black car, and spends ages talking to Denny. Every once in a while, they look back at her and Mikey, huddled on the back of an ambulance, a scratchy blanket over their shoulders. Mikey dozes on her lap.

The lady walks over to Jamie, and sits by her side on the ambulance. She offers her a chocolate, and Jamie readily takes it. They didn’t get to finish dinner. She’s starving. 

“I was just talking to your brother, Jamie, and first of all, I want you to know you’re not in trouble.”

Jamie frowns. Why would she be?

“Dennis was telling me that your dad works most of the day, and he looks after the two of you. He told me what happened today. I know you were hungry, and it’s okay if you couldn’t wait for him to come back with dinner. But kids are not supposed to try to cook without an adult, do you understand?”

Anger swirls in Jamie’s gut. Anger, and betrayal. Denny is a liar. He’s a dirty bloody liar, and she’s too small and even if she tells, and she wants to, this lady won’t believe her. Everyone likes Denny, and no one likes her. Everyone calls her a whore like her mum. It doesn’t matter what she says.  

The lady keeps talking, even though Jamie hasn’t answered her. 

“But you shouldn’t have been alone. Especially alone with your little brother. What happened is not your fault, okay?”

Jamie focuses on Mikey’s little body curled up on her lap to keep from shaking. 

Every word feels like poison, like the poison ivy she stepped into when she was little and her mum was still around. Her mom had laughed like mad, and said she needed to be more careful. Jamie’s legs had been red and itchy for hours. 

Something is red and itchy now, deep inside, somewhere she can’t reach.

“Your brother is only fourteen, and taking care of two younger siblings at that age can be a lot of responsibility. I know your mother left, and we haven’t been able to locate your dad,” the lady keeps talking. 

She places her hand on Jamie’s shoulder, right where Denny had dug his fingers in not an hour ago. 

“Everything that’s been happening...You kids shouldn’t have been going through all of it. And I wanted to tell you that I’m here to help. I’m with Children’s Services, have you ever heard that name?”

Jamie shakes her head. 

And then listens, with her heart on her throat, how her life is about to go up in flames just like her house did. 

⚜️***

Jamie wakes up with a jolt, the nightmare still fresh in her mind.

Her shirt sticks to her body with sweat.

It’s always like this.

In her dream, she’s lying in bed, staring at the door. She can’t move. Can’t speak. Her mouth has fused, or disappeared altogether, so where her lips should be only a blank, smooth piece of skin remains.  

Can’t speak up, can’t talk, can’t move. It’s like sleep paralysis, but worse, because this was real once upon a time. Like sleep paralysis, but not quite, because she isn’t awake—she’s dreaming. And the dream goes on. The door opens, and there’s heavy footsteps, and then—

Jamie drags herself out of bed. 

She wants to shower until she’s raw, until she rubs away completely the feeling of big meaty hands pawing at the softest parts of her.

She showers for a solid hour and then carries her sopping wet, miserable self back to bed. But sleep eludes her. She turns, kicks off the blankets,  as she tries to sleep

It’s stupid. So bloody fucking stupid. She was over this shite. She was fine. ***

But is she ever really fine? Back at school today—that was nothing. Literally nothing, and she’s having nightmares now on its account? Stupid. And Clayton...she’d stood up for her. She didn’t need nor want her to, but she’d gone up to the guy and—she drags her hand down her face. She probably had nothing to do with Rebecca Jessel and her ginger friend and that bloke messing with her. Hell, maybe she overreacted that first day with Clayton, too. Dani.

Maybe she’s just prickly, a thorn in everyone’s side, or simply covered in thorns.

She still can’t fucking sleep. Her thoughts wander.

Feels like she’s always been this fucked up. Can’t remember a time she wasn’t. Maybe she was born this bitter and untrusting. And maybe everything that’s happened to her—maybe she had it coming, maybe it was something she did. Maybe Denny could tell when she was a wee little thing and he took to calling her whore around the house. Her mum certainly didn’t care enough about her to stay, and her dad didn’t give enough of a fuck not to let her be taken away. Maybe she deserves every helping of shit she’s ever gotten on her plate.  

The spiraling thoughts drown her.

She doesn’t believe that, she doesn’t. It’s just her brain being stupid. A trauma response, Tamara called it. Her brain sucks. She sucks. Christ, people suck. In general, every single one. People just aren’t worth it. Jamie can’t wait to fuck off out of here and live out of a car, alone, in the middle of the fucking woods. 

She drags her hands down her face, tears wetting her palms.

She’s not sure when she falls asleep, but the knocking on her door wakes her up.

“Jamie, dear, are you awake? You’re gonna be late for school.”

Shit. 

⚜️

(2012, Manchester, England.) 

The oatmeal doesn’t taste like anything here.

Jamie isn’t sure where here even is. She heard the words Children’s Home, and Machenster, and the previous night they seemed to drive for hours. Jamie fell asleep on the way, her hand on Mikey’s car seat. 

She remembers asking for her dad as she was led to a bed inside a brightly painted room. She remembers screaming when they tried to take Mikey to a different room, and then finally falling asleep when they brought in a crib and laid him to sleep there, right next to her bed. 

She has no idea where Denny slept, but he sits down next to her now, a similar bowl of oatmeal in his hands. 

It really doesn’t taste like anything. Jamie wonders if she can ask for cinnamon, like her mum used to put on hers when she was in a good mood. 

She doesn’t. She picks up Mikey’s spoon, intent on feeding him breakfast like always, but Denny beats her to it.

“Let me do it,” he says. 

“Why?”

“Just let me feed him. Isn’t he my brother?”

“You said he wasn’t. You called him a bastard.”

“Lower your voice.”

“It’s my job.”

“Jamie, shut up.”

Mikey looks on, unalarmed, used by now to the fighting. 

“But it’s my job,” she tells him. “I have to feed him, it’s my job!” he yells at Denny, trying to grab the spoon. 

She doesn’t know what he’s playing at, but she doesn’t like it. He’s a different person in front of these people and she hates it. She hates not knowing where she is, and why their dad won’t talk to them, and why Denny is acting like this. 

“You’ve never wanted to feed him, it’s always been me!”

Denny grabs her wrist and pulls it under the table, and then twists the skin on her arm between two fingers, hard. Jamie yelps, and tears flood her eyes. 

“Say something like that again in public, and I’ll put a pillow over your head when you sleep, ya hear me?”

Jamie wants to weep. 

She thinks deep down, she always wants to, at least a little, but she knows there’s not any point because nobody cares, and nobody is listening. 

“Where’s dad?” she asks, trembling. He’d get home late, and covered in soot, but he’d pat her head and say thanks for the plate of food Jamie fixed him, even if it was just Mac and Cheese. 

“We’re not seeing him anymore,” Denny tells her. “He doesn’t want us.”

“You’re lying.”

“Am I? Then where is he?” he asks, cruelty twisting his lips. “Listen, here’s the deal: Mum left, and Dad doesn’t want us, and this is what it’s gonna be like from now on, get it?”

He’s done talking by the time the lady from last night sits in front of them, next to Mikey’s high chair. 

“Jamie, sweetie, are you okay?” she asks. She sounds so kind Jamie wants her to hold her, to give her a hug like her mum used to. 

Jamie bites her lip and nods, feeling Denny’s eyes on her. 

“I know it’s hard, darling, but it’s going to get easier,” she promises. “I have news. For the time being, we’ve found a wonderful carer here in Manchester who will take you in for the next month. We’ll work on something more permanent later, and especially someplace where you can all stay together, okay?”

Jamie wishes it could be just her and Mikey. Her arm throbs. 

“That sounds great. Thank you, really,” Denny tells the lady. “But why can’t we stay here? There’s...I mean, there’s way more kids here, for Jamie to play with.”

The lady smiles. “It’s nice that you worry about your sister, but the needs she and the baby have, not to mention yourself, are far too different for a home of 15 plus children. This was an emergency situation so we brought you in here last night, but it’s not ideal for any of you. With a carer, you’ll each be able to receive individual attention,” she says to him, but looks at Jamie.

“This is a really great placement, Dennis. Our carer works from home, and she has training with infants. She’ll be able to take good care of your baby brother and Jamie, and you’ll have her support as well. You’ll have your own room in this house. I think it’s a great opportunity. We’re moving you tomorrow.”

Denny nods, and smiles. 

But it’s the smile he uses when Jamie has told on him with their dad, and he didn’t care, or didn’t believe her anyway. The awful itchy feeling inside her chest grows. 

Jamie wonders if it’s her heart.

⚜️

Jamie drags her feet as she enters school. 

She feels like pure shit. 

The lack of sleep is doing her in, and she can feel a headache coming on. If it was up to her, she’d be at a park bench somewhere, getting some shut eye. But she had to come. It's not school she cares about, she routinely took vacation at her last one, where they didn’t care enough to chase her foster parents about it. But here...she hasn’t seen Mrs.Quint’s bad side. 

She doesn’t need to give the school reasons to call her, doesn’t need to give her reasons to kick her out. She’s got to be on her best behaviour. 

She still feels like shite.

She has Algebra first period, a class she shares with Dani Clayton. Jamie’s bleary eyes notice her, all bright blonde hair and a soft-looking pink sweater, one desk ahead to her right. 

Her brain is too slow and stupid to look away when Dani looks back. 

“Hey, good morning,” Dani says. 

Jamie is too taken aback not to answer. “Morning.”

She thinks she falls asleep in class, she’s not sure.

The board is different every time she looks at it, and her notes don’t make a lick of sense. 

“Pssst.”

Jamie peels her eyes away from her notebook to meet Dani Clayton’s denim blue eyes.
 
“Can I help you?”

“Are you okay?" Dani whispers. "You don’t look well. Not that you look bad! It’s just. You seem...sick.”

Why do you even care?  She wants to ask. We’re not bloody friends. 

“Mind your business, Clayton,” is what she tells her, “and I’ll mind mine.” 

Dani says a couple more things—something about their biology project, she’s sure—throughout the hour. The teacher says many things more. Jamie nods when required of her, but processes none of it.

⚜️

(2012, Manchester, England.) 

Jamie wakes up in the middle of the night.

Her cheek hurts a little, and she realizes she fell asleep on a big crease on her pillow. She drags her hand across her face, opening her eyes against the dark of the room. 

Mikey is asleep in his crib. 

Denny is dressed in his street clothes, standing at the bottom of her bed. 

For one awful second, Jamie wonders if he’s going to put her pillow over her face, but he doesn’t.

“Hey,” he says his voice low. “Look, I just wanted to say goodbye.”

Jamie sits up in bed.

“Where...where are you going?”

“Don’t know. London, maybe. I can’t be here. I’m not a kid anymore. I have to make my own way, you understand? So just, well, take care of yourself and the kid. You’ll be fine.”

Jamie isn’t sure if she’s still dreaming. 

“Goodbye, Jamie.”

He closes the door after himself, and then all that permeates the room is silence, and the sound of the cars outside. 

Jamie will never see her older brother again. 

⚜️

She’s nursing a massive headache by the time she gets home. 

It’s always like this, a single nightmare and she gets on a roll, lets it ruin her day, her goddamn week. Makes her feel weak. If she was at the group home, she would’ve been able to disappear under the covers for a few days. Smoked something from Claire’s stash to get over it quicker. Skipped school. But here—

There’s a knock on her bedroom door, that feels like nails being hammered into her skull.

“Can I come in?” Mrs.Quint asks. 

“Okay,” Jamie says, forcing her voice above a whisper.  

Mrs.Quint steps inside her bedroom. 

“Jamie, I don't feel like cooking today. I'm ordering in. Do you have a favorite?”

“Anything’s fine, ma’am.”

“Please, don’t call me ma’am. I mean, you can call me whatever you're comfortable with. But you can call me Anne. Or Mrs.Quint, if you like. But ma’am’s so formal. Know what I mean?”

Jamie looks up at the woman. She’s in her 50’s, most likely, dark blonde hair streaked with white. She looks harmless, and earnest, and Jamie wishes she could just take people at face value. 

“Yes ma’—Mrs.Quint.”

“Okay. Well, does pizza sound good?”

She nods.

“Jamie.”

Jamie looks up at her again, not quite sure when she allowed her eyes to wander away. 

“I don’t want to intrude, but are you feeling okay?”

Jamie shakes her head, and stops when it makes the pain flare up. 

“Just a headache, is all.”

Mrs.Quint nods. “Okay. I’ll let you know when the pizza gets here.” 

⚜️

(2012, Manchester, England.)

With Denny gone, there’s a change of plans. 

She and Mikey are moved to a different carer, but the lady—who says she is her and Mikey’s social worker—says it’s not the same person from before, that she’s found someone else for a few days. A couple.

Her social worker asks about Denny, and Jamie—thankful she doesn’t have to lie anymore—tells her the truth. He said goodbye to her. He said he’d go to London. That’s all she knows. 

Jamie feels weird. On the one hand, she’s relieved she won’t have to see Denny anymore. That he won’t get to push her around, or pinch her, or call her names. But on the other hand...he’s her brother. Mum left, and Denny said Dad doesn’t want them anymore, and now Denny’s left too. It’s just her and Mikey. 

She holds his little hand, and he looks at her, gives her a smile full of drool. How much does he understand? Jamie wonders. Does he remember their mum? Does he know how close they came to get hurt in the fire? Does he know Denny is gone?

“Saymie” he says, his attempt at her name. All his Js sound like an S. Jamie doesn’t mind. 

Mikey is the only person who’s never ignored her, ever, never been mean.

“I love you, Mikey,” she whispers. How much does he know? Especially when there are things she doesn’t even know herself. 

Like: are they still a family, if there’s just the two of them?

Jamie tries to put it out of her head. 

The new carers are closer to the Children’s Home where she’s been sleeping the past two days. Her social worker leaves them at the new house, the pajamas they gave her at the children’s home packed in a trash bag. 

Mr. and Mrs.Hughes are, well, huge. Jamie makes the joke to herself inside her head, and covers her mouth with her fist. They spend most of the day watching TV, and every night they order take-away, or so Bobby—one of the other kids in the house—tells her. Jamie likes the idea of it. 

She’s never had take-away that often, only on special occasions. 

Bobby talks her ear off all afternoon, while the two older kids, about Denny’s age, play basketball outside. She’s sharing a room with Bobby, and there’s a playpen set up for Mikey in the corner of Mr. and Mrs.Hughes bedroom.

Tonight’s meal is Mexican food. Jamie has never had it.  

The guy from the restaurant arrives in a motorcycle at half-past 6, and for the first time since she can remember, Jamie is excited. 

Bag after bag are placed on the kitchen table, and Mrs.Hughes passes cartons around to each of them. 

“Jess, tacos. Robbie, burrito. Sister, how old are you? Twelve?”

Jamie looks up, realizing Mrs.Hughes means her.

“I’m ni—almost ten.”

“Reckon that’s old enough. Feed your brother, will ya? I got him some plain beef. Don’t want his stomach to get messed up. Feed it to him with some crackers. There’s frozen peas in the fridge too.”

Jamie nods.

“Bobby, tacos. Sister, I got you a burrito bowl, alright?”

Jamie nods again. 

It’s the best thing she’s ever tasted. There’s beans, and rice, and chicken, and she’s familiar with all of those things but not like this. Veggies, and at least three different sauces, and a thick white cream on top.It’s spicy, too, to the point it makes her eyes water. 

She eats next to Mikey and Bobby on the kitchen floor, and she thinks that Denny was wrong, like he was wrong about a lot of things, because this isn't so bad. Bobby is a little annoying, and Mr. and Mrs.Hughes are strange, but there’s tons of food, more than they had at home. 

She stuffs herself like she hasn’t in ages. 

Her stomach starts hurting around ten. Mr. and Mrs.Hughes don’t have a bedtime, and Bobby says as long as they’re quiet they can stay up for as long as they want. 

She ignores it, at first, but then she can’t. Bobby tells her not to, but she goes to Mrs.Hughes, and whispers a miserable “My tummy hurts.”

Mrs.Hughes takes a look at her.

“There’s painkillers in the bathroom.”

She doesn’t know which ones to take, and her stomach hurts too much to try when she gets there. She goes to the loo, sweat covering her forehead. And finally, she’s sick.

It burns her nose and her throat and she chokes on it, her eyes tearing up. 

She hears someone open the bathroom door, and then a surprised yelp. 

“Shit, new girl’s speaking Welsh,” she hears, from one of the older kids. A chuckle follows right after. “Poor thing.”

