Chapter Text
Penny silently walked up the stairs to her bedroom. No – it’s not her bedroom anymore. Now it’s just a bedroom that her things are in. And they won’t be there for long. She could feel the eyes of the social worker and her foster parents – former foster parents – staring holes into the back of her head as she ascended. Her hand gripped the railing tight enough to turn her knuckles completely white. A pounding ache encased her skull as she clenched her jaw almost tight enough to shatter her teeth. Even if no one could see her face, she would not have a visible reaction. Sure, any normal kid would be upset by getting tossed out of yet another foster home. But Penny Lamb was no normal child.
Normal children were treated normally when having normal reactions. Normal children weren’t shoved off into random rooms to deal with emotions by themselves so as not to bother those around them while bothered. Penny had been separated from the normal kids for long enough to get the message that she wasn’t normal. And she was fine with that for the most part. For the most part, she couldn’t care less about whether she was perceived as normal or abnormal. She didn’t even notice most of the time. Except for when she would very suddenly be very alone when something she said or did was just a bit too abnormal. That was the only time Penny Lamb wished she could just...just...do whatever she had to do or say to not be alone. She hated being alone.
But she was alone, at the end of the day, wasn’t she? Terribly and terrifyingly alone. It had been so long since Penny had seen her birth parents; she couldn’t even remember the last time they had spoken or what they had talked about. And her foster parents, all of them...they never dealt with her long. She was too loud. Too quiet. Too needy. Too receded. Too sensitive. Too uncaring. Too problematic. Too much. Too much. Too much. Again and again and again, Penny was passed around foster homes, traveling all over Canada to different homes that would quickly become just houses she vaguely remembered. No one could stand her for long.
Sometimes, she knew exactly what she did to get the social worker to show up and whisk her away. Other times, it caught her so completely off guard that it took her time to process that she wasn’t going back. This time, she knew all morning that her time with the Bouchards was up. She had been getting dressed for school when she opened one of her dresser drawers and noticed that her pack of cigarettes was missing. She hadn’t been surprised at all when she was pulled out of class and taken home early. Upset, sure, but not surprised. The Bouchards had known that Penny had a history of smoking and told her on her first day that they would not tolerate such behavior in their house. Penny thought she had been following the rule by only ever smoking in the bathroom at school or behind whatever building she loitered in after school to avoid going home. Apparently just having the cigarettes in the house was too heinous of a crime, irredeemable.
It didn’t take long to pack. Penny didn’t have much to her name. Most of the clothes in her room were there before she got there, hand-me-downs from some other kids. She wouldn’t take them with her; she would only take the clothes she had bought for herself. She liked those more, anyway. She also had a very small book with contact information of other foster kids that she had briefly bonded with. She never reached out to any of them, and they never reached out to her. Having the ability to, though, brought Penny some comfort. She also grabbed her school supplies. She didn’t mind taking those even though she hadn’t bought any of them. One foster home never gave her school supplies and she went months without having so much as a backpack. She did not want a repeat of that. Lastly, she grabbed a framed photo of her as a kid, with her parents and little brother that she had been separated from years ago after their parents went to jail. She did try to keep in contact with her brother, but neither of them ever really had much to talk about.
“Ready?” the social worker asked when Penny emerged from her room.
Penny just barely nodded, looking down at her feet as they descended the stairs of the Bouchard house for the last time. She followed the social worker out to the car, getting in the passenger seat silently. She used to ride in the back, but the two had driven together enough times that Penny felt comfortable sitting up front. She stared out the window, watching the house grow smaller in the distance.
“Penny-”
The teenager knew what was about to come. Some uncaring check in on how she felt about being displaced again. It was just going to be a half-hearted attempt to dig into her inner thoughts. She had no interest in sharing.
“Just another pack-up-and-go,” Penny summarized.
“...Your next foster home is in Saskatchewan – the, uh, northeastern part...Uranium City. It’s a small town, tight-knit; you might like it.”
Penny didn’t respond. They both knew she very likely wouldn’t.
