Work Text:
She just wants to read in peace.
Fareeha is quiet. Not begging to practice kicking the hell out of something. Not eating everything in the fridge. Just quiet, occupied by her drawings spread out on the huge living room rug.
But these other two.
Angela with her crisp accent and her perfectly mussed hair. Jesse with the lean edges about to grow, and the facial hair that just won’t. It’s driving Ana to spike her tea.
“This is medicinal?” Angela says, across the room, at the kitchen island, where Jesse’s crowding over with less conspiratorial grace than he’d like to imagine. Angela takes a pinch of some loose leaves from a plastic baggie. She holds them suspiciously at the end of her nose.
Jesse grins. “Close enough,” he says. “I’ve got plenty more if you like it.”
Over the top of her book, watching and wishing she wasn’t, Ana’s eyes narrow.
“So I can have yellow teeth like you,” Angela replies. “Please.”
He reaches for the baggie, but Angela swipes it away.
Behind her book, Ana smirks.
“Stop it, you’re gettin it all over the place,” Jesse barks.
When the tussle ensues, Ana tenses..
“Don’t touch me.”
“Or what?”
“OW!
Hey.
”
In a flapping exchange of palms and loose shoes, Angela chases Jesse out of the kitchen.
When they’re gone, Ana stares at the empty kitchen, the mess on the floor.
“Ach, what a headache,” Ana growls, re-reading the same line of poetry she’s been trying to finish for five minutes. Another volley of shouts ricochets in the hallway. From behind her book, Ana peeks at Fareeha as if magic might be real. Like willing her daughter to grow up differently is something she can do. “Why can’t they just go to target practice?”
“Mom.” Fareeha’s eyes roll, then settle with wide fascination on Jesse and Angela as they burst into the living room, running for the courtyard, still arguing in an unintelligible doppler effect.
“Mom,” she says again, in complete sincerity, as if it explains the whole universe. “They’re
teenagers
.”
Ana’s book falls against her chest as she looks at her girl.
“I suppose they are,” Ana says.
Grow up differently,
she thinks.
Just don’t ask me how.