She glared at him like she wanted him to die slowly from something that also gave him diarrhoea. “Yeah.”
“You’re sure?”
“No. Because I’m a stupid looked-after girl who doesn’t know anything.”
Oliver gazed compassionately at her the way he gazed compassionately at me when I was shitting on myself. Unfortunately, it was still the wrong gaze for the wrong audience. “Jasmine, you’re not stupid and I think you know a great many things. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and send some emails.”
Which left me and Jaz alone with very little idea what the fuck was going on, either with Oliver or with Jaz’s geometry homework.
“What’s even the point?” she demanded, clicking random parts of the screen and seeming unsatisfied with the outcome.
“Oliver knows what he’s doing,” I told her, partly from a protective instinct and partly because he almost always did.
“Not him. This.” She pointed at a digital mix of blocks and graph paper. “When will Ieverneed this?”
Somewhere, buried deep in the national curriculum, there was probably a topic I could look at and say with absolute honesty that I used in my day-to-day life. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t say what itwasbut I could definitely say what itwasn’t. And it wasn’t labelling the plan, front, and side elevations of meaningless sets of cubes. “Well,” I tried, “maybe you’ll…you could want to be an engineer one day?”
She looked from me to the blocks and then back to me. “This is what engineers do, is it?”
“I mean, not literally this. Not exactly literally this. But itprobably develops, I don’t know, spatial awareness?”
Whether Jaz was feeling more scorn in that moment for me or for her maths homework was honestly a toss-up. “Spatial awareness?”
“School is important?” I tried, wishing the question mark wasn’t quite so audible.
With a sigh to break the world, Jaz turned back to her incomprehensible geometry and I, having satisfied myself that yes, she found my company less appealing than schoolwork, went back into the kitchen to finish chopping.
I was just about done with the carrots by the time Oliver came back. The butter in the sautéing pan had gone all yellow and clumpy, and needed remelting, but there were worse problems out there than clumpy butter and, from the expression on Oliver’s face, he was dealing with at least one of them.
“What was all that about?” I asked in the most nonconfrontational way I could manage. Which wasn’tthatnonconfrontational on account ofWhat was all that about?being kind of an inherently confrontational sentence.
“It appears that Bellefield stole from our foster child.”
“Bellefield?”
“Jasmine’s old school.”
This was still making limited sense at best. “It’s not stealing to ask somebody to give school property back when they leave.”
“Jasmine’s Pupil Premium payments aren’t school property. The money is assigned to her, personally. The school gets to spend it, but whatever it spends it on ishers.”
The sense that this was making had got slightly less limited, but only slightly. “Hang on, we can just make the school buy her stuff?”
“It’s not asDaily Mailheadline as it sounds. It’s not as though the government is handing out free money to buy PlayStations for transgender immigrants. But schools get a certain amount of discretionary funding per capita for LACs”—I interrupted him with mylook of incomprehension—“looked-after children, and that money is meant to be spent directly on the children in question. Operative wordmeant.”
I moved on to slicing mushrooms. “Is it even worth trying to get it back? Like, she’s fine with my desktop, and we could probably buy her a laptop anyway.”
It hadn’t been my intent to give Oliver an ethical question to analyse, but I guess, from his point of view, it was practically a perk. “I suppose,” he said, “you could argue that we can afford to buy a replacement, whereas the school is probably quite short on IT equipment. But it’s a matter of principle. This is technically theft.”
“Technically,” I admitted. And I was doing thetechnicallyvoice.
“Which in the eyes of the law is in fact the same asactually.”
That was true.
“Also, and I’m trying not to overvalue this as a factor because it really shouldn’t form part of my considerations, but not only did they technically steal—they technically stolefrom our foster daughter.”
This right here was the difference between me and Oliver. He’d have a thought like that and follow it up withBut I mustn’t let it sway my objectivity. I heard it and went immediately toLet’s fuck those fuckers all the way up.“Good point. They’ve messed with Team O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson.”