Jamie wants her dad. She wants her mum. She even wants Denny. She’s crying, and she stinks, and she hurts. 

She presses her clammy forehead to the gross tile of the bathroom floor, because at least it’s cold. 

She’s not sure how long she stays there. 

She thinks maybe she falls asleep, because suddenly she’s hearing Mikey crying, and Mrs.Hughes’ voice coming from the living room. 

“Why’s that baby crying?!” Mrs.Hughes exclaims. “Three of you lot in this house, and not a single one can pick up that baby?” 

Jamie drags herself up from the bathroom floor. She still feels poorly, almost too much to walk. But Mikey. He’s woken up. She needs to take care of him. 

She gets him out of the play-pen, and sits with him on the floor until he quiets down.

“Mikey,” she groans. “Think I’m ill.” 

She doesn’t know how much her brother understands, but he puts his tiny little hand on her face, and that somehow makes her feel better. 

She’s sick through the night. 

She tries drinking some water, but it comes right back up.

She debates whether she should tell Mrs.Hughes, but then she hears a “clean up after yourself” from her as she’s heading to her bedroom sometime after midnight, and Jamie realizes they know, they just don’t care. 

The next morning, she’s still unwell. She feeds Mikey, but she can’t bear to eat. By nightfall, she forces herself to eat some crackers. On day 3 at this new house, she’s back to normal, and starving. She ignores Bobby when he tells her she eats like a cow. Today’s take-away is pizza, which she’s had before many times. Jamie stuffs herself again.  

On day 4, her social worker parks in front of Mr. and Mrs.Hughes house, tells her she has found someone fantastic who is waiting for them, and packs her and Mikey into the same black car as always. 

⚜️

Jamie keeps her cold hands to her forehead, enjoying the brief respite from the pain. About fifteen minutes later, however, Mrs.Quint knocks on her door again, softer this time. Is the pizza already...?

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah,” Jamie whispers. It’s her house. Why does she even ask?

Mrs.Quint comes in, this time bearing a glass of water and two white pills.

She makes Jamie sit up, and take the pain medication. 

And she asks if Jamie would like to have dinner in bed.

And to let her know if she’s okay in the morning, or if she should call the school and let them know she’s not coming. 

Jamie breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth. Her eyes hurt, and it's not from the headache anymore, not from the knots she’s tied herself into. It’s just that it’s so hard to keep her walls up when she hurts, and deep, deep down, she’s always wanted someone to care.

To look at her and see something worth taking care of. 

But Jamie knows that’s an illusion. That it’s not real, it never is. She’s nothing but a paycheck, and she just needs to hold on 'til she can get out. 

⚜️

(2012, Manchester, England.)

Her new carer’s name is Rosie McKinley, and she tells Jamie she can call her Miss McKinley.

She feels weird watching her take care of Mikey, feels too much like it’s her job and not this stranger’s, but she has things to do here. She’s supposed to make her bed every morning, when back home no one had cared, and she’s supposed to do school work, to read history and do maths. They tell her she’s finishing out the school year with a homeschooling program for children in care. 

Jamie wonders if that’s what she is now. 

Things are different, here, than they were with Mr. and Mrs.Hughes

Miss McKinley tucks her in at night, and brushes her hair from her forehead, and smiles—not like Denny used to smile, cruel, or like the girls at school used to smile when they made fun of her, or like her mum used to smile, sad and not all-there. 

Miss McKinley smiles at her, and Jamie thinks it might be something like pity. She doesn’t care. She wants to sink into it.

But it’s hard. 

Miss MckKinley wakes her up every morning at the same time, makes breakfast for her and Mikey, she does schoolwork and then it’s time for lunch. In the afternoon, they get to watch TV while she cooks dinner. She tucks Jamie in, night after night. 

It’s never been like this, not even when her mum was still around or before Mikey.

She finishes her last maths exam one friday afternoon, and at lunch time, Miss McKinley slides a fairy cake in front of her. 

“Congrats, Jamie!”

Jamie is torn between smiling and frowning. It’s not her birthday. She doesn’t know what’s happening. 

“Today was your last day of school,” she tells her. “Half-term, remember? You get a little holiday! Isn’t that exciting?”

She’s not sure. 

When she didn’t have to go to school, she took care of Mikey all day long, and she thinks sometimes they got a bit sick of each other. Besides, Jamie liked school. She liked having something to do, kicking a ball with some of the boys at recess. 

She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do in Miss McKinley’s house. 

“Thank you,” she tells her, and slices her fairy cake in three even pieces to share with Mikey and Miss McKinley. 

Miss McKinley smiles at her in that way she does. “Oh Jamie, you’re a darling thing, did you know that?” 

What she’s supposed to do turns out to be nothing at all. She plays in the backyard as much as she wants, while Miss McKinley takes care of Mikey inside. It’s cold, but she doesn’t care. She captures crickets and ladybugs between her palms. They watch movies and Miss McKinley orders pizza. 

One afternoon, a nanny comes to take care of Mikey, and Miss McKinley takes Jamie to the mall. She doesn’t want to go, at first, feeling ill at the thought of leaving her brother, but Miss McKinley convinces her. A ladies’ trip, she calls it. 
She sees a movie at the movie theater. She gets ice cream, afterward. And when she gets home, Mikey is happy and perfectly fine. 

Life has never been like this for Jamie...but little by little, she begins to convince herself that it could be. 

Tonight, Miss McKinley places Mikey in his crib, tucks Jamie in, and reads them a story. Mikey is asleep, so it’s like she’s reading just to Jamie, and it makes her feel special. 

Jamie decides that it’s okay to like this. That she can breathe easy.

Miss McKinley finishes the story, but as she gets up, Jamie’s hand shoots out and grabs her wrist—the first time she’s touched her first. 

“Can I have another story, please?” she asks. Begs.

Miss McKinley smiles. 

“Of course, sweetie,” she says. She tucks her in again, and brushes her messy curly hair away from her forehead, and sits back down. 

Jamie lays her head back on the pillow, and closes her eyes. Mikey is safe in his crib, and Denny ran away so she doesn’t have to see him, and her mum might have left and her dad might not want her, but Miss McKinley will make her breakfast in the morning tomorrow and smile at her, and maybe everything will be alright. 

Jamie falls asleep with a smile on her face. 

The next morning, her social worker is at the door. She and Mikey are moved somewhere else. 

Chapter Text

The days hurry along, and Jamie chases after them until she catches up.

The nightmare doesn’t happen again. She hopes—knowing it’s futile—that it will be the last. Time marches on. The trees outside her homeroom classroom begin to turn red with the impending fall. October 5th. She’s been an entire month here. A month and change. 

It’s difficult, fighting the feeling of permanence that wants to take over. 

It’s human, Jamie thinks. She knows that people, when given enough time, can get used to anything. The body wants to settle. The mind craves it, too. The stillness. The dependability. And when you’ve gotten dealt a shit hand in life, it’s fucking tragic. People get used to beatings, to worse. She made a promise to herself a couple years ago to never let herself get comfortable in a sea of shit. But that’s what the body always wants: to be comfortable.

For most people, it’s easy. They don’t have to fight it. For most people it means a nice, solid job, a house under their name, a pet or a spouse. A nice, boring life. A life that feels like it can endure, that looks dull, monotonous, maybe, but Jamie knows it actually means stable . 

She doesn’t get the privilege of stability, so she makes do. One day at a time. When she ages out, when she’s finally free, she’ll carve a place for herself out there. She just has to hold on until then, and not get comfortable . 

The bell rings, and she gathers her brown leather backpack—still as great as it was the day she got it from Mrs.Quint—and gets out of class. 

She’s not expecting Dani Clayton to step into her path before she manages to leave the classroom. 

“Hi, Jamie.”

“I—Hey.”

“So, where do you live?”

“Excuse me?”

Dani’s easy demeanor cracks a little, like she was hoping Jamie wouldn’t be difficult. And truthfully—she hadn’t meant to be. She just has no fuckin’ clue what Clayton’s going on about. 

“Biology? The group project?” Dani clarifies, when Jamie remains gaping like a fish. “A few days ago you said it would be okay for me to come over after school. Today. Did you forget?”

“...No.” I was just too fucked up last week, and never heard you say that in the first place. “I—huh. I have to check with my...I have to check. I’ll let you know, yeah?”

“Sure,” Dani tells her, seemingly placated. “Well, talk to you later.”

Jamie watches her go.

She realizes she’s got an appointment with Theo that afternoon a minute too late. 

Tomorrow then. She sends a message about it to Mrs.Quint during lunch, aware that the only cell phone numbers gracing her phone are her caseworker’s, her foster mother’s, and her therapist’s. And Dani Clayton. 

All of them, in one way or another, stuck with her sorry arse.

⚜️

(2012, Manchester, England.)

Jamie gets used to it, the bouncing around.

She stops talking to the other kids, stops talking to the carers too. There’s no point. They’ll move her and Mikey again soon, be it a week or a month after they arrive. 

She only really talks to Mikey.

He turns 2 years old, and he talks back more than ever. Jamie’s glad that on the day, the carer buys him a small cake, and a birthday hat. He gets a gift wrapped up in proper green wrapping paper, and Jamie is glad that he can’t read, because there’s “Baby boy, ages 2 to 4” scribbled outside. 

The birthday present’s not for him, not really. 

It’s for any baby like him, any of the other many babies Jamie has seen in the houses they’ve passed through. There’s ones that cry too much, and others too little. And some that seem sick, and she’s not sure if they’re really there at all. But not her brother. Her brother has her. 

And he also has a plastic train set for his 2nd birthday.

The carer takes a photo, and they promise to print it for Jamie, but they’re both moved somewhere else a few days later, and she never gets it. 

⚜️

Jamie looks for Clayton after last period. 

Mrs.Quint says it’s fine for Dani to come over tomorrow, and Jamie is possessed by the need to let the girl know that she can do some things on schedule after all. So, she looks for her after final period—and find her she does. Glasses, the tall guy that usually hovers around Clayton and Jessel, is leaning over her beside her locker.

Dani Clayton pushes his glasses up his nose.

The sight makes Jamie stop in her tracks. It's...intimate. Uncomfortable to look at. It almost feels like intruding. And honestly, fuck them for doing that—whatever that is—on the hallway.

“Oi, Clayton?”

Dani looks her way.

She kisses the guy on the cheek before she follows after Jamie. Jamie looks away.

Tamara would have a lot to say about that, about how her first reaction to other people dating being contempt and annoyance. Like anyone being even remotely happy deserves Jamie's disdain. 

“You didn’t have to...anyway. You can come over after school, but I've got something today. Doctor’s appointment. Tomorrow alright?”

Dani nods. “Yeah, sure. We’ve got two weeks to hand it in. You okay?”

“Huh?”

“Your doctor’s appointment. Is everything okay?”

God, she’ll never get used to Americans. The limitless inability to be nosey, to be in other people's business, to call acquaintances, friends.

“Yeah...yeah.” What else is she supposed to say to that?   “Okay, well. I texted you my address so…”

  Dani walks backward, probably off to join her boyfriend and her gaggle of friends.

“Don’t be silly, we can walk together tomorrow.”

⚜️

(2012,  Stockport, Greater Manchester, England.)

They spend Christmas at a children’s home much like the one they slept in that first night, after their house went up in flames. They get Christmas presents. Mikey gets new clothes and a stuffed animal. Jamie gets an ugly doll, which she exchanges with a slightly older girl for a puzzle. She accidentally leaves the puzzle behind when they’re moved to a different set of carers with only a few minutes notice to pack. 

They spend New Years with a couple that make them go to church for hours. By the time they get home, their dog is going mad from the fireworks. 

It’s only her and Mikey in this house, and that’s different. It’s better. They have ham and mashed potatoes for dinner, and they watch TV. The couple—Jamie didn’t bother to learn their names—let her stay up until midnight. 

Mikey sleeps in the bedroom.

Everything feels weird. Wrong.

She remembers before Mikey was even born, how her dad would sit on his armchair, and she would sit on his lap, and they’d wait for the New Year. Denny wasn’t allowed out back then, and he’d sit on the couch with their mum. Jamie remembers how she and her dad would watch the clock arms, and how he’d repeat ‘black rabbits, black rabbits’ until the clock struck 12. He’d change it to ‘white rabbits’ after, because it was supposed to be good luck. 

She’s in a strange house, with strange people that are not her mum and dad, because her mum left and her dad doesn’t want her, and her older brother is gone too. It’s just her and Mikey. 

The TV shows a countdown, and tons and tons of people from a place called Time Square, but Jamie only looks at the clock below the TV.  

“Black rabbits, black rabbits, black rabbits,” Jamie says under her breath, her eyes on the digital clock showing 11:59. 

Her carer snaps her head to the side, her eyes trained on Jamie.

“No,” she snaps. “No! We do not abide superstition in this household. This is a Christian household. God only knows how you were raised girl, but you will not—”

“Ava.”

“—be spouting any of that nonsense under my roof. Heaven knows I don’t know what I expected, taking in your sort—”

“Ava.”

“And don’t you start, Michael, you know we should’ve never left London—”

“Ava! Happy New Year, dear.”

“I missed it!” The witch turns her eyes on Jamie once more. “Just—ugh. Go to bed, girl.”

Jamie wonders if blood can really boil, because that's what it feels like. 

⚜️

“Has anything changed since we last saw each other?”

Theo, as always, is the picture of coolness sitting in front of her. Her long dark hair is gathered over one shoulder, and she’s crossing her legs at her ankles. Jamie, in her overalls and a wrinkled plaid shirt, can’t help feeling slightly out of place on her leather couch. Maybe that’s part of it. The mind-control of it all. 

“Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

Jamie keeps quiet. She...struggles. 

Because Theo might be cool, apparently, but she isn’t Tamara. And she’s supposed to be able to talk to Theo, supposedly, but it’s one thing to know it and another thing to do it. Trust is what it is. 

What it always comes down to.

“Jamie?”

“I…”

“You can talk to me. It’s literally what I'm here for.”

The nightmare came back, the bloody nightmare she thought was gone for good. How does she say that? How does she start?

Theo looks at her shoes. Jamie's eyes follow hers. They’re black boots, like Jamie’s, but significantly less cuffed. 

Jamie looks at the roof. 

“School’s shite,” she says finally.

“Why?” Theo volleys back.

“Not school in general, just, huh, the students, I guess.” Her throat feels tight. It’s anger, not shame or fear or even sadness, it’s just anger. And Jamie hates how her anger manifests as tears in her eyes. 

She was over this shit, she was fine. It’s not fucking fair.  

“Jamie...what’s happening right now?”

“I hadn’t had one in ages,” she drags out.  

Theo doesn’t ask, like Tamara had done. She’d always said Jamie made her play the guessing game. Theo doesn't seem to mind. She just waits. 

Jamie grabs the sentence by its ankles, drags it kicking and screaming down a corridor lined with broken glass shards until it’s finally out of her throat.

“A nightmare. Hadn't had a nightmare in ages.”

“Was this a regular nightmare, or the same nightmares you talked about with Tamara?” Theo asks efficiently. 

Jamie simply nods.

“Those ones,” Theo confirms. “Okay. And why do you think the nightmare came back?”

The high-school hallway, in her mind’s eye. Hungry, dirty eyes. The memory of such similar eyes from years ago. 

“Well I already know, don’t I?” Jamie asks. “And I already told you it did, so can I go?”

“Jamie…”

“You said—”

“Technically, I said you had to tell me 3 truthful things each appointment,” Theo tells her, apparently guessing where her thoughts had gone. “That’s just one.”

Jamie huffs. “Is this good therapy?”

“I don't know, is it?”

Jamie chuckles, roughly, and looks away from Theo, away from this room. 

“Jamie...I don't want to make you feel trapped. If you feel the need to go, then the door is right there. You can go. I’ll have 40 minutes of unexpected Netflix in my near future until my 5pm gets here. And you’ll get to go home and think about this on your own,” Theo tells her, spreading her hands. “But I think you already know how helpful it can be to talk to someone else. Tamara is... persistent . That’s her style. But it’s not mine. You have to make a choice here Jamie, because I’m not her, and I won't force you to talk to me.”

Jamie looks at Theo’s hands, her polished boots. The massive oak desk behind her, the framed PhD diploma on the wall. She wonders what it must be like, to feel like you have a solid place in this godforsaken world. To be able to say this is my desk, this is my bed. This is my life, and I own it. Not foster parents, not the state, not the ghosts that follow her or the nightmares that haunt her. 

