“Fuck off, Luc O’Donnell.”
Okay, I needed to parent that. I needed to be all stern and allNow, Jasmine, that isn’t the kind of language we use in this household, but the words stuck in my throat. “Jaz,” I tried instead, “please don’t. I’m being serious. I know Colin is a prick. I just want to know what he did that made you shove him into a bin.”
“He didn’t make me,” Jaz insisted. “‘I am responsible for my own behaviour. Nobody controls my actions except me.’”
“Okay, this whole bit”—I waved my hand at her—“officially stopped being cute three sarcastic buzzwords ago.”
In the dark, Jaz glared at me. But at least she’d stopped spouting institution-speak.
“I want to know,” I repeated, “what Next Door’s Kid did.”
“Why?”
Well fuck. I thought kids grew out of thewhystage around three. Then again I suppose it didn’t count when it was a reasonable question. “Honestly? This is probably awful parenting, but mostly because I don’t like him and I’m hoping you’ll say something that reinforces my opinions.”
Jaz went back to focusing on Spud.
“Don’t get me wrong, you’re still totally grounded or whatever.”
At the other end of the bench, Jaz’s desire not to engage lost a brief battle with her desire to remind me how bad a job I was doing. “‘Grounded or whatever’? You really suck at this.”
“Believe me, I know.”
“Like, I don’t respect youat all.”
That was incredibly fair. I wasn’t an easy person to respect. “Tell you what, how about we stick a pin in that and you just answer my fu—flipping question.”
I wasn’t anywhere near confident enough to say that my strategy had worked or that I’d got through to her or that I’d worn her down, but Jaz did seem, for the moment, to have run out of ways to be hostile. So instead she looked down at the little bundle of fur in her lap and said, “He took Spud’s ball.”
The phrase “That little fucker” slipped out before I could remember to be parental, but I very smoothly glossed over it by saying “Go on” immediately afterwards in my best calm-and-listening voice.
“It went over the fence,” she explained. She didn’t explainhowit had gone over the fence, and it occurred to me that she maybe didn’t like to admit that she’d been doing something as wholesome and well adjusted as playing fetch. “And I told him to give it back, and he said he wouldn’t, and I said he would or I’d make him.”
I was really, really,reallytrying not to savour this. Okay, I was mostly, mostly,mostlytrying not to savour this.
“Then he said, ‘How?’ and then he pulled out his phone to take a picture of me or something, so I grabbed it and took it around the front and chucked it in the bin, and then when he went around to get it, I tipped him in and shut the lid.”
I really, really,reallytried not to laugh. Okay, I vaguely, vaguely,vaguelytried not to laugh. “That,” I said in a tone so forcedly solemn that it was basically parody, “was very wrong of you.”
“I know,” replied Jaz, seeming a bit confused about where I wasgoing with this.
“Which is why you’re grounded and had to apologise and everything,” I added, hoping that if I reinforced the punishment bit, it would matter less that I was also reinforcing the throwing-Next-Door’s-Kid-in-a-bin bit.
“I know,” Jaz repeated.
I let out a long breath, not quite able to keep the elephant out of the room. “But hedidhave it coming.”
Jaz looked blank.
“All that shi—stuff about, like, controlling your emotions and appropriate responses and…and everything. That’s all, like, that’s all really important and true and you absolutely shouldn’t do this again. But, like…”
“Like what?” asked Jaz. It was the least porcupinish I’d ever seen her, possibly because I was doing such a bad job at this that she didn’t know how to react. Sort of the parenting equivalent of that time that one guy beat a really awesome computer at Go by playing so incompetently it didn’t know how to counter him.
I tried to arrange my thoughts into something resembling a coherent life lesson. “I guess just… You’re not… The thing is, wanting to slam Colin into a wheelie bin doesn’t make you a bad person. And it doesn’t mean you’re damaged or whatever. Everybody who knows what Colin is like wants to throw him in a wheelie bin.”
“They just don’t have the balls to do it?” Jaz suggested, half smiling.
Fuck. “No. No, that makes it sound cool. Which it”—lie, Luc, lie like your foster placement depends on it—“absolutely wasn’t. But it also wasn’t… I dunno. Look, sometimes these things happen, and we mess up, or we…we react weirdly or pretend we can speak French or something. And that doesn’t have to mean anything super deep if we don’t want it to.”
