Rosita was out cold from the walk.
Theo was on her back with the kitten curled up on her chest, making little purring noises as she pet her.
“I don’t think I will ever need a drink after a long, hard day again,” she told me, her head turning to shoot me a soft smile. “I just need a kitten purring on my chest. Oh, my God. What is all of that?” she asked as I put the food down on the kitchen counter.
“Pizza, Chinese, tacos, and donuts.”
“You do realize any one of those meals would be perfectly acceptable on its own, right?”
“Perfectly acceptably is no way to live,” I told her as she carefully set the kitten down and made her way over toward me. “Since the girls are sleeping, want to make plates and take them down to the pond to watch Fiona and the swan flirt while Scotty mopes.”
“You remember that?” she asked, shaking her head.
“Not a lot of people reference an obscure scene from some early 00’s teen movie. That shit sticks.”
“The swan’s name is Donny, by the way,” she informed me as we both started piling food onto our plates. “That’s the name of the guy in the band Lustra in the movie. I watched a lot of movies back in the day,” she told me when I must have been giving her a curious look. “You know… to escape,” she said, shrugging.
“Yeah, I get that,” I agreed, having been a big movie watcher myself. I mean… I watched them by sneaking into the theaters. Kind of got a two-for-one deal there. The escape by getting to watch the movie, but also the thrill of doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing.
“What were you like as a kid?” Theo asked as we walked out the door and through the woods toward the pond. “Were you throwing fists with a pacifier in your mouth?” she added, shooting me a smirk.
“I was a fucking angel kid,” I told her. “Nah, I’m actually serious,” I told her when she snorted as we got onto the pristine white bridge over the water.
“You? With Lost hope tattooed on your fingers, you were an angel kid?”
“I was. Kinda nerdy. Teacher’s pet. Followed the rules. Brushed my teeth. Did everything right.”
“What happened?” she asked, and I could feel her gaze on my profile as I looked out on the water.
I didn’t talk to anyone about my past. Even Fallon and Daddy Reign, they just knew what they had to know to allow me to join up. And what they needed to know had nothing to do with my childhood.
No one needed to know that shit.
Except… I wanted Theo to know.
I was somehow okay with her being the only person who could truly know me like that.
“I realized that even being the perfect kid didn’t mean I wasn’t going to get my ass beat, wasn’t going to stop my parents from spiraling, wouldn’t stop my mom from running off with her dealer and never coming back.”
“How old were you?” Theo asked.
“When she ran off? Eight? Nine? Somewhere around there. My sister was only four or five.”
“What happened after your mom ran off?”
“The State figured out that my old man was leaving us to fend for ourselves while he went to work, or went out to score, or chased some skirt to her place for a weekend. They came in and took us out.”
“I knew so many kids from my old neighborhood who kept getting tossed into the system, only to be put back with their shitty parents, then get taken away again.”
“Nah. My old man never got us back. He didn’t want us back. No one could find our mom. Didn’t have anyone else. So we stayed in.”
“That’s when the rebelling started?” Theo asked.
“Not right away, no. Think I was too shellshocked, too uncomfortable with new surroundings, new people, trying to comfort my sister.”
“You know how they always throw around that phrase about how kids are so adaptable?” Theo said, looking out as the swan finally glided across the surface of the water.
“Yeah.”
“I think it’s bullshit. I think they mistake trauma responses for adaptability.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
I was sure as fuck traumatized by it. The problem was, my little sister was more of an outward wreck about it all. So I’d needed to bury all that shit so I could put on a brave face for her.
I remember thinking, as I sat with her on her bed in a stranger’s house, full of weird smells and unfamiliar noises, both of us jumping at every footstep going on outside of our door, how small she was, how I needed to be bigger and stronger and mean enough to scare anyone off who might try to upset her.
“Did you guys bounce around a lot?”
“For the first year, we only moved twice. And it wasn’t… bad,” I said. There were more horror stories than good ones from most kids who went through the system, but there were some decent folks out there who were trying to help.