She looks at Theo’s face. The woman’s blue eyes are trained on her, and she raises a single manicured eyebrow.

Fuck her. Jamie knows it the second she’s not leaving. 

The mind-control of it all is this: Theo has posed staying like a challenge, has made it so talking is a challenge, and leaving is the coward’s way out. Leaving makes her a wimp. And Jamie knows she’s being played, but it doesn’t help. Fuck herself and the scars on her knees that prove she’s never backed away from a challenge. 

And fuck Theo for putting it in such easy terms how easy it is for her to help herself in this one moment in time. 

“There’s this girl at school,” Jamie starts.

“Okay.”

“No. Well, it’s not her fault, I don’t think. She actually...nevermind.”

“What’s this girl’s name?” Theo asks.

“Doesn't matter.”

“Okay.”

“Point is, last week, when I was leaving Biology class, this bloke...Last year student, tall, stupid looking. He yelled some things at me.”

Theo nods slowly. “What type of things? Did he hit on you?”

“No. I don't consider cat-calling hitting on anyone,” Jamie says.

“I agree.”

“And either way, you’d think they’d get a hint,” Jamie tells her, spreading her hands to signal her clothes. Combat boots, overalls. A baggy t-shirt hidden under a final layer of honest-to-fuck flannel. 

Jamie looks at Theo, waits for the lightbulb to go off. Best to put it out there.

Theo shows no such moment of eureka. 

“I understand,” she says evenly. 

Jamie eyes her. “Do you?”

Theo twists back to take a hold of a picture frame on her desk, and turns it around so Jamie can see it.  In the photo, a pretty Asian woman with tattoo sleeves smiles at the camera, her face squished next to Theo’s.

“My wife, Trish,” Theo tells her by way of explanation.

“Oh.”

Well, Jamie is a tad disappointed in herself for not clocking her therapist as gay.

“I have a lot of experience with guys not taking a hint when I was younger,” Theo tells her. “Is that what happened? Did he get physical with you—”

“No. No, he just...But it’s worse when they do know and they do it just to fuck with you. Pretty sure he had a girlfriend and just wanted to make me feel…”

“He was a bully.”

Jamie nods. Shrugs. “I guess.”

“So, he said these things…”

“And that was it. And I went about my day, and I went home, and then I woke up in the middle of the night. Pool of sweat, as usual.” 

Theo nods. 

And if Jamie breathes through it, if she lets herself sink into the feeling, it’s not that different from sitting in front of Tamara back in juvie and exorcising her demons, one by one. She trusts Theo a bit more now—yeah, probably because she knows now she has a wife—but the feeling is the same.

Like sometimes it’s worth it. 

To crack herself open and let things flow until she’s empty. 

“And the nightmare was the same too. I couldn't...move. I had no mouth, just skin. And the door was open just a crack I think, but I know it’s going to open, and I’m just laying there waiting. And I keep thinking, I should know I’m asleep, right? Should know I’m older. But I never do. All I can think about…”

⚜️

(2013,  Manchester, England.)

The new year doesn’t feel like a new year.

Time feels weird, meaningless. The only way Jamie has to keep proper track of it is Mikey.

Her brother learns new words, and he gets big enough that the carers just let him share her bed every night. She doesn’t even mind when he wets it, and she has to change the sheets.

In any case, he only does it the first few days in a new house. There are many. They get moved again. And again. And again . 

After winter break, Jamie goes back to school, and she does nothing but sulk and worry over Mikey while she’s sitting in class, being stared at by kids she doesn’t know, and teachers she begins to hate. The grey socks she has to wear for her uniform are always itchy. And she wishes she could just wear trousers like the boys instead of the stupid skirt she has to. 

Her hair is always a mess of curls and waves, and one day, a few girls from the upper school next door entice her to sit with them during recess, and they feed her sandwiches and comb her hair into pigtails like she’s some sort of living doll.

Jamie hates pigtails, but she lets them do it. It’s been ages since someone has brushed her hair for her.

It reminds her of her mum, faintly, though it’s been over a year since she saw her last. Jamie wonders if her mum thinks of her and Mikey. She wonders if her dad, or even Denny, wonder about the two of them. 

And then she realizes it doesn’t matter if they do or not. 

She’s stuck here, and she and Mikey are alone. 

⚜️

Dani Clayton is waiting outside of school for her when class lets out that day. 

Jamie—bored to tears after an hour of history, and still a bit raw from talking to Theo yesterday and stirring up old shit—briefly wonders if she could just slip past her and get at least another hour to herself, before she’s faced with another human being.  This one, in particular, who’s waiting for her—brilliantly blonde, wearing a blindingly white cheerleading uniform. Even from afar, Jamie can see her eyes look like glass under the sun. Like stained glass church windows.

“Jamie!”

Jamie sighs, and makes her way toward the girl. 

“Hey.”

She’s about to keep walking—they are supposed to head to her house together, after all—but Dani grabs her by the wrist, stopping her in her tracks. 

“Wait, before we get going...I think we got off on the wrong foot.” Dani lets go of her arm, and Jamie turns around, facing her. Her smile is...polite. Way too polite for a 16-year-old kid, Jamie thinks. “I’m sorry if I offended you when we first met,” Dani carries on. “I really didn't mean anything by what I told Becca. But I know you took offence so I'm sorry.“

She sticks her hand out. Jamie gets the odd feeling that they’re acting out a part, meant for people older than themselves. She’s never settled a misunderstanding with a handshake before. She’s done nods, and passed around stolen cigarettes, but not this. 

Then again, she’s never had  a misunderstanding with a good Christian girl like Dani Clayton before. 

“Start over?” Dani offers, her hand unflinching in its place between them. 

Jamie stares.

“We’ve been walking on eggshells around each other for weeks now,” Dani tells her. “And if not, we’re just downright rude to each other.” Jamie notes how Dani doesn’t mention it’s mostly Jamie being the rude one. “I don’t want to do that for an entire year. We don’t have to be friends, but can we at least be partners?” Dani smiles. “Pro-pah partners?” she drags out.

Jamie’s instinct is to take offense, to think that Dani is making fun of her accent—

But her smile is so earnest she just can’t.

Jamie shakes her hand.

“Only if you promise never to attempt an English accent again.”

Dani laughs. “Deal.”

⚜️

(Late August, 2013. Oldham, Greater Manchester, England.)

Many things happen the week Jamie turns ten years old. 

For her birthday, the carer they're currently staying with gives her a doll Jamie hates.

She already carries Mikey around everywhere, she doesn’t have the spare arms to carry a doll, and even if she did, she doesn’t understand the point of ‘em. What’s so fun about feeding a fake baby? About changing fake dirty nappies? It’s stupid. It must show in her face how stupid she thinks it is, because the lady sends her to bed without supper, and calls her ungrateful. 

Then, her social worker tells her that because she got so behind in school, she has to repeat Year 5 all over again. 

And finally, a hot summer week right before the first week of class, she meets them. 

Mr. and Mrs.Martin.

Mrs.Martin is blonde, her hair short and wavy, and she makes funny faces at Mikey and Jamie. (Jamie smiles, but only because Mikey’s laugh is so funny.)

Mr.Martin is tall, with dark hair, and a funny way of speaking. He says he’s from the United States, and when Mr.Martin asks if she’s studied geography, and if she’ll be going to Year 6, the social worker meddles and lets him know that Jamie is repeating a year.

Her cheeks feel hot. Jamie doesn’t understand why he needs to know anything about her, because it’s not like she and Mikey are getting moved again, is it? Her social worker would’ve said. 

But in any case, Mr.Martin stays behind talking to the social worker, while Jamie goes to the back yard with Mrs.Martin and Mikey. 

She watches them play and laugh, kicking herself for sulking, but not knowing how to stop. 

⚜️

Starting over apparently means being a chatterbox, because Dani...talks to her, on the walk home.

Or just talks, without expecting Jamie's input. She complains about the algebra class they both share. She points out their PE teacher has no business telling them to do cardio with his significant beer belly. 

After a moment, she’s quiet. 

It should be awkward, but it isn't. She feels Dani’s eyes on her every once in a while, and ignores them.

They pass by a corner store a few blocks from the school, and Dani points down the road to their right. 

“My house is over there, two streets down to the left.”

Jamie nods. “Nice neighborhood,” she points out, noting the manicured lawns of every house. 

“I guess,” Dani says, with the aloofness of one who doesn’t know how lucky she is. “We moved here after—we moved when I was little.”

Jamie nods. 

They walk in companionable silence for a few minutes. The leaves crunch under Jamie’s old, worn boots. It’s...not horrible. Jamie is very aware she’s been holding herself up tight, controlling her breath since they left school. She relaxes.

“Do you like fall?” Dani asks suddenly, and then laughs. It sounds more like an exhalation of air than proper laughter—like her mirth has to be quiet. “God, I sound like my mother. I’m not about to ask you about the weather just to fill the silence, don't worry.”

Jamie smiles.

“I like it just fine,” Jamie says. “Spring’s my favorite though,” she offers. Starting over it is. 

Dani looks a bit surprised, like she can't quite believe Jamie is capable of more than monosyllables.

“Really, why?”

Jamie shrugs, suddenly not knowing what possessed her to talk in the first place. 

“Like watching things grow, I guess.” 

Dani nods, looks at Jamie like she’s considering her words. Absorbing them. She can’t remember the last time she spoke and someone just...listened. 

“I like autumn,” Dani tells her. “I think it's my favourite. There’s something nice about watching the leaves fall and the trees end up bare. Like the world is cleansing itself, you know?” She shakes her head, like she’s embarrassed of what’s come out of her mouth. Jamie is oddly enthralled. “I was crazy about winter when I was a kid though,” Dani says, switching gears. “The snow, the holidays, the presents and hot chocolate.” 

Her face is so wistful, Jamie can’t begrudge the picture perfect, Christmas card childhood she apparently had. 

Dani seems to dig herself out of the memory.

“It was nice. But I prefer autumn now. Even though, when I was little, I huh...well, I used to cry every time, because I thought the trees would stay bare forever.”

The corner of Jamie’s lip turns up in what almost resembles a smile. She can imagine it.

Dani seems the type of sweet—the type of sheltered , of taken care of—that can only come from a loving family.

She’s met plenty of girls like her in the system. Has seen it chew them up and spit them out. Soft, cotton candy pink girls that end up shacked up with the first soul that offers them a helping hand, even if that same hand will deliver blows later, who’ll take whatever a perverted foster father dishes out, because it’s a type of care, isn’t it? Who’ll twist themselves into little wife roles at 16 to feel a semblance of peace, of belonging . 

(A memory, then. A pretty girl with pretty pink lips. A Maybe you can take care of yourself, Jamie, but I can’t. The uncertainty...I can’t take it.)  

Jamie was never that type. She’d rather run and get hurt by her own means, than let someone else do it. Smash her body against the cage bars rather than let someone cut her wings. 

The world is cruel and unjust to the type of little girls who cry over trees losing their leaves. 

“It’s sound so stupid—”

“No,” Jamie says. “Makes sense.”

She’d felt something similar with any new foster home, back when she was really little. That sense of loss for what she never truly had, what she knew she couldn't hold on for too long. Loss was inevitable, like trying to stop the seasons.

If Jamie was vegetal, she’d be a leaf, forever falling from her tree and drifting about.

“I think when you're really little, you take the world at face value. You don't see the things under the things. Autumns can be tough. Giving up the summer, saying goodbye to the hot of the sun, at least for a little while. Because, see, the sun in the summer feels like it’s got a purpose, y'know? But during autumn, it wanes...it just feels like it shows up because it has to. And Winters...winters can be rough. The world’s just a bit more bleak.”

Jamie gets on a roll sometimes. Spouts shit like she knows what she’s talking about, like she knows anything about the world. Anyone who’s ever heard her has rolled their eyes. 

Dani Clayton listens, intently.

Jamie shrugs, feeling her ears warm. She turns on to her street.  

“But spring always comes around anyway.”

⚜️

(2013. Oldham, Greater Manchester, England.)

Mr. and Mrs.Martin visit her and Mikey twice, the first week. 

Then every other day, the second week. 

Mrs.Martin, who tells Jamie to call her Emily, spends almost the entire time holding Mikey and tickling him, and Jamie doesn’t like it. He’s her brother. She doesn’t like other people treating him like he’s their responsibility. But she puts up with it. Emily asks her about school, and Jamie tells her the truth, that some of the other kids pick on her because she’s a year older already, and that she doesn’t like maths. 

Emily leans into her like they’re friends, and tells Jamie she also hated maths when she was a girl. 

That Friday, Emily and Mrs.Martin hand Jamie a belated birthday present. It’s a large red box with a bow, and Jamie can’t remember the last time she held something so big as she carries it. Can’t remember the last time she felt this excited. 

She tears open the wrapping paper, bracing herself for another doll, but when she opens it, it’s a Lego set. The box says Lego Creator Winter Village, and 1,200 pieces, and 12+.

Jamie gapes at the present.

“We thought you might like it. It’s supposed to be for kids over 12 years old, but you’ve got it under control, don’t you, Jamie, darling?”

Jamie nods—excited, happy, bursting out of her skin. 

⚜️

There is a knock at the door. 

Both of them look up from their place on the floor of Jamie’s bedroom. 

Mrs.Quint must have gotten home. She hadn’t been there when they’d come in, and Jamie had had to use her key for the first time. Mrs.Quint is an accountant, her caseworker had said as much, and she works from home—most of the time. 

“Can I come in?” Mrs.Quint’s muffled voice comes from behind the door.

“Yeah,” Jamie says. 

Dani looks at her oddly—or surprised, maybe. Yeah, Jamie didn’t think it was normal for adults to ask before barging in, either. 

“Hey, girls. I brought you some snacks if that’s all right,” she says, holding two bottles of the ice tea she’s always drinking, and a bag of crisps. She hands Dani a bottle. “Here you go.”

Jamie grabs hers, though there’s no way she’s drinking it. She receives the crisps as well, and Mrs.Quint straightens up.

“Thank you,” Dani says, sweetly. 

Jamie thinks that of course she’d be good with parents—and then rolls her eyes for thinking such a thing. Mrs.Quint isn’t her parent, and Dani isn’t her girlfriend, she’s not even her friend. 

“No problem, dear,” Mrs.Quint answers. “So will you be joining us for dinner?”

Jamie does her best not to whip her head to look at Dani. No . Dani here for dinner would be wrong in a way she can’t explain. It’s bad enough she had to come over. Things in her life need to be kept separate, in their proper drawers, and this just...it just muddles it all up. 

Dani shakes her head, and Jamie lets out a subtle breath.

“No, thank you. My mom is expecting me before six.”

“Alright then. Well, I’ll leave you girls to it.”

Mrs.Quint bows out of the room, and the door hasn’t even closed before Dani is turning toward her, words spilling out of her mouth.

“Is your dad the British one? I mean, how is your mom American?”

Jamie flinches. 

“Not my mum is she now?” Jamie asks. Dani sends a confused stare her way. Jamie doesn’t buy it, because people at school knew, and she knows how gossip it works. “Come on, you didn’t know I was a foster kid?”

Dani’s eyes widen. “Oh my gosh, no, I’m sorry—”

Jamie’s hot head clears up. 

Of course she didn't. Because she’s not important enough to have been noticed, have been talked about by Dani Clayton. She’s a pretty cheerleader with a bunch of popular friends and guys slobbering after her, of course she wouldn’t partake in the lowly high school rumour mill.

Jamie’s an idiot, a sour, moody idiot, who thinks she’s more important than she is. Who overreacted on that first day, and even after promising to start over keeps being garbage now.

Dani never had it out for her, that’s obvious now. It’s clear Jamie is barely a blip on her bloody radar. 

“S’okay.”

“I mean. In biology class that first day you said you moved here with your parents, and I just assumed—”

“Dani, really. It’s fine.”

Dani bites her lip, threads her fingers through the fuzzy blue carpet she’s sitting on.

“If I’m not intruding...you have siblings, right? I mean, from your family tree, I saw…. I did print our assignment.”

Jamie nods. Not any point denying it. 

“Older brother back in England. Little brother, with other foster parents here in the states.” His legal parents, his proper adoptive parents. “Don’t see either of them anymore.”

“That must be hard.”

Jamie shrugs. 

“It’s been years.”

