Disclaimer: disclaimed.
Spoilers: Yeees, up to 2x17.
Notes: Jenna is awesome and human. I might have the smallest bias towards her.
stilettos
People tend to forget that she is young, and naïve, and not as much of an adult as her clothes make her seem.
Jenna is lost and scared, and her boyfriend's wife is her niece's mother and everything is just fucked up. There are people dying around town, she stabbed herself with a knife not too long ago (and that kitchen scares her still, because there have been two near-deaths there), and it's as if her next step will be her last.
She never wanted to be a mother. She wants to stay in the university where there are pretty boys who smile at her during her late nights at the library. The work is hard but normal, and family is a distant thing a drive away. Her bed is hard and lumpy and has never known the entity called Alaric Saltzman. Her phone is turned off, and honestly, this kind of irresponsibility makes her feel good. It's giving her a high, and some days she just laughs because she can and it doesn't feel out of place like it does in her house where everything is doom and gloom.
Jenna is the selfish sister. She wants the good but never the bad—and that's bitchy and bad, she knows that, but Jenna has never wanted any of this. She wanted to straighten up as a person, go to school, maybe meet a nice guy. She wanted to be someone better, and be known as someone else than 'Miranda's druggie sister.'
But Miranda is dead, and Jenna is playing mother to two kids who feel so much older and jaded than she is. They aren't even legal adults, and here Jenna is, leaving them to fend for themselves with John, and she really is such a bad, bad person.
Her fingers tap on her keyboard: her thesis is looking good, her professors are impressed with her work so far, and if she stays, she will be fine. Everything will be fine for her.
And then—then she remembers afternoons spent with her sister, laughing at the Gilberts' house, and how she'd once wanted to live there forever and ever (back then, John had been a prince and not related to Isobel at all, and why does everything go back to her?).
Jenna rubs her eyes, and her phone glints in the setting sunlight. She's not old enough for this, she wants to say; she's not ready for this life, but Jenna's realized that life waits for no one and it's getting impatient with her.
She gives herself ten seconds. Ten seconds of what-ifs and could-bes, and then she picks up her phone and dials home.