I screeched the car to a halt half up the kerb. I’d failed two driving tests on parking and this was nowhere near my best work.“Jasmine,” I said. “I’m beingreallyserious here. My mum gave up everything to look after me when my dad left, and no matter how angry you are with me, you donotunder any circumstances bring her into it. Do you understand me?”
Jaz stared at me. She didn’t look scared exactly. But she did look uncertain. “Whate—okay.”
“We good?”
Her expression melted into abject disdain. “Right up until you said ‘we good.’”
“It’s a phrase. It’s an ordinary phrase that ordinary people use.”
Neither getting nor really expecting any kind of reply from Jaz, I pulled us back into the road and finished the extremely short drive back to the house. As I was completing my second, only mildly more effective attempt at parking, she said, “It’s online.”
“What?” I wasn’t trying to be sharp. I’d just completely lost track of what was going on.
“Homework. Mostly online. Don’t have a computer.”
I didn’t like to assume my foster child was lying to me, but the alternative was that the way people did homework had changed so radically since my own childhood that I felt about a million years old, and in some ways that was worse. “Is that normal?”
Jaz nodded.
“How did you do homework at your old school?”
“Lorimer got them to buy me a laptop. They kept it.”
That seemed to check out. “Well, we have computers in the house, so I think this is a pretty solvable problem.”
From the way Jaz was looking at me, it didn’t seem like she had any faith in my problem-solving abilities.
An hour of failing to set up a new user account for Jaz on my desktop later, I came to the conclusion that she was probably right.
Still, she did start on some homework, which I took as a good sign, and that meant Oliver couldn’t really tell me I was Doing ItWrong when he came home from work and I filled him in on how things had gone.
Not that I thought hewould. Not that he ever normallydid. It was just a fear I sometimes had because of my own issues. Because, y’know, I have bad coping strategies.
“Apparently her old school got her a laptop,” I explained to Oliver while he crushed garlic and I pretended to chop carrots. “But she had to leave it behind.”
Oliver moved on to sautéing onions. “That’s understanda—hold on a second, when you say ‘got her,’ they didn’t buy it with her Pupil Premium Plus money, did they?”
I shrugged. “No idea. Sorry, I’m still a bit vague on the details.”
Removing the sautéing onions from the heat, Oliver gave me his this-is-important look. Maybe I’d been jumping the gun on the whole wouldn’t-tell-me-I’d-been-doing-it-wrong thing. He turned off the hob and strode purposefully into my study, where Jaz was sitting with Spud on her lap and making disgusted expressions at a virtual learning environment.
“Jaz?” said Oliver in a voice I still thought was more suitable for talking to pets, even if he’d managed to resist calling her Jasmine. “I need to ask you some questions about the laptop you were given by your previous school.”
Jaz spun around in my chair with a face like incredibly defensive thunder. “What? I told Luc. They’ve got it. I’ve not.”
“I’m sure that’s—”
“I’m not fucking lying.”
“I didn’t say you—”
“Look”—she pointed at the screen—“I’m doing my fucking homework, all right? You don’t need to be up my arse all the time.”
I couldn’t help looking where she pointed. “What the hell does ‘label the plan, front, and side elevation’ mean?”
Jaz’s shoulders dropped. “I don’t know. I think they did it whenI wasn’t here.”
It hadn’t been planned, but my interruption provided just enough of a distraction that Oliver could get a full sentence out. “Jaz, did they buy the laptop with Pupil Premium Plus money?”