Dani Clayton looks at her like she knows, somehow, that it’s been years isn't the same as it doesn't hurt anymore. 

Jamie pointedly ignores kind blue eyes, and gets back to the task at hand. 

⚜️

(2013. Manchester, England.)

When the social worker lets Jamie know they’re going to be moved to Mr. and Mrs.Martin’s house, Jamie is actually happy about it. 

And it’s not because of the Lego Set she got as a belated birthday present, or the new trainers Mr.Martin bought for her when he saw hers were falling apart, or the new, really nice clothes that Mikey got from them.

It’s more the fact that they seem to actually see Jamie and Mikey.

A lot of the grown ups they’ve stayed with have ignored them, talked about them like they’re not even there, or in the worst places, pretended they weren’t there, and left Jamie to figure out dinner for herself and Mikey.

Some others loved Mikey, but couldn’t stand her. Jamie could tell. They would hold him and feed him and make him laugh, while Jamie had to stay in her room all afternoon doing her homework.

But Mr. Martin and Emily...mostly Emily, seem different. 

She actually talks to Jamie.

When Jamie tells her the kind of shoes Mikey likes, and the kind he’ll cry if you put on him, she listens. 

Jamie has to change schools, and she doesn’t even mind that it’s only been a month into the school year.

Their house is really nice. Mikey has his own room, with a crib that Emily says can be turned into a bed when he’s a bit older. Jamie has her own room as well, though Mr.Martin has some furniture and some papers from his work there, that Jamie is never supposed to touch.

They don’t fight, like some of the other carers, and like Miss McKinley used to do once upon a time, they always have dinner at the same time, together at the table. 

After, Mr.Martin bounces Mikey on his lap while he watches the news, and Emily knits, and Jamie plays with her lego sets on the living room floor. And at night, she listens through the wall how Emily reads Mikey stories before bed. She only wishes she was little again, so she could get a story too. 

One night, after they’ve been there for an entire week, Jamie remembers something she forgot:

They always get moved, in the end. 

She shouldn’t get used to things being nice, and she shouldn’t talk to them so much, because that makes it worse, when they get moved, and then she has to miss them. 

She already misses her mum and dad and sometimes even Denny so much that her chest feels tight. She misses Miss McKinley and how she helped her with her homework and how that boy named Timmy always let her play football with him and how Sarah, the real daughter of a couple she stayed with for a month, would smile at Jamie and poke her in the stomach, and she was so pretty and nice Jamie never wanted her to stop. 

She remembers she forgot all those things, but as the days go by, and they stay there, it’s harder and harder to remember the missing. 

And so much easier to imagine that this could be forever. 

⚜️

Certain parts of schooling have always made Jamie feel stupid.

She isn’t, she’s not stupid, but the definitions and the dates and the endless names of long dead men bore her to tears. She likes English class well enough, when the assigned readings aren’t awful, and she does fine in World History. She picked up enough Spanish from the other foster kids to not suck at it. Algebra can get fucked.

She’s not flunking out of 11th grade, but she’s no star, either. 

Not like Dani Clayton seems to be. 

And while Biology is one of those hit-and-miss classes, that she can either excel at or barely pass, depending on the current topic, one of those classes that can make her feel stupid...Dani doesn’t. Jamie’s beginning to think that Dani would never. 

Dani watches her struggle with the questions she’s supposed to answer from their worksheet, and a half an hour after her arrival at her house, she drops the pretense that they’ll both do a part, and they work together. 

Or rather, Dani works, and—metaphorically—holds Jamie’s hand through questions about heredity and genotypes and alleles. 

She’s quite good at explaining all that rubbish, and Jamie finds herself asking questions and actually contributing after a little while. 

She realizes she misjudged Dani, that first day. She’d been meaning to hurt her, and used the most juvenile and cliched of insults she could throw against a blonde cheerleader to do it, but Dani Clayton quite clearly does have something inside her head. She is smart, on top of pretty. And kind, on top of those. 

 The sun begins to slip past the horizon without her knowledge. 

But Dani does realize it, and after an expletive under her breath, she begins gathering her notebooks. 

“We’re only missing two questions, I can take care of those”, she says, pushing everything inside her backpack. 

Jamie almost tells her that they should finish it together, and she could come back. She doesn’t. 

“Should I...Should I walk you to your house?” she asks. It’s getting dark outside, and she’s lived in enough bad neighborhoods to know a girl like this shouldn’t walk by herself when it’s dark. This might not be a bad neighborhood, but old habits die hard. 

Not that Jamie is some type of knight in shining armor. Dani’s just a few blocks away—it would hardly be a sacrifice. 

“No, that’s fine,” Dani tells her. “Thanks though. I’ll text you when I’ve printed everything.”

Jamie nods. 

She gets up from the floor when Dani does, and opens her bedroom door for her. 

“Okay.”

“Thanks for letting me come over,” Dani throws over her shoulder as they go down the stairs.

“Sure,” Jamie says, feeling out of place. If anything, it’s Mrs.Quint who’s responsible. This isn’t even Jamie’s house. “...Not so bad at being proper partners, are we?” Jamie offers, playing up her accent to get a smile out of the other girl. It works.

“Guess so,” Dani says.

“‘kay. Goodnight Dani.”

Dani raises an eyebrow, her hand on the doorknob. 

“So I’m not just Clayton anymore?” Dani asks. 

Jamie...she doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t even know herself when she made the switch, when Clayton turned into Dani in her head. 

Dani doesn’t give her time to say anything, in any case.

“Bye, Taylor,” Dani tells her playfully. She waves at her before leaving, her cheeks slightly pink.

It’s probably a trick of the light. 

⚜️

(2013. Manchester, England.)

Jamie’s stomach drops to her feet when the social worker pulls up to Mr. and Mrs.Martin’s house. 

A month. They’ve been here a month, and Jamie is dumb, so, so dumb and stupid and silly to think that they were going to stay here forever.

The social worker must guess what she’s thinking, because as soon as Mr.Martin lets her in, she pats Jamie’s shoulder and tells her: “I’m just here to see how you and your brother are doing.”

So they’re not going?

They send her and Mikey upstairs, while they talk. 

Jamie leaves Mikey in his room with a few toys, and she crawls to the top of the stairs, to listen in. 

They’re all sitting on the couch, so it’s kind of far away, but she can make out some of it. 

“Mikey is everything we’ve dreamed of.”

“...waited for…”

“...understand…”

“ They’ve both already lost a brother...”

Jamie frowns. Why are they talking about Denny? 

“...possible…”

“Our priority is to keep families together,” the social worker says loudly, almost sounding mad. It’s the one sentence Jamie can make out perfectly. 

She doesn’t know what it means. Does their dad want them again? Has their mum come back? 

Jamie hears them moving, and she scrambles backwards and slips into Mikey’s room once again. She sits beside her brother, pressing her finger to her lips when Mikey begins to ask what she’s doing. 

Her heart beats like a drum inside her chest. 

Before the social worker leaves, she visits them upstairs. She asks Jamie how she’s doing, and Jamie tells her the truth, tells her about Mikey’s newest pair of trainers, and how he gets a bedtime story every night, and how Mr. Martin said he’ll switch the crib soon so he’ll have a big boy bed. 

“But how are you, sweetheart?”

Jamie frowns. She doesn’t quite understand the question. Isn’t it obvious, that if her brother is okay then she’s okay?

“Mikey is doing great, but how about you?” she repeats.

“I’m the big sister. If he’s good then I’m good.”

The social worker smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. She touches Jamie’s cheek before she goes, and for just a moment, she reminds her of her mum.

“You’re a sweetheart, Jamie Taylor.”

⚜️

One more time , the text reads.

Folder color preference?

The text is followed by a picture of a few folders spread out on a bed with a dark blue comforter. Jamie hums. She would have expected Dani Clayton to have a fully pink room covered in posters of horses or the like. This small look into the other girl’s life makes her curious, and she shakes her head to clear it. Curiosity killed the cat and all that. 

Jamie looks at the folders instead, tries to give a proper answer instead of just ‘whatever you like’ . Green is her first instinct, but then she notices the red one, same shade as the trees outside.

Red🍂🍁 , she texts Dani. 

 👍 , is Dani’s reply. And then—

What are you doing now?

Jamie debates on whether to pick up the phone again at all. Reminds herself she doesn’t do this, can’t afford to do this, she doesn’t talk to her classmates let alone pretend like she could have friends. She has rules and walls for a reason and she’s gone years respecting those, knows the consequences of not keeping to herself—

But she does. She texts Dani back. 

⚜️

(2013. Manchester, England.)

Emily walks into her bedroom early the next Sunday, Mikey already in her arms. 

He’s still yawning, and when Emily puts him down in her bed, Jamie lets him cuddle up against her neck like he always has. She’s always more calm with Mikey by her side, and her eyes want to slip close. 

“I have something to tell you,” Emily whispers, like a secret.  “You guys aren’t just here for a little while, Jamie. We’re going to adopt you.”

Jamie isn’t sure if she’s still awake, or if she’s dreaming and hasn’t realized it.

“We’re going to be a family now,” Emily tells her, holding her hand above the covers. “I promise.”

Chapter Text

We’re watching Titans.

Eddie is really into superheroes lately

The text message notification appears at the top of her phone screen, and Jamie doesn’t even mind that it cuts off the top of her YouTube video. Another message slides in right after the first.

Actually this one character reminds me of u

Jamie smiles. While she can be accused of texting too many one-liners, Dani fires several texts in a row often. Jamie taps on the notification to properly answer her. 

Which one? 

It takes Dani less than a minute to send a photo. In it, Jamie can see her socked feet crossed on top of the coffee table, can just make out Glasses’ curly hair at the edge of the picture. In Dani’s TV, a girl with short bluish hair sulks while seated at a table. By the looks of her, a goth of some sort. 

Jamie types out a message and hits send. 

Should I be offended that

this is how you see me? 

She sees Dani is typing right away, and then her messages pop up.

It’s not that u LOOK like her!!

you’re both sort of...

cool loner types i guess

Jamie chuckles, and then feels this spark of surprise, when it bounces off the walls of her empty room. 

She doesn’t remember the last time she laughed out loud like this. 

⚜️

(October, 2013. Manchester, England.)

Mr.Martin wakes up, and Emily gets up to go to him. Jamie cuddles Mikey, who still dozes against her side. Her cheeks hurt, and that’s when she realizes it’s because she’s smiling so hard.

She knows what adoption means, she knows it’s what every kid from every home they’ve been in wished for, deep down. You get to stay forever with a carer. And they're not your carer anymore then, they’re just your family. A new mom and dad. 

Jamie misses her real mum and dad so much it hurts to breathe sometimes, but Emily is so nice to them, and Mr.Martin pays more attention to Mikey than their dad ever did, so maybe this is a good thing. 

She and Mikey will stay in the same place, forever, and Mr.Martin and Emily will always take care of them. Jamie can’t imagine wishing for more. 

⚜️

She and Dani text. They...talk.

Dani is a cheerleader because her mom always wanted her to be one. She met Rebecca Jessel at the try-outs freshman year, and they’ve been friends ever since. 

Dani lives with her mom only, but Jamie isn’t the type to ask for information that isn’t freely given, so she doesn’t ask about her dad. Divorced, deadbeat, or just dead—she doesn’t know, but she realizes maybe Dani’s life isn’t as perfect as she’d once thought.   

Dani calls Glasses—whose name is Eddie, apparently—her best friend, and Jamie doesn’t care to know if that’s a new, cheesier way of referring to your boyfriend, and she doesn’t ask. Don’t mean she’s keen to dive into High School politics just because she’s deemed it okay to talk to a classmate.

Dani is surprisingly funny, and relentlessly kind.

Nice, in a way that Jamie thought was reserved for therapists who get paid to act that way and weaponized by fake people to get you to trust them. Nobody could actually be this nice. But Dani is, and weirdly enough, after a few days Jamie doesn’t feel stupid for texting her back, stops chastising herself for picking up the phone and giving in, every time. 

Might be useful, to talk to at least one of her classmates, she tells herself. Might be good for her grades, if she ever needs help with an exam, or misses school for any reason. It only makes sense, really.

After two weeks, Jamie doesn’t feel like she’s walking on ice. 

She texts Dani first sometimes, instead of just answering whatever message Dani has sent. She stops typing and deleting her texts in an effort to sound as normal as possible, whatever the fuck that means, and just writes what she really thinks—even when it’s shite. Dani takes her moods in stride. She doesn’t balk at her curses, either in text, or in real life.

Because after two weeks, they start talking in school, too. 

Little conversations in biology class and across the aisle between their desks in Algebra become Dani stopping to chat with her between classes. Become Dani waving at Jamie when she catches her leaving school, become them talking for a few minutes while Dani waits for the bus or for Eddie to finish up with band practice. 

And then one afternoon, about two weeks after the new development, the cafeteria is being fumigated, and the students are directed to have lunch outside, by the football field. 

Jamie finds an empty spot in the far side of the bleachers, and opens her overpriced bag of crisps. If the first time she’s spent some of the lunch money Mrs.Quint routinely gives her—apart from the box of cigarettes she bought at a corner store last week and that she’s been steadily making her way through.

She has a small fortune tucked away in a hand-made pocket inside her backpack, almost two months worth of lunch money in a neat little roll. She can afford to treat herself, every once in a while. 

And Christ, the National School Lunch Program really does suck. After so many weeks of bland, free lunches, junk food feels like heaven. 

She looks out across the football field, licking the salt from her fingertips. 
The sun beats down on her. It’s quite hot for an autumn day, and Jamie soaks up the sun. She looks around. The other students huddle in groups as always, chatting and laughing. It’s almost like she’s the only one noticing how bright it is today, compared to the rest of the week. 

From the right corner of the football field the voices of a gaggle of giggling girls carry over. She’s almost tempted to text Dani to say that phrase three times fast, when she notices Dani herself is part of the group.

Must be the cheerleading team as a whole, Jamie guesses.

She doesn’t realize she’s staring at first. Ponytails, slender bodies, easy smiles—the ones she can make out from this distance. She wonders, briefly, if her circumstances had been any different, if she could’ve ended up a part of something like that. Probably not, she guesses. Maybe the essence of someone is unchangeable, who they are down to their bones. And Jamie can’t imagine a life where she’d have anything but contempt for anyone who thought whatever they managed to do in high school was an accomplishment. 

Teams and clubs, particularly, are for suckers who can’t bear to be alone, Jamie’s always thought. For people who haven’t figured out yet that alone is what everyone is at the end of the day, where everyone’s headed to anyways. 

Jamie doesn’t notice she’s staring, until she’s caught.

Dani notices her, Jamie realizes when she does. Even from this far, she sees those blue eyes widen when they fall on her, and notice her staring back. And then Dani is saying goodbye to her friends and jogging towards Jamie—which is senseless. 

It’s one thing to be forced to work together for Biology, and to end up chatting every once in a while, but hanging out is something else.  

Jamie looks at Dani’s friends, meets their eyes when they look back at her. They don’t even bother to hide their giggles, she sees. Or the way they talk to each other, cupping their hands over their lips as though they’re still children. What is Dani doing talking to that weirdo? is probably what they’re whispering among themselves. What they’re giggling about. 

It makes Jamie feel hot inside, makes her itch in places she can’t reach. 

“Hey!” Dani exclaims, when she’s close enough. 

Jamie averts her eyes. She looks across the football field, even as Dani is three steps away, then two. 

“Think you might need to stop this, Clayton,” she says.

“What do you mean?” Dani says, slightly out of breath. Her cheeks are pink and her chest rises up and down fast, all things Jamie notices from the corner of her eye. 

She looks at her then, can’t help the way her eyes are pulled in like a moth to a flame. Dani’s hair is so bright under the sun. Her smile is dazzling. 

“I mean, I'm not a bloody charity case.” 

Dani’s smile falls, and Jamie—the pit of her stomach does this thing. It twists. It hurts, a tad, almost like she got sucker punched by a strong toddler. 

“Don’t mean to be rude, Dani,” she backtracks immediately. “I’m sorry. I’m just sayin’...we handed in our assignment already, and we’ve got nothing else yet, so there’s no need to hang around me at school.”

Dani’s expression, usually so open, shutters over with something akin to defiance. To determination. 

“I don’t know how they do things in England, but last time I checked this is a free country,” Dani says, and then sits herself down next to Jamie in the bleachers, staring resolutely at the front.

“We haven’t had a day this hot in weeks,” Dani says. “I’d love to enjoy it if you’re done being grumpy.” 

