“No, make sure she’s OK,” I said, my voice sharper than I meant it to be, but now she was here, I felt a spike of anxiety the like I’d never expected to experience. She was alive, my baby, outside of my body, and now everything and anything could hurt her.
When she was returned to me, wrapped up in a baby blanket now and making strange little snuffling sounds, I had to stop myself from snatching her as I fitted her into my side and stared down at her.
I had no experience looking after younger siblings, because my brother was older. I’d never really thought about being a mother due to the PCOS situation, figuring I’d sort that issue out when it became relevant, and yet here I was. I gazed down at her, not able to see or hear what the nurses or Carmen or Sophie were saying or doing, because right now, there was only her.
I pulled down my thin cotton hospital gown as my baby started to root around, some instinct driving her to seek food. I shifted her to my breast and then when my nipple was close, she latched on. I blinked, my eyes fluttering as I looked up at Sophie.
“She’s perfect, Lils.” She collapsed then into tears, grinning the whole time as she tried to dash them away, but more formed. “What are you going to call her?”
We’d talked long and hard about this over time, because hey, no more parties, drinking and kebabs for me, but I’d never really been able to settle on a name. There was a long list we liked, but right now, one rose up without question.
“Evie,” I said. “Her name is Evie.”
Chapter 8
Nine years later
“Mum, I don’t know why I have to go to school,” my daughter, Evie, said, a familiar belligerent look on her face.
“Oh, I think you do, a smart girl like you,” I said, pulling milk out of the fridge and adding it to my coffee then to her bowl of Weet-bix. I glanced up at Evie and saw I had her rapt attention. I’d spent money, so much money, on psychologists for my daughter and hadn’t got much help, but this one thing always worked. “We’ve talked about it many times. You’ve heard my reasons. You just don’t like them.”
Her jaw flexed for a moment, as I watched her be torn in two different directions. It wasn’t a nice thing to be doing to my daughter, but… On the one hand, being seen as intelligent was terribly important to Evie, so she didn’t want to contradict me. On the other…
“You own a bookshop,” she said. “Everything worth learning is in books.”
“I own a bookshop where most of the books are those yucky kissing books you hate,” I said, putting her breakfast in front of her and placing a kiss on her forehead. Part of me wanted to linger, to just squish that little body and never let her go. She, of course, elbowed me away and started eating. “And anyway, thinking that school is only about knowledge is terribly reductionist.”
Yup, I was an adult who used words like reductionist now.
“It’s about learning to work and play with kids your own age.”
“Kids my own age are dumb. You should send me to high school,” she said between mouthfuls.
“I’m sending you to a very special, very expensive primary school for kids with gifts like yours,” I shot back before taking a big bloody gulp of my coffee. I needed every damn gram of caffeine in the strong brew to battle my daughter in the morning. “You are very good at English and Humanities.” She preened slightly at that. “But have some areas to work on when it comes to Maths and Science.” Her nose wrinkled. “Learning to get along with people is probably the most important skill you can have. You’re very bright, Evie, and so are all the other kids in your school. You’re lucky in that respect. Nana pulled a lot of strings to get you into that place.”
But it hadn’t been the magic bullet we’d hoped it would be. Evie had been tested several times and appeared to be in the gifted range academically. Socially, however… I was getting just as many calls and emails from teachers at this school, if not more, than from her previous one.
Evie frowned over her cereal, then looked up at me.
“But Mum, I get bored in class and then when I start moving or talking, the teacher tells me off.”
“Yes, she would, because you’re disrupting the class and affecting other people’s learning. What did we say you were to do if you got bored?”
“But I started reading my book and Ms Janice took it off me! She said I always have it out when we do Maths and I—”
“Evie.” I injected as much of a growl into my voice as I could, another weird bloody trick a therapist gave me and for once, my daughter’s tirade stopped. “You can’t avoid a subject just because you find it hard.”
“It’s not hard. It’s boring.”
“We talked about this, about having grit and determination, about trying so we can get better.”
“But Mum—!”
“Eat your cereal and get ready,” I said, walking away from the table, something I bloody hated doing, but I had to. Everything was a battle of wills with my daughter. I took my coffee, going into the lounge room and holding it way too tight until the heat from the ceramic scalded my hands, then stared out the window.
“Your daughter is likely an alpha,” the last psychologist had told me. “This is a highly unusual situation, as you might appreciate, but it’s further complicated by your family structure. Alphas are usually born male, in packs, to a family structure where there is sufficient competition between siblings to curtail some of those dominant impulses as well as parents who can exert their dominance when needed over their children.”
She sighed, then leant forward.