Helpless. That's what she felt. Completely fucking helpless.
She couldn't fix Gloria's dramatics. She couldn't make the children sit still. She couldn't solve the costume crisis or find the missing sheet music or perform any of the thousand other miracles that seemed to be required to pull this thing off.
All she could do was stand here and watch Annabelle slowly crumble under the weight of trying to save everyone and everything and wonder how, and why, she did it.
"Raven!" Gloria's voice cut through the noise. "We need you on stage for the musical number!"
Raven pushed off the wall and made her way through the chaos, dodging running children and what appeared to be a papier-mâché book that someone had left in the middle of the floor.
The next twenty minutes were a special kind of torture.
The children couldn't remember the words. Gloria kept stopping mid-song to give "directorial notes" that made no sense. And through it all, Annabelle kept smiling, kept encouraging, kept acting like everything was fine when it clearly wasn't.
Finally,finally,Gloria declared they needed a break.
The children scattered immediately, descending on the snack table like a swarm of locusts. Raven stepped off the stage, ready to escape to the relative peace of the back wall, when she noticed a small figure sitting alone.
Jamie.
He was perched on the edge of the stage, knees pulled up to his chest, staring at nothing. While the other kids laughed and ate biscuits and generally behaved like tiny humans hopped up on sugar, Jamie just… sat there.
Raven frowned. She crossed the room before she could talk herself out of it and sat down on the stage beside him.
"You been practicing?" she asked.
Jamie nodded.
"Good."
A tiny smile flickered across his face.
They sat in silence for a moment. Raven had no idea what she was doing. Small talk wasn't her strong suit at the best of times, and children were a completely foreign species.
"You, um, alright?" she tried.
Jamie shrugged. Which was the universal language for 'no, but I don't want to talk about it.'
Raven knew that shrug. She'd perfected it herself around age twelve.
"The performance is in two days," she said carefully. "Getting nervous?"
"A bit." His voice was barely above a whisper. Then, quieter still: "My dad moved out. Like, properly. He's got a flat now and everything."
Oh fuck.
Raven went very still.
But Jamie was looking at her now, his eyes shiny with unshed tears, and Raven couldn't just get up and walk away.
"Sucks," she said, because what else was there to say?
"Yeah." Jamie pulled his knees in tighter. "Mum cries a lot. And they still fight on the phone. I can hear them even when I'm in my room."
Raven's chest tightened. She knew that feeling, not from parents, but from foster homes. The fights through thin walls. The feeling of being stuck in the middle of someone else's anger. The desperate wish to just make it all stop.
"Music helps," she heard herself say.
Jamie nodded slowly. "That's why I like the guitar lessons. When I'm learning the chords, I don't think about the other stuff."