Jamie almost, almost smiles. 

⚜️

(October, 2013. Manchester, England.)

Jamie hears screaming when she comes back in from playing outside. 

Her first instinct is to check on Mikey, and she breathes easier when she sees he’s asleep in his playpen in the living room. The yelling doesn’t seem to bother him. He’s used to it, from so many different carers who did nothing but scream. 

Jamie is the opposite. She could never just tune them out, and she can’t do it now, either. 

“We wanted a son! We agreed, that we would—”

“She’s so sweet.”

At first, Jamie has no idea what’s the fight about. And it’s so weird, that Emily and Mr.Martin are yelling, because they never do that. 

“It’s not about her. Emily, we had a plan.”

“Plans can change. She’s old enough to fend for herself, we don’t need to do anything differently.”

“We planned for a son. The house in Minnesota…”

“They can share a bedroom for a few years.”

They...as in her and Mikey. Is it her they’re talking about?

“She’ll be out of the house before you know it,” Emily says. “Don’t you love Mikey already? Could you genuinely send him back and wait until another b—”

“No.”

Jamie doesn’t know when she started crying, but she can’t stop. She hushes the sound against her fists, presses them to her mouth when it feels like her chest is caving in. 

She knows now what the fight is about.

They love Mikey—they just don’t love her. 

⚜️

Jamie is grabbing her literature notebook from her locker when she’s cornered by what seems like half the cheerleading squad.

She can’t see them, at first, only gets a look at three pairs of similar looking white trainers, their owners obscured by her locker door. Jamie’s muscles lock up. Years of group home scuffles and the paranoia juvie instilled in her make her fists close, even if she won’t need them. She won’t hit a girl first. And she doubts a bunch of cheerleaders want a tumble on the ground—Jamie is more about fists and less about cat scratches. But it pays off to be prepared.

She takes a breath and closes the locker door, and then—

Dani. 

Dani, is the first thing she registers, standing behind the two other girls. Rebecca Jessel and the redhead who’s boyfriend had had a go at her a few weeks ago stand in front of her. 

“Hey, I’m Chloe,” the redhead says, looking like she’s eaten something sour. “Look, I’m sorry we were dicks to you a few weeks ago. Michael’s sorry too,” she says, and Jamie assumes Michael is the piece of garbage wearing a Football jacket who had inadvertently given her nightmares. “Dani says you’re cool, so…”  

Chloe shrugs, looks at Dani, and when Dani nods, she hightails out of there. 

Jamie would find it hilarious, if she wasn’t so bewildered and her body wasn’t still geared up for a fight. 

She looks at Dani, but her eyes are on her friend. 

“Yeah,” Rebecca says. “And sorry I hadn’t said anything before, but welcome to the school. It’s not much but...well, it’s not much, period. So! Jamie, the tryouts for the cheerleading squad are next week. You have the right body type, you could be a flyer.“

“Think I’ll pass,” Jamie says immediately, and then reels herself in. She scratches her head. “But, huh, good luck.”

“I’m gonna need it,” Rebecca says, jumping right over Jamie’s inability to interact with other people like a functional fucking human being. “If I have to answer another freshman’s questions about whether they can audition with a Tik Tok dance instead of a cheer routine, I’m literally going to drown myself in the water fountain.”

Dani laughs out loud at that, and the corners of Jamie’s lips pull up of their own volition. 

“Well, I have Spanish class now.”

Rebecca hugs Dani goodbye after that, and Jamie hums as she watches her go. 

“So...your friends just had a flash of remorse?” Jamie asks Dani.

Dani looks away. A smile plays at her lips, but she bites it down. 

“Seems like it,” Dani says, leaning back against the lockers.

“Nothing to do with you,” Jamie states.

Dani doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t meet Jamie's eyes. Her eyes are twinkling. Jamie has always thought that definition was bullshit authors used when they didn't know enough adjectives—but Dani’s blue eyes bloody sparkle. 

The school bell rings, and Dani jumps. She tells Jamie they’ll talk later as she jogs to her own class, and Jamie’s left scrambling to get her notebook. 

It’s worth it when she’s late to class. 

⚜️

(October, 2013. Manchester, England.)

Jamie is quiet during dinner that night. During breakfast the next morning.  Quieter than usual, so much so that Emily notices. 

“Jamie, you haven’t touched your breakfast,” Emily tells her, taking a break from peeling apples. 

She’s baking a pie later, she’s said. It reminds Jamie of her mum, her real mum, when she was really little and there were still some days where she wasn’t tired of being a mum. She’d baked pies back then too. 

But this isn’t her mum, or her house, and just like her real mum, Emily doesn’t really want her. She’s just something that comes with Mikey, that she’s got to put up with. 

“‘m not hungry,” she mumbles. 

“I am not hungry,” Emily repeats. “Enunciate your words, Jamie.” Emily puts the knife down. “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

Jamie shrugs, staring resolutely at the table. 

If Emily asks again, she reckons she’ll break. She’ll do out with it and ask. Do they really want her? Do they care, even a little?

Mikey drops his spoon on his cereal bowl, splashing milk everywhere. Emily laughs, and turns her back on Jamie to tend to him.

⚜️

Jamie’s eating lunch in the farthest corner of the cafeteria, in her usual empty table, when suddenly—there’s her. Brilliantly white cheerleading uniform, voluminous mane of blond hair, the faint scent of cherries. Dani Clayton in all her glory. 

She sets down her tray in front of her, and Jamie has only a second to register the fact, when Glasses—Eddie—slides in next to her. 

At first, she has no idea what the fuck is going on. 

But then Dani begins talking, picking up the conversation they were having over text the previous night about the most useful superpower to have. 

Dani had brought the topic up as Eddie had demanded a rewatch of all the Marvel films over the weekend. Jamie had been regaled with Dani’s complaints the entire time. Last night, Jamie had made a case for invisibility being the best ability.

Now, Eddie pipes in with his opinion that super strength is the most useful power. 

Jamie looks at him, at the way his glasses slide down his nose when he ducks his head, at the gangliness of him, of most boys his age. No big surprise there, that he’d fantasize about strength. 

Jamie is smarter than that, if she may so herself. Being able to slip by undetected is a useful skill in life. The real version of it has served her well through the last few years. But the fantastic, stupid version of it? She’d be invincible. 

“You’re thinking of being a superhero, but in real life there’s no actual need for that,” Jamie says, the first words she actually directs to the bloke since school started. “Here, in school, what could super strength get you? Maybe a spot in the football thing or something? Kidnapped by the government for tests if they found you out?”

Eddie opens his mouth, but Jamie presses on. “But invisibility? Could rob a bank, become a millionaire. Could get test answers unnoticed and graduate with a perfect GPA. Could do just about anything, I reckon.”

Dani smiles.

“I’m sorry, but I’m with Jamie on this one,” Dani says. 

Eddie sulks, while Jamie tries not to feel pleased with herself. Would be stupid of her, that. 

Dani has lunch with her every other day after that.

It becomes a habit quickly, and Jamie begins to expect her certain days of the week, either by herself or with Eddie and sometimes even Rebecca by her side. Worst things have happened.

⚜️

(Halloween, 2013. Manchester, England.)

Jamie has only dressed up for Halloween once

She was seven, it was the year before Mikey was born. Her mum bought her a witch costume, and took her to a fancy dress party Halloween night. Her dad had said it was a waste of money, but her mum had ignored him. 

Then Mikey was born and everything changed. Last year, she and Mikey were with carers who thought Halloween was the work of the devil. 

Mr.Martin and Emily don’t feel that way. 

In fact, Mr.Martin tells her he used to go trick or treating every Halloween as a kid.

“You’ll love it too," he says, "when we’re back in the states.”

And Jamie’s world stops. 

“What?”

Emily gives him a look, and Mr.Martin scratches his head. 

“Guess it’s time to tell you. We’re moving back to the states,” Mr.Martin says, “You’re going to love it. And you’re still so young—you’ll lose the accent.”

Jamie shakes her head, messy curls flying every which way. 

“I don't’ want to go,” she says. “I don’t want to—”

“It’ll be an adventure,” Emily says gently. 

“No!” Jamie seldom yells, but she doesn’t know how to make them understand. America, the states, as Mr.Martin says it, are a nebulous ball of nothing far beyond her reach. “I have school here! My brother is here!”

“Of course your brother is coming with us,” Mr.Martin says, like she’s ridiculous. 

All it does is remind her that they want Mikey, not her. 

But she’s not even talking about her baby brother. 

“Not Mikey, Denny!” She hasn’t thought about Denny in so long, but in the back of her head she’s always thought he’s close. In London somewhere, making his own life like he said. Away, but here. Same with her mum, with her dad. If she leaves, it feels like she’ll truly never see them again.  “Denny is here! And my dad—”

“Well, guess what, legally I’m going to be your dad,” Mr.Martin says, raising his voice. “Now, be quiet.”

“Don’t talk to her like that, she’s just a kid,” Emily tells him.

“She doesn’t know how good she has it. She’s going to be better off back home than whatever place they pulled them from—and she can’t see that?!”

“I had a hard time when I moved the first time, and I was eighteen. She’s just a kid—”

“Well, I can’t stand her attitude.”

Jamie runs to her bedroom and slams the door.

The firefighter costume on her bed remains unused, crumpled under her fists, stained by her tears. She doesn’t go trick or treating that year either. 

⚜️

It sounds like a bee, or a fly. An incessant, annoying buzzing she can make out in the distance. 

She’s having lunch with Dani in the school cafeteria, and Dani’s description of her only trip to Disneyworld when she was a little kid is interrupted by the irritating, far-away sound. 

And then Jamie notices what it is.

“Danielle! Danielle!”

Behind Dani, there’s the cafeteria windows, and outside, in the lawn, is Eddie O’mara, trying to get her attention. 

“The worst part is, I really thought I was auditioning to American Idol, so when I went in—”

“Dani,” Jamie pauses her, touching her arm. Jamie nods towards the window. “Your boyfriend’s calling.”

Dani looks behind her. ”Who...Eddie? No! Ew! He’s not my...no!”

Eddie, ridiculously, jumps when Dani notices him, and then begins pointing at his cap like he’s having some type of seizure. Dani smiles and gives him a thumbs up. 

“He thought he’d lost that baseball cap yesterday,” Dani says, once Eddie has moved on. “I wonder where he found it.”

Jamie shrugs. She couldn’t care less. But she does find it interesting that apparently they’re not dating. She’d assumed...well, it hardly changes anything. Dani is nothing but a classmate, and Jamie is just happy she has better taste than what she’d first thought. 

“And, also, what?” Dani asks. “Not you teasing me with him, too.”

Jamie looks up at her. “Wasn’t teasing. Really did think he was your boyfriend.”

Dani makes this sound in the back of her throat, almost comical.

“Really?”

Jamie nods as much. “I mean. He’s always around you, I don’t know. You sure he doesn't think he’s your boyfriend?”

Dani huffs. “No way. We grew up together.”

Like that matters much, Jamie thinks. She has stayed in houses where foster siblings were shagging each other. If you put two hormonal creatures in the same space for a period of time, things settle, and there’s no guessing in which way. Eddie might be her best friend, to Dani, might be her brother, even, but to him, Dani could be everything he dreams of night. 

Jamie looks at Dani, really looks, and thinks that growing up at her side wouldn't have been a deterrent from noticing the sort of beauty she grew into. In fact, she would have probably graduated from puppy love as a wee thing into the sort of red hot thing you get into fights for when you’re grown. 

She can't blame poor Edward or Edmund or whatever the fuck his full name is if that’s what happened to him. And it’ll at least be funny when Dani realizes it, and sets him straight. 

“Pfft. No.” Dani shakes her head. “Besides, I’m…” she waves at her body, like that makes any sort of sense. “Guys don’t...So, no.” 

Guys don’t what? Have brains? Jamie almost asks. Have you looked in the mirror lately?

Last thing she needs is to make things weird though, for the only classmate she routinely talks to, to stop—so she bites her tongue.

⚜️

(November, 2013. Manchester, England.)

Mikey’s 3rd birthday party is huge.

Jamie’s never attended a party so big, with so many kids, so many balloons and so much cake. It’s like all the kids from the neighborhood are there, even though Mikey is too small to play with them. They run on Mr.Martin’s garden among themselves, and Jamie just watches. 

Mikey is in Emily’s arms, dressed up in a funny cowboy costume. All of Emily’s friends coo over him, and Mikey seems to eat it up. Emily took him to get his hair cut last week, without even telling Jamie about it, and she got the surprise when she got home from school.

She locked herself in the bathroom and cried. 

He looks different now, no longer a baby but a little boy. And he talks more and more every day, and everyone can understand him now, not just Jamie. 

It all sits in her stomach like she’s swallowed something bad. 

The party is big and loud and colorful, and she hates it. 

Emily’s forced her into a dress, and Jamie fucking hates it. 

It feels nice to say it, even if it’s just in her head. 

She fucking hates her dress, and her new polished shoes, and this loud, stupid, bloody party. 

“Jamie, come!” Mikey asks, running up to her.

“No.”

“Jamie!”

She misses when he was smaller, when he still called her Mimi because he couldn’t pronounce her name any other way. 

“We gonna play. Hide and seek! Hide and seek!”

“Christ, I said no!” 

She runs back inside the house, away from the strange kids and the noise and a little brother who seems more and more different each day. Who seems to need her less and less. 

She hears them singing Happy Birthday a few hours later. Nobody came to get her. 

⚜️

A few days after they have lunch together, something even more alarming happens. Dani walks her home—or rather, she walks Dani home, seeing as her house is closest. And then it keeps happening.

Some days, as Jamie is leaving the school building for her half hour of peace each afternoon as she walks home, Dani will catch sight of her, and begin walking by her side.

And if the first time Jamie had to bite her tongue to stop herself from telling her to go away...a week later she finds herself hoping Dani will be there, if only to finish their oddly philosophical conversation from the day before. 

Because that’s another thing Dani does. She doesn’t laugh when Jamie gets in one of her moods, when all she wants is to talk about the universe and that sort of thing, but she listens intently, and ask questions, and bounces Jamie’s ideas back at her. 

Jamie comes to learn that Dani thinks everyone has a fate in life. That Dani believes in God—not exactly the judgmental God from the evangelical church her grandma forced her to go as a kid—but she thinks there really is a God who made everyone and who’s looking after people. Jamie thinks everyone is here because of unprotected sex, planned or otherwise, and life has as much meaning as you give to it. And no, there’s no one looking after anyone from a cloud in the sky. People are alone, that’s just the way it is. 

Dani calls her a pessimist. Jamie thinks she’s realistic. 

Today, Dani's walking with her again, but she’s been intercepted by two younger girls from the cheerleading squad. 

Jamie had hoped it’d be a quick goodbye, but Dani’s spent the past five minutes talking with the girls. Jamie switches her weight from one foot to the other, trying not to feel as awkward as she does as Dani goes over some sort of routine the girl’s apparently having trouble with.

“Give me your phone,” Dani says finally. “This is my number, send me a text later. I’ll record the routine for you today, and I’ll send it. You’ve got plenty of time to practice over the weekend. You’ll be fine.”

Dani smiles, and the girls look at her with stars in their eyes as they thank her. And finally, blessedly, leave. 

“Real nice of you,” Jamie says, rejoining Dani as they walk out of the school.

“Rebeca has to pretend to be tough because she's the captain, but she loves the team,” Dani says. “And those two, they’re just kids. Anna actually skipped a grade, she’s only 13. Freshman year is hard enough. And they really wanna make the team.”

Of course Dani remembers all their names, their ages. She’s possibly the nicest goddamn person Jamie’s ever met.

“Proper Mary Poppins now, aren't you?”

Dani blushes. 

The nickname sticks.

⚜️

(December, 2013. Manchester, England.)

Jamie’s sitting at the dinner table, finishing her school work, while Emily walks around the living room with Mikey. 

He doesn’t want to take his afternoon nap. 

Cuddling with Jamie always calms him down, but Mr.Martin has been saying he’s too old to need his sister like that. Jamie thinks Mr.Martin’s a twat. 

Still, Mikey’s fussy now, and Jamie alternated between looking at her notebook and looking at Emily as she tries to make him sleepy. 

“You’ve got to take your nap, Mikey-boy,” she sing-songs. “Do you...want a glass of warm milk?”

Mikey shakes his head in her arms. “No.”

“Want...a story?”

