Chapter 24 #2
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 Johnson had 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.”
“I’d offer to help out, but honestly, I kind of suck at most things.”
From the way she looked at me, it was the first thing I’d said all day that she’d believed. “It’s not too difficult.”
“Then is it…” Of the eight million wrong things to say, I couldn’t even think of one. “I don’t know, are you just being a dick?”
Probably I shouldn’t have given myself points for the fact that Jaz at least hadn’t expected that one. “What?”
“Sorry. Bad phrasing. It’s just…either there’s a reason you’re not doing homework or there isn’t, and if there is we can help but if there isn’t then, like…”
“Then I’m just being a dick.” She looked sullen. And possibly like she was internalising is a dick and adding it to is traumatised and makes bad choices on her roster of self-definition.
“No!” I insisted very fervently. “Not, you know. Not actually. I mean sort of actually but only in the same way that… Look, can we pretend we had this conversation without the being-a-dick framing because I don’t think it’s helping.”
Jaz buried her face in her hands. “How did I get stuck with you?”
“Spat on a security contractor?”
“If I spat on you, do you think they’d send me to somebody who isn’t shit?”
“Do you?” I gave her a meaningful look. Then realised that I was meant to be meaningfully looking at the road, oversteered, and very nearly swerved into oncoming traffic.
“We’re going to die,” Jaz said calmly. “I’m going to die in a car crash because the socials decided my mum was too fucked in the brain to look after me and gave me to a guy who can’t drive.”
“I can drive,” I insisted in the face of all the evidence.
“Prove it.”
Fortunately, while I had a great many self-destructive impulses, the desire to show off behind the wheel wasn’t one of them. So instead, I tried, “I’m sorry about your mum.”
“Don’t talk about my mum.”
I kept my eyes squarely on the road. “Right. Sorry.”
“You know nothing about her.”
“Gotcha.”
“Or me.”
“Right.”
“Are you just agreeing with everything I say now?”
It hadn’t been a deliberate strategy, but it seemed to be working. “Looks like.”
“You suck.”
“Yup.”
“Odile O’Donnell is a shitty musician.”
“Hey!” I de-road-eyed for a tenth of a second, then got control of myself. “I’ll lay off your mum but you lay off mine, okay?”
I could feel Jaz rolling her eyes. “Whatever.”
“No. Seriously. My mum is off limits.”
“What’ll you do? Ground me?”
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 being really serious here.
My mum gave up everything to look after me when my dad left, and no matter how angry you are with me, you do not under 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 It Wrong when he came home from work and I filled him in on how things had gone.
Not that I thought he would. Not that he ever normally did. 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 when I 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?”
She glared at him like she wanted him to die slowly from something that also gave him diarrhoea. “Yeah.”
“You’re sure?”
“No. Because I’m a stupid looked-after girl who doesn’t know anything.”
Oliver gazed compassionately at her the way he gazed compassionately at me when I was shitting on myself.
Unfortunately, it was still the wrong gaze for the wrong audience.
“Jasmine, you’re not stupid and I think you know a great many things.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and send some emails. ”
Which left me and Jaz alone with very little idea what the fuck was going on, either with Oliver or with Jaz’s geometry homework.
“What’s even the point?” she demanded, clicking random parts of the screen and seeming unsatisfied with the outcome.
“Oliver knows what he’s doing,” I told her, partly from a protective instinct and partly because he almost always did.
“Not him. This.” She pointed at a digital mix of blocks and graph paper. “When will I ever need this?”
Somewhere, buried deep in the national curriculum, there was probably a topic I could look at and say with absolute honesty that I used in my day-to-day life.
Off the top of my head, I couldn’t say what it was but I could definitely say what it wasn’t.
And it wasn’t labelling the plan, front, and side elevations of meaningless sets of cubes.
“Well,” I tried, “maybe you’ll…you could want to be an engineer one day? ”
She looked from me to the blocks and then back to me. “This is what engineers do, is it?”
“I mean, not literally this. Not exactly literally this. But it probably develops, I don’t know, spatial awareness?”
Whether Jaz was feeling more scorn in that moment for me or for her maths homework was honestly a toss-up. “Spatial awareness?”
