“Oh good.” I sounded flatter than I’d meant to.
“Just remember to be a parent as well.”
The part of me that still felt like it was fifteen and in trouble was laughing unhelpfully at that. “I…I don’t suppose you’ve got any tips?”
Esther sat casually on a desk in a way I thought she probably would have done when she was at school too. “Mostly, keep doing what you’re doing.”
I felt like there was abutcoming. Which is why I said, “I feel like there’s abutcoming.”
“But”—Esther let it hang there a moment—“don’t undermine the other people who are part of this. We don’t know each other that well, but the impression I get is that you’re not the sort of guy who usually goes in for Personal Plans and Goal-Setting and Student-Centred Learning Approaches.”
There comes a point when you’re wincing so much that it’s the gaps between winces that actually feel like gestures. This wasn’t one of those gaps. “Was I eye-rolling really hard?”
Esther did thelil’ bitsign, the one where you hold your fingers like two millimetres apart and make an embarrassed face.
“I guess I just…I don’t feel like you can boil a human beingdown to a few action points and notes for improvement.”
“Oh right.” Sometimes Esther could really give Jaz a run for her money on the sarcasm front. “Now you’ve pointed that out, I’ll rethink my entire approach to my profession. Weknowthat, Luc. Even Doug”—she caught my blank expression—“Doug Lorimer knows that. But it really does help to have—”
“High expectations and clear boundaries?” I echoed Oliver from half a city away.
“Basically, yeah. And look, if it’s any consolation, thinking your kid is so unique and special that the rules that work for everybody else, however imperfectly, aren’t good enough for her is averyparent mindset. Just…if you could shade it down like ten percent.”
I nodded. I was weirdly tempted to give her one of Jaz’s almost-shrugs. “I’ll try.”
“That’s all any of us can do.”
Oliver kind of kept saying that as well. But for some reason—maybe because Esther was an authority figure, not my boyfriend—it was more reassuring. And, fuck me, I needed the reassurance.
Chapter 21
The drive home was almost a perfect mirror image of the drive out. A mirror image in the sense that we’d turned around and were going in the opposite direction. Not in the metaphor sense where either of us had done a 180 on our attitudes.
After Esther’s little chat, I did wonder if I should try to do some damage control on the whole Personal Education Plan thing. Like try to convince Jaz that I didn’t think it was bullshit. Except while I understood rationally that the people who did this kind of thing for a living probably knew what they were about, I still didn’t think I could be enthusiastic about SMART goal-setting in a way that wouldn’t come across as incredibly fake and insincere.
So instead I went with a nice neutral, “You hungry?”
She didn’t answer.
“Okay, let’s try it a different way.I’mhungry, so I’m going to stop for something to eat, and I can’t leave you in a car because that would be illegal.”
From the look she gave me, she felt that was very much ameproblem. Fortunately, it wasn’t quite enough of ameproblem that she’d actually refuse to get out. So when I stopped outside a place that called itself the Cosy Café and went in to investigate their all-day breakfast and pie ’n’ mash offerings, I had a bitter teenager shadowing me.
The small café I’d stopped at was one of those places with a menu as long as your arm covering everything from a full English breakfast to a homemade curry, so I stood there for a moment looking at my options while Jaz stood beside me radiating misery.
“You want anything?” I tried.
Jaz made a noise that Ithoughttranslated as “I’m fine” but could have been anything.
I tried again. “If I got you some chips, would you eat them?”
The movement of her head wasjustclose enough to a nod that I thought it was probably worth ordering the chips on spec. I got her a tea as well because Oliver had looked up some research on adolescents and caffeine, and apparently we shouldn’t have been feeding her coffee. And because I didn’t want to be all rules-for-thee-and-not-for-me, I got a tea for myself as well.
Once I’d paid at the counter, we sat down and waited for our food, not quite looking at each other until Jaz, in her best don’t-give-a-fuck-voice, said, “You forgot your receipt.”
It felt a bit out of nowhere, but at least she was talking. “I’d just lose it. Anyway, I’m not really a reconciling-my-bank-statements kind of guy.”
For no reason I could understand, a look of puzzlement settled over Jaz’s brow. “How you going to get the money back?”