Mikey shakes his head and giggles. 

“No!”

Emily sits down on the couch. 

“Okay. Well...how about some tickles!”

She tickles Mikey, her fingers merciless on his sides, pressing her face against his little chest and making sounds like she’s biting him. Mikey laughs and laughs, his arms flailing and his legs kicking.

Jamie smiles, she can’t help it. 

“Mummy, please!”

Jamie freezes. Emily seems to freeze too, and pulls away from Mikey with a weird, watery smile. 

“Mummy,” Mikey repeats. “I no want to go to bed.” 

Jamie drops her pencil and makes her way to the living room.

“What did you call her?” Jamie asks her brother. “Mikey, she’s not your mum!”

Emily’s head snaps up. 

“Jamie! Go to your room. And don’t come out for dinner. You’re not ruining this for me.”

⚜️

They sit under the shade of a tree outside. 

Jamie had had one of those mornings, where the bloody classes bleed into each other and the classrooms feel no different than the animal pen she lived in back in juvie, and she’d just needed some space. Some fresh air, to look at the sky.

She hadn’t expected Dani to find her, and join her for lunch outside on the dirt. 

They sit in silence, each one eating their respective lunches. 

Autumn is sliding into colder days. It’s probably the last chance she’ll get to get some fresh air during lunch hour, before the cafeteria doors are closed against the oncoming winter.

Dani groans beside her, stretching her head back and resting it against the tree trunk. 

“Don’t you ever just wanna be an oak tree? And not have to worry about our algebra quiz next period?”

Jamie chuckles. Dani is going to do great in the quiz. Jamie on the other hand, knew she was fucked from the start, so she didn’t even bother studying.

“No,” she answers Dani. “But also, not an oak tree.”

“Huh?”

“This is a sycamore tree,” Jamie tells her, and then elaborates when Dani raises an eyebrow. “Oaks have deeper ridges in the trunk. The shape of the leaves is completely different too.”

“You know about trees,” Dani says. 

“Most plants, really. Was something of a hobby of mine, ages ago.”

Busy work for idle hands. An escape, like anything else. 

“You never talk about your life before you came here,” Dani mentions.

“Nothing worth talking about.”

Dani hums. She takes a bite out of her sandwich. She doesn’t push. 

Jamie likes that about her. And she wonders. 

Dani kneels in the ground beside her, her legs folded beneath herself. Her cheerleading uniform wasn’t meant for the ground, but she doesn't seem to mind that she might get dirty. Jamie, in her baggy jeans and raincoat, is quite at home here.

Dani isn’t supposed to be. 
 
Jamie stares at her. 

“What?” Dani says. “Do I have something on my face?”

“Seriously Poppins. Why have you stuck around?” Jamie asks, immediately feeling hot over how painfully honest the question is. “I mean...you could be in there with your squad, and Eddie, and proper chairs. And instead you are…” Jamie squeezes a fistful of grass between her fingers.

“Do you want to go in?” Dani asks. 

“No. I want to know why you’re outside,” she says. Why you’re with me, is what she means. 

Dani  looks at her, seems to give it some thought. 

“Well, you're nicer than you give yourself credit for,” Dani says. “And you're hilarious but you don't try to be.”

“Well this is starting to feel a bit vain. Do go on.”

Dani laughs.

“And...I like the way you look at me.”

Jamie feels a jolt of electricity in her chest.

“I'm sorry if that sounds silly, but it's like…you don't expect anything from me. Like I can just be me.”

Jamie swallows, tries to shrug the last few seconds off. 

“Who else could you possibly be?”

Dani smiles.

The cold autumn breeze ruffles their hair. 

⚜️

(February, 2014. Manchester, England.)

Jamie’s stomach hurts the entire day of the adoption proceedings. 

She doesn’t feel like Emily is her new mum. Mr.Martin could never be her dad. Her whole world feels like a puzzle, and she’s a piece that somehow, suddenly, doesn’t fit. 

Before she knows it, she’s sitting between them in a small room. She’d thought they’d be in a big court room, like the American show with the lawyers that Mr.Martin likes so much, but the change in setting doesn’t make her feel better. 

They’re in front of a large desk, where a dark skinned woman dressed in black robes sits, sifting through papers. 

“Why is she wearing that?” Mikey asks from his place on Emily’s lap. Jamie tenses up—she knows they’re not supposed to talk when adults are doing stuff, but nobody chastises Mikey. 

“She’s a judge,” Mr.Martin whispers to Mikey.

The lady—the judge—smiles. 

“Well, everything looks in order. Before we make it official, however, I think ten years old is old enough to give us her opinion,” the judge says, and then looks directly at her. “So, Jamie. Would you like it for you and your brother to be adopted by Chris and Emily?”

Jamie feels her heartbeat in her throat. 

No, she wants to say. I want my real mum. I want my real dad. I want our home to not be ashes, and for my older brother to come back and say he’s sorry and be good to me. I want my real parents to want me. I want these fake parents to want me, but they don’t. Nobody does. 
 
But then she thinks of Mikey.

Mikey, who used to cry his little head off when their mum first left, who Denny used to call a bastard and who their dad used to ignore. Mikey, who talks so much now, and has stupid big birthday parties and bloody cowboys costumes to go with them. 

Jamie looks at the judge and nods. 

“Fantastic,” the judge says. “It really is a great day at court when we can bring a new family together.”

Mr.Martin and Emily raise their hands and say some words. They sign papers. 

And then the judge gets up and says, “Shall we take a picture?”

They all huddle together with the judge behind her large desk, while the secretary comes in and takes pictures with Emily’s phone. 

“Say cheese!”

Jamie tries to smile, but she can't. 

⚜️

Dinner with Mrs.Quint is always a simple affair.

They’ve developed a nice routine the past 2 months. Dinner together every afternoon seems to be non-negotiable, but nowadays sometimes they eat in front of the TV, and sometimes they discuss whatever they watched the day before, or Jamie elaborates about what she did at school.

They talk a bit more, or at least Mrs.Quint does, which is fine, Jamie guesses. She is living under her roof after all. Mrs.Quint tells her she’s the middle child of three sisters, the oldest who has passed. Jamie comes to know Mrs.Quint has a nephew named Peter, and a younger sister who is married but has no kids. Mrs.Quint never had kids herself—although she mentions an Owen bloke who apparently is like a son to her—and her husband passed away a few years ago. 

Jamie doesn't talk about herself, not here, and not ever, as a rule. It’s not needed, anyways. Mrs.Quint probably has read all about her in her file. The thing must be thicker than the bloody bible by now.

“So I wrote back, as per our previous email,” Mrs.Quint says tonight, regaling her with a tale about her work and passive aggressive emails. “Which is basically code for, we’ve discussed this a thousand times, what is not getting through to you?”

Jamie shovels mac and cheese into her mouth, her knee bouncing under the table. 

She’s left her phone upstairs—she knows adults don’t like it when you use a phone in front of them, and she probably wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation. She’s convinced Dani to listen to Blondie and The Wombats, two of her favorite bands, and she’s waiting for her verdict. 

She’d much rather be talking to her than listening to a riveting tale of corporate America.

“Slow down, Jamie,” Mrs.Quint says suddenly, chuckling. “Didn’t you eat at school?”

Jamie’s fork slows on its way to her mouth. 

It dawns on her, every single thing, like a row of dominoes or a house of cards falling down. She’s eating fast. Because she wants to go back upstairs. To keep chatting to Dani.

Fuck.

Before she even realized it, somehow, she’s begun to...get attached. She looks forward to texting her. She expects her at lunch, either alone or with her weird fucking friends that are weary of her. She hopes to walk home with her each afternoon. 

That just can’t fucking be.

“I didn’t mean to upset you, dear,” Mrs.Quint says suddenly. “Don’t mind me. Eat however you want.”

Jamie looks at her half empty plate, then examines the longing in her gut. She doesn’t do friends. She doesn’t do this. Stupid. 

“No, you’re right,” she tells Mrs.Quint. “Reckon I’ll make myself sick if I keep that up.”

It’s not the meal she’s talking about. 

It’s blonde hair and blue eyes and a kind smile. It’s walks home that were supposed to be her time to be alone and at peace, that have turned into chatting with Dani some days, and missing her the days she’s not there. She’ll make herself sick, heartsick, if she keeps this shite up. 

She knows how it goes, how it’ll be when she gets a different placement and possibly changes schools and never sees her again. 

“You know, you’ve been here two months and I think that’s the first thing you’ve said to me that wasn’t an answer to a question I asked,” Mrs.Quint says. “I think that’s progress, Jamie.”

It’s the opposite of progress, Jamie knows. People aren’t worth it, and pretending any different will not do her any favours. 

This whole thing with Dani was a mistake. 

She needs to take a step back.

Chapter Text

(April, 2014. Manchester, England.)

Jamie has never been on a plane before.

Before getting put in care, she’d never traveled further than her hometown at all, and all of this...the passport photos she had to take, the busy airport, and the massive fucking plane...it’s a lot to take in. She wishes she had her brother close. Jamie cranes her neck to look on the row behind her. She's sitting directly in front of Emily, who has Mikey by her side. He sits in a car seat so bulky he looks like he’s about to fly the plane himself.

Jamie herself sits in a booster seat that makes her feel stupid. She’s 10—almost 11—fucking years old. She’s not a baby. 

It’s not her fault she’s so small. 

“Chew some gum while we go up,” Mr.Martin says from the seat beside her, leaning over. “It’ll help with your ears.”

She doesn't even know what’s supposed to happen to her ears, but she takes the piece of chuddy he’s offering.

She chews it, the sweetness exploding on her tongue. Suddenly ,they’re moving. 

At first it doesn’t feel any different from a car, but then it gets faster and faster, and there’s a rumble and a pressure that sticks her to her seat. She doesn’t like it. Actually, she hates it, she bloody hates it. She looks out the window, and realizes the ground is getting farther and farther away. Her ears clog up like she’s been underwater. What if they fall?

Jamie’s dizzy. Terrified. 

It must show in her face how scared she is, because Mr.Martin—who only ever plays with Mikey and has said how much he hates her attitude—offers her his hand. 

“It’ll be okay, kid.”

Jamie looks out the window, at the way the ground gets smaller and smaller, and back at him.

Jamie wants to cling to him, to anything she can, to any sort of comfort—but she doesn’t. 

You can’t really trust people, trust that they’ll stay or they’ll want you around or they’ll love you. And Mr.Martin least of anyone. And sure, she may be a kid, 10—almost 11—but she has her pride. 

Jamie clenches her hands into fists, and closes her eyes. The bad part will be over soon. 

⚜️

Jamie has a plan, when she walks into school that morning. 

It’s not a great plan, as far as plans go, but she thought of it late last night as she pointedly tried not to check her phone less her fingers betray her and check on her texts from Dani, so she can't ask it for much.

She’ll just avoid the girl in question for as long as it takes for Dani to take the hint that their quasi-friendship is over, or until Dani hates her—whatever happens first. 

She quickly realizes it's easier said than bloody done. 

Dani’s waiting by her locker when Jamie turns the corner. She curses under her breath. She briefly considers heading into English class without her notebook and her copy of Romeo and Juliet that she hasn’t even started yet, but then Dani catches sight of her, and that plan is shot to hell.

Dani waves at her from afar, and Jamie forces her eyes down. It does something to her insides, knowing it’s the last time. 

“You didn’t answer me last night,” Dani says when she’s close enough. “Did you fall asleep?”

Jamie doesn’t say anything. She opens her locker in silence and sort of shrugs. 

“Hey, are you okay?”

Jamie bites the inside of her cheek as she digs out the notebook and novel, and then closes her locker. 

“Jamie?” Dani touches her shoulder, and Jamie steps away. She doesn’t see Dani’s face, but the silence is deafening. “Are you pranking me?” Dani asks, her voice colored with confusion. 

Always thinking the best of people , Jamie thinks. Proper Mary Poppins.

“I have to tell you, the silent treatment is very elementary school.”

“I’ve got to get to class,” Jamie gets out, before disappearing down the hallway as quickly as her legs will take her. 

⚜️

(April, 2014. All over the fucking place.)

First, they land in London. 

Jamie can’t help but think of Denny, when she realizes where they are. Had he flown here, too? Or had he hitchhiked or walked or ended up dead on a ditch and never made it at all? She doesn’t know what she prefers. Isn’t sure, not really, after over a year without laying eyes on him, over a year without his hands leaving bruises on her tender skin. She doesn’t know what wins, the anger, or the missing him. 

She tries not to think about it. 

They don’t stay in London for long anyway.

They spend the night in a hotel room, and the next morning Emily wakes her early to board yet another plane.

It’s the worst experience of Jamie’s life. 

She’s a bit more prepared for the clogging of her ears and the rumble of the machine, that’s true, plus this time she’s sitting next to Emily, and Jamie does let her wrap her arm around her while the plane is rising...but still. The whole journey is a bloody nightmare. 

Whatever she’s meant to do with her life, it’s not sitting in a tin can for 9 hours. She feels she’s losing her mind. She watches the little screen in front of her seat almost ravenously, follows the tiny plane flying across the ocean with her eyes until she dozes, but finds no rest. 

She’s jealous of how easily Mikey sleeps. She’s wondering if Emily will be cross if she asks to go to the bathroom for the second time in the past hour when the captain announces they’re starting their descent. 

They land in some place called Chicago. 

Jamie is not half as dumb as everyone else thinks she is, so she knows enough to sort of recognize the name, although it’s not New York City or Los Angeles. Hardly matters, as they don’t leave the airport. 

They walk and walk, and then settle down on a bunch of seats next to a sign reading Gate 36. She finally gets to sit next to Mikey. He’s fussy, as tired as she is, and when neither Emily nor Mr.Martin can calm him down, Jamie holds him. Sits him on her lap even though he's getting too big and heavy.

He falls asleep on her shoulder. Jamie tries to hide her pleased smile from Emily and Mr.Martin. It's proof enough, she thinks, that her brother still likes her best. 

Jamie doesn’t remember falling asleep.

Mr.Martin carries her from the gate into the plane, and for the first time in years, since before her dad started working at the mine, she sees the world from the vantage point of a man’s shoulder. She’s too exhausted to demand to be put down.

She settles on her seat, and somehow sleeps through the plane taking off. 

The flight is over in the blink of an eye. 

And then, they land in Minnesota. 

⚜️

The rest of the morning at school goes marginally better. She only has one class with Dani, Algebra, and they have a quiz so there’s no opportunity for Dani to look back at her, to lean across the space between their desks and try to talk to her.

Jamie’s pretty sure she doesn’t get a single answer right in the test. 

She tries to focus on the rest of her classes, but she hates chemistry, and spanish is too easy to hold her attention for long. She resorts to doodling on the corner of a page when she realizes she’s staring out the small window on the door on the microscopically small chance that Dani might be going to the bathroom and could walk in front of her classroom. 

Get a grip. The entire point of cutting off ties with Dani is that she needs to stop thinking about her, stop wanting to hang out with her. The walking home together, and the texting, and the long talks...it reeks of dependence. Somewhere along the way she started expecting things from her and being disappointed if, for example, Dani wouldn’t be walking home with her because she wanted to help Eddie with a chess club meeting. 

She can’t depend on anyone, and she knows it. 

Depending on people is stupid, dangerous really. Gives them the chance to dissapoint you, or betray you, or hurt you—or all of the above. Jamie doesn't need anyone. She decided a long time ago that she would live her life in such a way that she would never depend on another soul.

It’s better that way. 

Maybe what she needs is just a little time to undo what a few weeks of Dani Clayton have done. A cleanse of sorts.

Or an exorcism.

The bell rings.

⚜️

(April, 2014. Minneapolis, Minnesota.)

The United States of America make no sense to Jamie Taylor. 

(And she explicitly refuses to acknowledge the way her last name was changed to Martin a few days after the adoption was finalized.)

It’s a sunny spring day when she first sets foot on American soil, but it’s cold, too, and that feels like the first betrayal of many this country has in store for her. 

Back home, she could take things at face value. If the sky was cloudy and overcast, she could expect a damp, gloomy day. If the clouds cleared, she could expect a sunny afternoon and the chance to play outside with Mikey.

People might have said the weather was unpredictable, but Jamie had always been able to feel it in her bones. Had liked it, even, how a day could start grey and cold and then turn sunny and hot, or the opposite, or a combination thereof when there was rain to be had, or hail, or even snow on a rare occasion.