“School is important?” I tried, wishing the question mark wasn’t quite so audible.
With a sigh to break the world, Jaz turned back to her incomprehensible geometry and I, having satisfied myself that yes, she found my company less appealing than schoolwork, went back into the kitchen to finish chopping.
I was just about done with the carrots by the time Oliver came back. The butter in the sautéing pan had gone all yellow and clumpy, and needed remelting, but there were worse problems out there than clumpy butter and, from the expression on Oliver’s face, he was dealing with at least one of them.
“What was all that about?” I asked in the most nonconfrontational way I could manage. Which wasn’t that nonconfrontational on account of What was all that about? being kind of an inherently confrontational sentence.
“It appears that Bellefield stole from our foster child.”
“Bellefield?”
“Jasmine’s old school.”
This was still making limited sense at best. “It’s not stealing to ask somebody to give school property back when they leave.”
“Jasmine’s Pupil Premium payments aren’t school property. The money is assigned to her, personally. The school gets to spend it, but whatever it spends it on is hers.”
The sense that this was making had got slightly less limited, but only slightly. “Hang on, we can just make the school buy her stuff?”
“It’s not as Daily Mail headline as it sounds.
It’s not as though the government is handing out free money to buy PlayStations for transgender immigrants.
But schools get a certain amount of discretionary funding per capita for LACs”—I interrupted him with my look of incomprehension—“looked-after children, and that money is meant to be spent directly on the children in question. Operative word meant.”
I moved on to slicing mushrooms. “Is it even worth trying to get it back? Like, she’s fine with my desktop, and we could probably buy her a laptop anyway.”
It hadn’t been my intent to give Oliver an ethical question to analyse, but I guess, from his point of view, it was practically a perk.
“I suppose,” he said, “you could argue that we can afford to buy a replacement, whereas the school is probably quite short on IT equipment. But it’s a matter of principle. This is technically theft.”
“Technically,” I admitted. And I was doing the technically voice.
“Which in the eyes of the law is in fact the same as actually.”
That was true.
“Also, and I’m trying not to overvalue this as a factor because it really shouldn’t form part of my considerations, but not only did they technically steal—they technically stole from our foster daughter.”
This right here was the difference between me and Oliver. He’d have a thought like that and follow it up with But I mustn’t let it sway my objectivity. I heard it and went immediately to Let’s fuck those fuckers all the way up. “Good point. They’ve messed with Team O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson.”
Oliver gave me a slight smile. “I notice you’ve put your own name first.”
“Well, when you name the team you can call it Team Blackwood-O’Donnell-Johnson.”
“I was thinking of Blackwood-Johnson-O’Donnell.”
This was like when everybody had kept putting me in the kill spot. Best strategy was to change the subject. “So how are we going to get Jaz’s laptop back?”
“I’ve sent them an email reminding them of her rights. I’ll give them a day or so to respond and then…”
“Then?” I asked.
Oliver had a slightly wicked gleam in his eye. “Well, I suppose I’ll need to start asking around. See if anybody knows a good lawyer.”
God, it was embarrassing how hot it was when Oliver got all I will use my barrister superpowers to stand up for the rights of the people I care for.
If Jaz hadn’t been home, I’d have pushed him against the fridge and done things that might have invalidated the warranty.
As it was, I was forced to restrict myself to a soupy smile, a kiss on the cheek, and the kind of mushy, heart-warmed feeling I didn’t like to acknowledge having.
Of course, chances were Jaz wouldn’t give a fuck if Oliver got the laptop back or not.
And, even if she did, she wouldn’t admit it.
But that wasn’t the point. This was the Oliver I knew and the Oliver I loved, and I was so glad and, honestly, so fucking relieved—that he was trying to be that Oliver for Jaz as well as for me.
Even if she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it.
For the first time in a while—perhaps even since that time he’d tried to raise a formal complaint about the handcuffs—I felt like we were on the same page. Like we really did have a chance of being Team O’Donnell-Blackwood-Johnson or Johnson-Blackwood-O’Donnell or whatever.
Like we were a family.