I sent a quickokayand he went quiet after that. But just as I was slipping my phone back into my impractically tight jeans, it buzzed again. Looking down, I saw a picture of a whale.
Moby Dick?I asked.
A little obvious, I admit.
I love youI sent back in a moment of intense dick-related sentimentality.
Because I felt weirdly reassured that, even after five years, Oliver was still sending me dick pics. The fact he was still managingto source new dicks to send me was a very Oliver-specific reminder that whatever arguments we had, whatever the differences might be between us, deep down we were solid. That we were, in our own silly, idiosyncratic way, as inexplicably enduring as a classic knob joke.
* * *
If she hadn’t been grounded, I probably wouldn’t still have been driving Jaz to and from school. Fourteen was young, but it wasn’t needs-constant-handholding young. Hell, it was only two years off from is-it-really-okay-that-you-can-join-the-army young or maybe-we-should-think-about-letting-you-vote young.
But she was currently beingpunished, and since in practice she lived in her room anyway, about the only part of her punishment that actually felt punish-y was the part where she had to get picked up from school by some wanker in a secondhand EV.
Even then, I never met her at the gates because I remembered my own school days well enough to know that she’d have had the shit bullied out of her if I had.
“Good day?” I asked as she threw her bag carelessly onto the back seat and herself carelessly onto the front.
Not-a-shrug.
“I got a call this afternoon,” I continued, as if it was this super-casual thing that I’d just happened to remember, instead of the start of a conversation I’d been rehearsing for more than two hours.
Oh really, that’s interesting. Who was the call from and what was it concerning?is what a completely different child might have said to a completely different parent in a completely different situation. I got nothing.
“Apparently you haven’t done any homework yet?” I didn’t like to pat myself on the back, but I was proud ofyet. Like I was saying,I’m sure you’ll get around to it, and don’t forget that Oliver and I,your supportive foster parents, are with you every step of the way!
Even with theyet, she still said nothing.
“Is there…is there a reason for that?”
Perhaps I’d just got foster-parent Stockholm syndrome, but I took her continued silence here as an actual win. Only a few days ago, I was pretty sure, she’d have assumed I was attacking her and said something self-destructive about how it was because she was a fuckup who couldn’t be trusted.
Then again, maybe I was just projecting.
“I don’t want to push,” I went on.
That got a reaction. She stared at me with a don’t-shit-on-my-head-and-call-it-a-beret expression. “Yes, you do.”
“I…” Figuring I couldn’t sink much lower in her estimation, I chose honesty. “I don’twantto. I just sort ofhaveto.”
“Or what?”
“Or they’ll take you away.”
And that, it turned out, wastoohonest. She kicked hard into the footwell. “You don’t get to say that.”
“Sorry, I just—”
“Iwastaken away. Iamtaken away.Thisis away.You’reaway.”
It wouldn’t be completely true to say I’d never thought of it like that. I’d thought of it like that quite a lot. Or at least I’d thought of all the pieces of it, just never quite in the right order. I mean, I’d known Jaz wasn’t super stoked to be with us, but it never quite occurred to me that the way she felt about being placed with me and Oliver was the exact same way we felt about having her placed somewhere else. That somewhere out in the world there was a Team Johnson that had to be broken up so that Team O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson could be a thing.
Oliver would probably have pointed out that I was using imprecise language. That it was more accurate to say that Team Johnsonhad broken down of its own accord and that Team O’Donnell-Blackwood had come along to pick up the pieces and form Team O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson in the aftermath. But I’d have bet CRAPP’s entire annual operating budget on that not being how it felt to Jaz.
“Is it…” I was super aware that there were approximately eight million wrong things I could say in this situation and somewhere between zero and no right things. So I focused on the homework issue like a giant coward. “Are you finding the work too difficult?”
“Fuck off.”