In any case, she could trust what she saw.  No such luck in bloody America. 

From the first moment they leave the airport she can tell it’s nothing like the tiny bloody mining village in North Yorkshire she hails from, and every new thing just keeps driving that home.  She and Mikey had been bounced around Manchester for a bit, so she’s not surprised at the height of the buildings or the amount of people anymore, but still, there’s something about America that is... insolent.

The bright lights are too bright. The people are too loud. The portion sizes are too bloody massive.  

Her new public school is nothing like the sad little primary school with just over 70 pupils back home. Hundreds of kids attend here, Mr.Martin says, as they drive in front of the massive building on their way to the new house.

Even the new house is nothing like their old house back in England. Jamie had gotten used to it, how all the houses felt a little alike, and it’s all painfully different when she steps into the new house. 

It feels...brand new. Plastic. Flimsy. 

The bedrooms are upstairs, and she holds Mikey’s hand as they run up the stairs. Their bedroom has a large window overlooking the backyard. Her bed is against one side of the room, Mikey’s bed is at the other. 

She feels strange, like she’s floating and lost, but then Mikey tugs her towards his bed and begs her to jump with him, and she gives in. 

“Jamie! Look! Look!”

The mattress sinks under their feet before propelling them upwards. Mikey laughs, delighted. Jamie smiles.

This is strange at first, too. It’s been a while since she’s had fun with Mikey, between all the time outs she got when they were packing and stressed about the move, and it’s been even longer since she’s played. She doesn’t feel like a kid anymore, probably hasn’t felt like one since before her mum left, if she really thinks about it.

But it’s coming back now, as Mikey makes a funny face that Jamie can’t help laughing at. As she stretches her arms up and tries to jump higher and touch the ceiling. As Mikey loses his footing and lands on his butt, and then bounces a bit more before he can get up again. They laugh and laugh, and Jamie thinks that the world might be new and strange, but she has her brother, and that’s all that really matters.   

When Mr.Martin finds them a few minutes later and scolds them for jumping on the bed, Jamie takes the blame. He doesn’t like her anyway.

⚜️

She slips into the girls bathroom during Lunch, and stays there the entire fucking time. 

She eats a granola bar she swiped from Mrs.Quint’s cupboard sitting on a closed toilet, and for the first time in ages feels remarkably embarassed about her life choices. Embarrasment was reserved for the older girl at a group home she has a crush noticing she stares at her for a bit too long. Or for the time she bled through her trousers a few years ago, and her foster mother couldn't pick her up so she had to go back to class wearing damp jeans she'd scrubbed in the bathroom herself. 

And, aparently, eating lunch in the bathroom because she's hiding from a cheerleader. 

She made the right call ending their almost-friendship, but hiding out in the bathroom it’s a miserable exercise in cowardice. 

She just doesn’t want to face Dani. 

If it was anyone else she’d be out there, making a point of it, letting her eyes pass over her like she’s not even there. But it’s Dani, and she can’t do it. Jamie is a lot of things, but she’s never been needlessly cruel to people who don’t deserve it. And cruelty is the last thing Dani deserves. 

She just hopes this part—the avoiding her, the Dani chasing after her and asking what she’s done wrong—doesn’t last long. She hopes Dani moves on fast and she can sink back into anonymity soon enough, get back to her derailed plan to keep her head down and hold on until she turns 18. 

She hopes their almost-friendship dies a quick death—but she’s not counting on Dani Clayton’s stubborn need to save broken things. 

⚜️

(April, 2014. Minneapolis, Minnesota.)

At first, Jamie's accent is interesting. She’s enrolled in Mrs.Nelson’s class as the school year is almost coming to an end, which makes her strange enough, but the way she speaks is what really raises eyebrows. At first, it’s curious. But it becomes clear soon enough that for the rest of the 5th graders, she’s something more akin to a weird bug than a rare butterfly.

She fucking hates them.

She hates that they’re all friends already so she doesn’t fit in anywhere, hates that none of the topics ring a bell, that she doesn’t know any of the TV shows they’re watching. Her homeroom teacher tells her to make an effort, like she’s the problem. 

And then, it’s not just at school. Suddenly, Jamie being Jamie is also a problem at home.

She drops her bag as soon as she comes in, but Emily intercepts her before she can make her way to the backyard and climb one of the two trees back there, the only activity that calms her down these days.

“How was school?” Emily asks.

Jamie doesn’t know when it started to feel like a trap, every time she asks her anything. 

“Fine.”

“How was the Math quiz?” she asks. Jamie stares at her shoes. “Jamie?”

Honesty is the best policy, her homeroom teacher always says.

Jamie looks up at Emily.

“Dead 'ard."

“Hard,” Emily repeats. “Enunciate your words. And dead hard is no way to speak. Say it was difficult.”

“What does it matter how I say it?” She’s failing either way, and difficult sounds stuck up. 

Emily huffs out a breath. “You sound uneducated when you speak like that.”

A memory hits her, then. Her dad, following her mum around the house. Words she couldn’t understand. ‘You’re too good for me, is that it? I’m just an old, uneducated sod, and you’re too good to be stuck with me.’

“I can't help where I'm from,” Jamie says, her voice rising along with the tide of feelings the memory brings up. “Can’t help the way I bloody speak!”

Emily purses her lips.

“Yes, you can. And you will.” 

⚜️

Dani corners her at the end of the school day. 

Ambushes her, really. One moment she’s walking out of her last class and the next Dani is stepping into her path so suddenly Jamie has to skid to a stop less she smashes their faces together—they’re the exact same height. 

“Jamie?” It’s soft, the way she says her name, soft and searching, like she’s hoping Jamie was just joking this morning, being a twat for no reason and she’s back to normal. But she isn’t—or she is, actually, back to the normal that she should’ve never strayed from. 

“This isn’t funny anymore,” Dani says, stern—but with cracks showing through. “Talk to me.”

Jamie steps aside and starts walking.

She hasn’t taken two strides when Dani grabs her shoulder, hard . 

“D’you need something, Clayton?!” She asks, aware of how a few kids look their way.

“Jamie, what the hell ?” 

Some people are outright staring now, but it’s like Dani doesn’t care, like she doesn’t see them. 

Jamie looks down at the ground. Can’t do anything else, really. She doesn’t want to be cruel, to push more than she has to, but she’s running out of options and Dani’s seemingly not giving up.  

“You’re not joking, are you?” Dani asks again, quieter this time. She grabs Jamie’s wrist and walks them to a corner, and Jamie lets herself be guided. The hallway gets emptier as everyone collects their shit and heads home. Soon enough, it’ll be only them, and Jamie doesn’t know what she’ll do then. Scream at her, maybe. Some part of her deep down wants to cry. 

“Was it something I said?” Dani asks softly. “Let me fix it. I thought we were getting to be friends.”

“No,” Jamie tells her, looking resolutely over Dani’s shoulder. 

“Am I really so bad that you don't want to be friends with me?” Dani asks, her joking words masking self-deprecation Jamie can hear . As if Dani didn’t know just how great she is. “And I know I offended you the first time we talked, but I thought we were over that. Haven't I made up for it?”

There was nothing to make up for , Jamie thinks. You’re the best friend I’ve had in years. Maybe the only real friend I’ve had in my life. 

She looks at Dani, at the hopeful gleam in her eyes, and feels the resonating spark of something in her chest. She can’t do this. 

“I just don't do friends,” she tells her. “ Now piss off.”

⚜️

(May, 2014. Minneapolis, Minnesota.)

School doesn't get better. If anything, it gets worse. Jamie’s annoyed by her classmates, a bunch of stupid, brain dead morons who spend recess talking about Disney Channel TV shows. The boys won't let her play with them. The girls don't want her to sit with them. Jamie doesn't fit in anywhere.

And being set aside is just fine, but then they start picking on her. Calling her names. Chasing after her on the playground. And when that happens? Well, she hits first and she hits hard. If she didn't take it back home, she’s not going to take it from a bunch of American idiots. 

It doesn't go well with Emily and Mr.Martin. 

At first Emily had been kind, had told her she needed to try harder to fit in, that it would take time. But then, after her bloody teacher calls home because a boy had wound up in tears after she hit him on the mouth, Emily and Mr.Martin both start piling on her. 

She’s a troublemaker. She’s a problem. She’s bad, she’s bad, she’s bad.  

Jamie slams doors. She stomps her feet. She hates it at school and now she hates it at home too.

She yells at Emily and Mr.Martin, because she can, and because she’s no longer afraid. Every day that passes only makes it clearer that she’s not in care anymore, that her case worker is not going to come knocking on the door, and that gives her a freedom she hasn't had in ages. 

They can’t separate her from her brother anymore. 

“You’re a whore! You’re a fucking stupid bloody cow!”

Words she’s been called. Words her real mum had been called. Words she’s not entirely sure she knows the meanings off but deep down feels how ugly and dark they are. Like tar. Like coal.

Emily has tears in her eyes, and Jamie thinks, serves her right. For taking us away from home. For making me be here where I’m different and everyone hates me and even I hate me. Fuck her and her husband, for wanting Mikey but not wanting me. 

The tears last a second, before Emily grabs her by the earlobe and drags her to the bathroom, where she promptly washes her mouth out with soap.

⚜️

Jamie runs the last few blocks home.

It feels good—her trainers slamming on the pavement, the wind whipping her hair back, her lungs dragging in air. It's over before she knows it, and she's thundering up the steps to Mrs.Quint's front door. She makes her way up the stairs two at a time.

She throws her backpack on a corner, slams her bedroom door closed, toes her shoes off and then falls face first into bed.

She keeps replaying that final moment, Dani's silent gasp at her words. Like she’d been sucker punched. Like she was surprised it was Jamie of all people delivering the killing blow. She’s not sure if those were tears in her eyes or just a trick of the lighting.

Jamie feels hot inside, unsettled. Her body is thrumming. Her throat itches. 

It’s the urge to cry.

This isn't her. She doesn't cry. It’s even more ridiculous when she remembers how good she has it. This is the best house she’s been in by far. She’s the only kid here, and constantly getting lunch money, and she’s got a backpack and a phone out of the deal. She would’ve killed for internet privileges a year ago. And now, Mrs.Quint has handed her pretty much the Christmas list of any kid in foster care for no good reason. 

It’s stupid, to waste a single moment feeling sorry for herself.

But her stupid brain wonders about what is the point of having a phone if she won’t have anyone to text anymore. Her dumb monkey brain is already running through future lunches by herself, to the way her other classmates will certainly go back to messing with her, since Dani herself is the only reason they stopped. It had felt so good, to give voice to thoughts that she usually only keeps to herself. To snap a picture of a ridiculous advertisement while at the grocery store with Mrs.Quint, because she knew Dani would find it funny.

It’s been a day, and she already misses Dani Clayton. 

So it seems like she’s hallucinating, when she hears footsteps up the stairs, faster and lighter than Mrs.Quint’s. A type of power walk that she’s grown used to from afternoon walks home. 

She only has a second to reflect on it because then Dani Clayton is barging into her room with the force of a tornado. 

Jamie jumps out of bed like someone's lit a fire under her arse.

“ What the fuck?”  

⚜️

(May, 2014. Minneapolis, Minnesota.)

Mikey is the only good thing.

The only good, happy thing in Jamie's life. 

He’s getting good at running faster now, and Jamie’s got it into her head that she’ll teach him to play football, proper football, not whatever Americans call football.  The Martin’s have a big backyard, and Jamie spends as much time as she can back there, sometimes with Mikey, most times, alone. Under the sun, under the shade of the neighbor’s tree spilling over their fence. Away from the screaming, and the kids at school, and her own ugly thoughts. 

" Mummy’s making pizza for dinner," Mikey says, plopping down beside her. "Mine with pepperoni, and cheese...and pepperoni."

"Yeah?"  Jamie encourages him.  It’s a lost cause telling him that Emily is not his mother, and Jamie thinks it doesn't even matter anymore. Emily wants him, and their real mum left him. That’s got to count for something.  

"J amie?" Mikey asks, pulling on her sleeve.

"Huh?"

"Please don't hate mummy today."

The simple words in Mikey's pitchy little voice knock her back.

" I don't...What are you saying? I don't hate her."

She doesnt want to lie to Mikey, but she’s not sure if that’s true.  Maybe lying is the kind thing to do, anyways. 

Before she can say anything else, Mikey’s already moved on, picking himself back up on steady legs.

" Do you want to hear my song about cowboys?”  he asks out of the blue, and starts singing nonsensically before she can answer. 

Jamie watches him, how happy and carefree he is in this house, with this parents, singing under the shade of this tree. She's not scrounging up leftovers from an old fridge or trying to pick the padlock of a locked cabinet when their stomachs growled. She doesn't have to worry about whether the next set of carers will try to hit him or just her if they're not quiet enough. He's happy, and Jamie is mad at herself that the awful, angry thing that sits in her chest hasn't dissapeared. Things have changed but she hasn't.

Mikey is the only person in the world she’s sure she loves, so what does it mean if the way she is is hurting him?

⚜️

“What the fuck?”  

She’s too alarmed to say much else. She desperately wipes her cheeks and then wipes her hands on her jeans, praying her face isn’t shiny and her eyes aren’t red. “Did you bloody break in?”

“Of course not,” Dani says, matter-of-fact. “I told Anne we had to study.”

“Anne? You’re on a fucking first name basis with my foster parent now? And what are you doing here?”

Dani stares past her, straight at the wall. 

“I want an answer from you,” Dani says. It sounds practiced, robotic. But even so, Dani looks like a force of nature. She barged in here like a hurricane—and like a hurricane, Jamie is powerless to stop her. 

“What?”

She feels like a fish out of water. She’s standing in the middle of her bedroom—as much as any room under a stranger’s roof could be hers—but she holds no control. Dani has it all. And how did that fucking happen?

Dani was meek and polite and nice. She helped younger kids at school and always had a smile for everyone. She was possibly the first popular person Jamie had met in almost a dozen different schools attended in her 17 years on this earth, that actually deserved it.

Dani right now looks so determined Jamie is almost afraid of getting in her way.

"See, you said you don't do friends earlier, so I'm wondering how you would describe the past few weeks. Because here I thought we were friends already. You certainly weren't complaining when we walked home together, or when I spent all those lunch hours with you. So are you lying now, or were you lying back then?"

Jamie swallows.

She feels stupid. This is stupid. 

Dani is not following the script here. She’s set the script on fire and now Jamie is left floundering, unsteady as she tries and fails to figure out her next move. Dani was supposed to move on, to forget about their brief dip into friendship and carry on as normal with her squad and her best-friend-not-boyfriend like Jamie had never existed. 

She wasn’t supposed to call her out on her shit. She wasn’t supposed to push. No one ever has. 

At the end of the day, no one’s ever fought for Jamie, and she’s okay with that. Not her real parents, or her older brother, or the endless carers, or her adoptive parents—no one. And this 16-year-old girl who could give a Barbie doll a run for its money thinks she’s going to be the first?

“We’re not…friends, Dani,” she tells her, evenly. Hopes it sinks in.

Dani huffs. She rolls her eyes, dismissive. That annoys Jamie. She almost can’t help it, the way she gets heated. Her temper rises to the surface.

“You don't understand,” she tells her, tense. 

“What? That you think you’re too cool to have friends?”

“It’s not like that!”

“Oh, it’s isn’t?” Dani asks, challenging her.

“You don’t understand, you just don’t get it—”

“Then tell me—”

“I’m a foster kid, okay?! I could leave next month if I get placed somewhere else. I could leave tomorrow, and you'd never see me again, and then what's the point? What’s the bloody point—”

“You!”

Dani’s hand closes around her wrist. She looks straight at her, and Jamie’s world is reduced to two things: that point of contact, and Dani’s impossibly blue eyes. Jamie is breathless.

“You are the point.”

⚜️

(June, 2014. Minneapolis, Minnesota.)

Summer starts, and the new season brings change into Jamie’s life.

For possibly the first time in her life, however, it's by her own hand.

She couldn't control her parents fighting, or her mum living, or Denny's smoking that eventually burned down their home and got them thrown into care. In a way, Jamie feels like her entire life she's been circling around in a washing machine of other grown ups' shite choices, just turning and turning with no end in sight, powerless to stop. 