“...Is there anyone you wanted to say goodbye to before we left?”
Penny had been in the Manitoba Province for a while, but she and the social worker were probably the only ones really aware of that. Friends of Penny Lamb were few and far between. More often than not, she only ever really made “friends” with other foster kids...She wished she could say goodbye to Lucas. The two had been inseparable, and that also happened to be the longest she had stayed with one foster family. That house, and with Lucas in it, was a home that Penny had loved. It was like the very walls had held her closely and lulled her with security. And Lucas had held her closer.
He wouldn’t let her be alone when lights were too bright or things and people were too loud or when something she touched or was touching her was so awful that the awful feeling seeped through her skin and infected her veins until her entire being just existed in a state of “awful”. Every time, he would find her and eased himself slowly and carefully to be sitting behind her. He would wrap his arms around her in a tight embrace and would untangle her fingers from her hair. Depending on whether she would move her hands to cover her eyes or ears, he would cover the other sense. And they would stay like that until she stopped being Awful and started being Penny again. He was so patient, so gentle with Penny...not so much with the adults in their life.
“Stay in this town. Stay with me,” Penny could still remember herself whispering when she had followed Lucas out into the street one night when she caught him in an attempt to run away.
He had a bag on his shoulders, but, from where Penny stood, it looked empty. Did it ever have anything in it? In the dim light of the streetlamps, Penny had seen Lucas’s facial expression slip. Suddenly, in the dark of night, she could see him so clearly. She could see the mask that he wore. And behind the mask...it was a sadness so familiar that Penny forgot how to breathe while focused on trying to understand how she hadn’t noticed. She had let go of his hand, not able to hold him back. He had embraced her one last time before disappearing.
“Goodbye, Penny Lamb.”
After he left, the house stopped being so lovely.
In fact, Penny kind of hated it. Hated her foster parents. Hated her foster siblings. She hated it all. She felt trapped, all alone in that house. She ran away, too. Was she moving away from the memory of Lucas or toward the possibility of him? For days, she wandered the streets, dodging the eyes of curious passersby. She would risk being seen when checking homes for any sign of Lucas, though, hoping that he wasn’t still on the streets. When she caught her reflection in the windows at night, she would grow weary of her reflection mocking her, projecting her to be inside the warm, bright houses. But she was never in those houses; she was always outside, in the darkened cold. Sometimes, when she was at her loneliest points, she would find herself wondering if he ever thought about her, if he also had fantasies of the two of them settling down together and just staying put somewhere that they loved to be.
Eventually, Penny had been found and re-homed nearby. That was a couple of years ago, and the hope that she and Lucas would run into each other again dwindled with every day. Now that she was moving to another province, the wish was snuffed out. In her dreams, though, she still chased after Lucas through the streets in a never ending cruel game of tag.
“Penny?”
The girl jumped, so lost in her head that she forgot the social worker was there or that she, herself, was even in the car.
“What.”
There it was. The singular word conveyed everything Penny had been trying to tamper down. It hadn’t been a question, because Penny held no curiosity. But she held bitterness, anger, and sadness. And all off that had clambered up from her heart, through her throat, and out into that “What.” It choked her enough to make tears prick at the corner of her eyes. Penny couldn’t even remember what the social worker had been trying to prompt her to respond to, but she knew it made her want to cry. She took short and sharp breaths in an attempt to keep herself from sobbing.
The road stretched on for a long time, dragging her further and further away from what she had come to know. So many times, she had been on the road, late at night, with the social worker as the two made their way to the next foster home. It used to only make Penny sad. Once, it was a happy journey, considering what she was leaving behind. That trip had felt light and airy, as if she was floating along a cloud to a new beginning.
This trip...some sick feeling pooled in her stomach. Her body felt like lead, and she sunk further into her seat. The entire car felt like a heavy, heavy load that she was responsible for moving. For the first time in a while, Penny felt anxious about her next foster home. She had such little hope for it turning out well for her. She fiddled with one of her braids, wondering how long it would take before she’d be back out there on the road.