“Fuck, thatwouldbe wanky.”
“Right? So can you just, like, tell me what happened?”
For a while, Jaz decided that no, telling me what happened was too much of an imposition on account of how I was the living incarnation of crap and so talking to me wouldn’t be worth the oxygen atoms she exhaled while doing it.
But eventually she gave up and just said, “Fighting.”
I didn’t sayDid you win. Partly because even I havesomeparenting instincts and partly because I’d never really come from a winning-fights-is-good culture. “Who with?”
“Someone.”
As nonanswers went, it was almost beautiful. It did technically tell me that it had been an individual, rather than a group of people or, I don’t know, a dog or something. But it also made it very clear that she still didn’t think I was worth talking to. “This someone have a name?”
Silence.
“What happened to building more productive relationships with your peers and all that?”
A little more silence. Then, “Tried it. Didn’t work out.”
I let that rest and just drove us a little further, keeping my eyes on the road while also trying to be at leastawareof Jaz in case she tried to wrench the door open and leap out while we were moving.And although I wouldn’t have called it a strategy, or even a ploy, it did sort of work.
“Trish,” she said, so out of nowhere that it took me a moment to piece the context together.
“Your friend Trish?”
Jaz still wasn’t looking at me, but I could imagine her look of contempt as clearly as if she’d been jamming it in my face.
“I mean, not now, I guess?” We’d come home the same way we had the first day I’d taken her in, so we were driving past the Cosy Café again. “Do you want some chips?”
Nothing.
“Do you want me to order some chips that you can then eat off my plate?”
Nothing.
So, in the absence of any better ideas, I tried what I’d tried last time. I ordered a plate of chips and a Coke for Jaz and a full English and a coffee for me, and we sat down at a tiny, uncomfortable table, and I waited for her to decide that speaking to me would be less awful than staring at me.
It was, unfortunately, a plan that relied on me having more willpower than a fourteen-year-old. “Seriously,” I asked. “What happened with Trish?”
“She got in my face,” Jaz said, keeping that face well away from me by staring out the door, “and I’m bad at controlling my emotions, remember?”
“I don’t want to hear about your emotions,” I said. Then realised that sounded bad and back-pedalled: “I mean, if you want to talk about your emotions, that’s fine, but you don’t need to keep telling me how bad at controlling them you are.”
“It’s what people keep tellingme.”
I gave a shrug. “They’re your emotions. Do you need other people to tell you about them?”
“Must do,” she said, completely deadpan. “Otherwise, why would they keep doing it? ’Specially when they’re all on my side and looking out for me.”
I did my best not to get angry, which I was finding harder than usual. I reckoned I was normally pretty chill with Jaz’s behaviour—too chill by far for Oliver—but when she got all laconic and self-loathing, it started pushing some highly specific buttons. “Can you just tell me what Trish did?”
“It’s not about what Trish did,” Jaz informed me piously. “I cannot control her actions, but I can control my response to—”
“Jaz, can you please cut it out with the mindfulness talk—you clearly think it’s bollocks.”
“You’re so shit at this.”
I clenched my jaw. “Jaz, please. Tell. Me. What. She. Did.”