So she resolves to be different. To make the choices herself. There won't be any fights to get into when she’s not at school anymore, and in the few weeks that separate her from summer break, she keeps to herself, and sits close to the teachers during lunch to avoid kids picking on her and her having to answer with her fists. There's a choice between rolling her eyes when Emily gets on her ass about something, or at least pretending to listen to her. There's a choice to yell less. To not use curse words with either Emily or Mr.Martin.

She doesn't get detention again the remainder of the school year. Emily stops yelling at her so much at home too.

Things get better, in some ways. But not in others.

One hot Saturday afternoon, the day after the last day of school, s he wakes up from a nap and there’s no one at home. It makes something tight and aching bloom in her chest when she realizes that they left without telling her. That not even Mikey thought to shake her awake. 

When they come back, Mikey has a paper crown on his head and a toy in his hand. 

Mr.Martin notices her on the couch, and leaves a greasy, cold paper bag with Burger King on the side on the coffee table in front of Jamie.

"You were asleep, kid," Mr.Martin tells her. "But we got you some dinner."

⚜️

Jamie looks away from Dani. 

You are the point bounces around in her head, in her ribcage. What is she supposed to say to that?

Dani doesn't give her space to say anything.

"I like you," Dani says, without letting go of her wrist. "You're great. You're funny, and you're smart, and—and if you move away we’ll still get to text, and we’ll keep in touch, and we can facetime and use that app Eddie told me about and watch Netflix at the same time." Dani drops her wrist, but Jamie still feels her touch like a burn on her skin. "You're a good friend, Jamie." Dani smiles, small and gentle and catastrophic to Jamie's heart. "And to be honest...I’m so happy I got you as my partner in Bio Lab instead of Rebecca." 

Jamie looks away from Dani's eyes, from the way her eyebrows pinch in the middle like she's in anguish.

She stares at her socked feet.

It's hard, to even begin to process everything Dani's just blurted out. Her brain is still catching up to the fact that she's here at all. Jamie knows she'll be thinking about it for days, trying to remember her exact words and trying to ignore this feeling in the pit of her stomach. Something like hope. Like—a choice. Or a leap of faith. 

"Jamie."

Jamie looks up without meaning to, Dani's soft call enough for her body to have a mind of its own. 

"Can we just keep being friends? And we'll deal with whatever happens later?"

Everything in her body wants to say no. The unknown is dangerous. Waiting to see what happens get people in trouble, and depending on others is pure shite.

But she already feels like shit anyways. She's not even sure if she'd feel worse if she ended up moving away—as if Dani has already put down roots on her, after only a few weeks, and it's going to be a bad time when it all ends, whether she lets herself have this or not. 

Dani isn't demanding an answer anymore. She just looks at her, and waits, as if she knows that Jamie needs time to process all of this and is giving it to her. 

Can they keep being friends?

Jamie thinks maybe they can. And who would've thought?

She nods, and a grin spreads across Dani's face, her top lip pulling back to reveal her teeth. Her eyes...there they go, sparkling again, like magic and pretty things could be real. 

Jamie's not quite sure she's ever been looked at the way Dani is looking at her right now. 

Or maybe, she was looked at plenty before, and this is being seen.

⚜️

(July, 2014. Minneapolis, Minnesota.)

It happens on a warm July afternoon. 

She's been out of school for long enough that she doesn't wake up overly early every morning, her body actually lets her sleep in. For the first time in ages, she can relax, too. Before, being on vacation meant being smart, finding ways to stay out of the way of her carers and keep Mikey entertained. Now, she rolls around in bed for a bit, listening to Mikey play with his toys on their bedroom floor. 

She dozes, feeling lazy, and when her bladder finally drags her out of bed, it's noon.

"I'm hungry," Mikey tells her, between a sea of building blocks.

"Where's Emily?" Jamie asks, but Mikey's ensuing ramble doesn't offer any clear answers. She holds out her hand for her brother to take, but Mikey extends his arms instead, begging to be picked up. 

Jamie does, not without effort. 

He's getting heavier, growing just a bit more every time she blinks.

Sometimes, Jamie wonders if she's so small because she didn't always get something to eat when she was hungry. She's glad it will never be like that for Mikey. 

She carefully goes down the stairs, Mikey's legs firmly wrapped around her waist. He's 3 years old already, but Jamie remembers when he was nothing but a baby, pink and wrapped in blankets, or when he turned 1 and she ruined his birthday cake. 

She's so lost in thought, she doesn't look where she's going.

She loses her footing on a wrinkle in the carpet on the last step, and stumbles before crashing to her knees. A jolt of pain flashes through her legs, but she ignores it, grabbing Mikey by the shoulders to look him in the face.

"You okay?"

Mikey's eyes are wide open, but when he realizes they're fine, he laughs. 

Jamie sighs, her heart thundering.

She deduces from Mikey's rambling a few minutes later that Emily is out with some old friends, and she quickly locates Mr.Martin in the front yard, mowing the lawn.

"I'm hungry," Mikey whines, and Jamie doubts for a moment with her hand on the doorknob. 

She doesn't want to ask Mr.Martin for help. Emily is always the one who cooks, anyway, so what could he do?

"Jamie," Mikey says, pulling on her shirt. 

 She doesn't need him, Jamie thinks. Either of them, really. She was taking care of Mikey just fine without them. 

"How does Mac and Cheese sound?" she asks Mikey, who immediately beams. 

She finds a box on the pantry, and sets a pot of water on the stove to boil.

That's all it takes for her life to implode.

Chapter Text

They end up studying together that afternoon.

Jamie is at a loss, but Dani just trudges on and pulls out her history book like she can’t tell that Jamie’s nose is leaking and her eyes are red. 

She doesn’t answer Dani’s question. ¿Can we just keep being friends? she had asked, and Jamie hadn’t said a word. Dani had taken her silence for an agreement, apparently. 

Jamie isn’t sure if she’s relieved, or happy, or terrified of all the above. What she does realize is she’s still standing in the middle of her bedroom, face wet and unsightly. The hot flush of embarrassment invades her body. She gets her shit under control quickly after that.

They sit on the floor, on the carpet that Mrs. Quint insists on coming in to vacuum every third day, something about preventing allergies. Jamie used to think she was using it as an excuse to watch over her, but she’s not sure anymore. She’s not sure of anything.

“I think I’m done with this,” Dani says, pulling Jamie’s attention from thoughts she’s too exhausted to untangle.

Dani sighs and pushes her textbook away. Jamie looks down at her own. She’s already read the material, and she finds it quite interesting. She’s engaged enough that she knows the exam won’t be so hard. 

Chemistry is usually one of her weaker subjects, but they’re studying biochemistry now, and there’s something about protein structures and amino acids that feels alive—alive enough to hold her attention.

“You’re gonna do better than me,” Dani says.

Hell, she just might. 

Jamie shrugs. “I’ll pass you the answers.”

“No, you can't.”

She looks genuinely appalled at the thought. Jamie smiles at the conundrum that is Dani Clayton. She’s not okay with cheating off a test, but barging into her house—into Mrs.Quint’s house , she corrects herself—is alright. 

She’s embarrassed all over again. 

“Dani?” She asks quietly. “Can we forget about everything I said earlier?”

Dani looks up, her eyes impossibly blue. 

“No,” she tells her, “and I don’t know why you’d want to.”

Jamie’s throat itches. 

“Embarrassing,” she croaks out, scuffing the floor with the side of her shoe. 

Dani looks at her—Jamie can tell she’s looking at her, she feels her eyes on her face, but she pointedly stares at her own shoes. 

“It isn’t,” Dani says, when it becomes obvious she won’t look up. “My dad died when I was 10, you know? He was driving home one day and a drunk driver t-boned him at an intersection. They said he died on impact.”

Fuck. 

“Jesus, Dani. I'm sorry.” She looks up at her finally, and is surprised to find a smile on Dani’s face. The upturned edges of her mouth paint an image of nostalgia that Jamie has only seen flashes of before. 

Dani nods, acknowledging her words.

“For months afterward, I didn't want to let my mom out of my sight. I was convinced if I did, that she’d die too. She thought I was stupid. It was Eddie, who finally pulled me out of it. I just started to spend more time at his house, with his family, than I did at my own. His house is the blue one across the street from mine. That’s why we’re so close. It wasn't just growing up together, it was...that.”

Jamie nods. 

“I...I think I realized that life is so short and people can leave in just a second. And you don't even get to say goodbye. That’s why I was so terrified of losing my mom too. I even felt it with Eddie sometimes, when he stayed home sick. I would spend the whole day imagining him choking on his lunch or getting stung by bees like that horrible old movie with the boy from Home Alone. You know the one?”

Jamie doesn’t, but she nods again just to keep Dani talking. 

“And then I grew up a bit more and realized that was pointless. Whatever is going to happen is going to happen. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.” Dani meets her eyes. “Eddie told me once that if I hadn’t been close to my dad, like he wasn’t close to his dad, I wouldn’t have minded that he died. But I don't regret how close I was to my dad just because I lost him.”

Jamie nods. She knows what Dani’s saying. She gets what Dani is trying to get her to see, and she’s not entirely sure she agrees with it—it goes against her entire philosophy in life. But she feels so brittle, so on the verge of breaking, that she can’t argue with her right now.

And she’s thankful that Dani isn’t spelling it out for her. 

“How did you do on your algebra quiz?” Dani asks, offering her a respite.

“Fucking blew it.” 

Dani laughs. “Want to go over the answers?”

⚜️

(July, 2014. Minneapolis, Minnesota.)

The lies are what kill her.

The lies are what feed the dark, hot pit inside her chest, where anger festers like the worms she’d dig up in her backyard back home in England, before everything went to shit.

“Why did you want to hurt your brother?” the psychologist asks.

“What did Mikey do that made you so angry?” her caseworker says.

Jamie screams that she wasn’t angry. That it was an accident. That she never meant to hurt the one good thing she has in the world. But it all falls on deaf ears. 

“As you can see, she’s very...problematic,” Mr. Martin says. He looks at her like she’s a monster now, whereas before she was just a nuisance. 

It makes Jamie feel like a rabid dog they’re trying to put down. 

She remembers it every night. So often that it begins to tangle with her dreams, her nightmares, untils it feels like she’s living the same five minutes over and over again every night. 

The pot of water, boiling. Mikey whining that he wants to help. Jamie telling him to go watch the telly and looking away—why did she look away? She turns just in time to see him get on his tippy toes to reach the pot with a wooden spoon. Then, the noise of the pot and the metal of the stove. The way it slid forward.

She dives in front of it, she always does, just like real life. 

She feels the burning pain in her back, as if her skin is melting, just like it happened. 

And no matter how many times she dreams about it, the outcome is always the same. Her shoulder gets burned but so does Mikey’s neck. 

She wakes up, and her nightmare is still real.  

⚜️

They’ve both stopped studying chemistry. Jamie, because she knows the material. Dani, because she says it’s hopeless. The end result is the same: the both of them spread out on Jamie’s bed, staring at the ceiling. 

“Is Mrs.Quint...how many...I mean, I don’t want to intrude, but since when…”

Jamie looks to her right, and then quickly back up to the ceiling. Dani is so close she’s out of focus, and it makes Jamie feel all out of sorts. 

“Been in care since I was nine,” she offers. “I genuinely don’t know what number of foster parent she is. Stopped counting after 20.”

“Jesus.”

Jamie shrugs as much as the position allows. 

“It’s fine. You get used to it pretty quick.”

You do. Jamie realizes that she’s been in the system almost as long as she hasn’t. When she turns 18, she’ll have spent half her life in care. She’s used to it, has adopted locking doors when available and hoarding food and coins as second nature. It’s not a pain anymore. In fact, foster care at all wouldn’t be so bad, if it wasn’t for the other people—the other kids, sometimes, and the carers, most of the time. 

Jamie almost misses juvie, at times. No foster parents there, just guards that would leave her alone if she didn’t act up. Juvie was solid; she knew where she’d be laying her head every night. The inmates changed every once in a while, which was fine because she never got close to anybody. That’s how you survive. 

She can feel the heat from Dani’s body all along her arm, can almost feel the static energy from the other girl.

Why has she agreed to do this, again? She’s gone 17 years without a friend, why ruin that now?

“Oh Jamie,” Dani says, and squeezes her hand. Jamie jumps, and Dani pretends not to notice—or she doesn’t. It’s been so long since anyone has just...touched her. Not to steer her footsteps by grabbing her arm, or squeezing her shoulder as some show of dominance, but just…a touch. A comfort. 

It’s jarring.

“I’m sorry you’ve had to be in so many different places,” Dani says. “But I’m so... glad, you’re here now.”

She lets go of her hand.

Jamie’s lungs fill with oxygen again. 

“You know, I never did tell you but I do like The Wombats. Blondie, not so much.”

“I’ll take it,” Jamie says, and the conversations steers away from topics that make her throat feel tight.

⚜️

(August, 2014. Minneapolis, Minnesota.)

Jamie turns 11 years old, and it’s all a big bloody joke. The Martins get her a cake, and there’s a present supposedly from Mikey, but it’s all a big fucking fucking ruse. They want to see her punished for an accident, like they don't know how much Jamie hates herself already for what happened.

Maybe she deserves it, anything they can dish out. 

“Blow out the candles.” Emily tells her, and Jamie stares resolutely ahead.

“Don’t want to.”

“Jamie, don't be difficult, not today.”

“Well, it's my bloody birthday isn't it?”

They send her to bed without supper. She lays there, her empty stomach aching, the bandaged third degree burn on her shoulder burning, and she imagines she’s a lit ember. A piece of coal like the ones her dad has spent his whole life digging out from underground.

She imagines Mikey is safe outside, that their mum has come back for him, to take him home. 

And Jamie is free to stay here—and as her pain grows—burn brighter, hotter, until she turns everything to ashes. 

⚜️

Dani hugs her that afternoon, before she leaves. Jamie is just reaching for Dani’s jacket when she’s caught off guard by a pair of warm arms around her, squeezing her tight. It takes her a moment to react, and by the time her hands have reached up to delicately rest on Dani's shoulders, Dani is stepping away. 

She doesn’t walk her to the door. She’s frozen to the spot, as she waves goodbye, and then sees Dani disappear downstairs. She hears her say goodbye to Mrs. Quint, and then the telltale click of the door. 

Jamie sits back down on her bed, and she swears she can still feel Dani’s presence here—or maybe it’s just her perfume. 

Dani had hugged her like...Jamie wants to say a mother. Or a sister. She has a vague idea of how those are supposed to feel. She had a mother once, even if she left. And she had siblings once, even if one hated her and the other one was ripped away. But it isn't anything like that. 

A friend, then, she decides. Dani’s a friend.

Jamie has never felt that before. 

She was so young, far too young, when she made good friends with bitterness and rage. A friend like Dani almost feels like hope. 

⚜️

(September, 2014. Minneapolis, Minnesota.)

The end, when it comes, is equal parts surprising and devastating in its simplicity. 

Jamie wakes up one day like any other, curls sticking to her neck from the heat. The dog days are almost over, summer slipping into autumn, but it’s still hot some mornings. Her room is empty. Ever since the incident with the boiling water, Mikey has been sleeping in Emily’s and Mr.Martin’s bedroom. 

She wakes up, already bracing for what the day will bring, when she notices a black bag at the foot of her bed.

Emily comes in a minute later, surprised to see her awake. She looks ashamed, almost, when she tells her someone is here to see her. 

It’s a blur after that. 

There’s words exchanged between the grown ups. Jamie sees her caseworker, and some strangers, and dread settles in her throat like she’s swallowed a pill that was too big.

She hears things like “it’s been proven she’s a danger to herself and others” and “succeeded in harming her brother” and “can’t remain in the home”. She barely understands sentences like “legally a United States citizen now” and “law is ambiguous in these cases”. The ones that make her start crying are “cannot be returned to England” and “back in the foster system.” 

“These people are going to help you find the place you deserve,” Mr. Martin tells her.

“You’ll be able to see your brother when you’re better,” her caseworker promises. 

But Jamie is seeing her brother now, in Emily’s arms in the other room.

He is laughing in her arms, and it's like he doesn't care, like he doesn't know that she’s his big sister and she’s taken care of him since he was born. That her only worry the last two years they’ve been in care was him being okay. That she was supposed to take care of him always and he prefers this stupid blonde lady that they didn’t even know a year ago. 

He’s laughing, like he doesn’t realize that Jamie is getting sent away.

“Do you want to say goodbye to your brother?” the caseworker asks.

Resentment ignites in her chest.

“No.”

She will always regret not saying goodbye to Mikey.

She will never see him again.