prolong

Author note : I thank Sweettater8, going by me. This flashback when Meredith was 8.

"It's a girl! Alexandra Caroline Grey. She's beautiful," Thatcher announced to the family, friends and colleagues who had amassed in the waiting room of the hospital. He turned around and walked back into his wife's hospital room to await the arrival of their baby girl. He felt a little pang guilt that Meredith wasn't there to see her half-sister. She had moved to Boston with Ellis after the divorce. Thatcher missed her but he was happy that he would get a chance to right all the wrongs he had made with Meredith by doing the right thing by Lexie.

"Meredith will see her little sister one of these days, Thatcher. I know that's what has you so worried. She's still young. You have to wait for her to come around. She probably doesn't even know what happened. I am sure that someday soon your girls will be very close. They'll take care of each other. You just wait," Susan said to her husband as he walked to her bedside staring at the beautiful baby in her arms. He had been honest with her about Ellis and Meredith. She knew he missed Meredith terribly but she had faith that Meredith would be back in his life someday.

same day

Meredith took teeny tiny bites of her grilled cheese sandwich mommy had placed before her. She knew they were in a hurry – they always were – but she could never seem to eat fast and efficient enough.

"Mommy?"

"Hmm?" Mommy didn't turn around from where she was standing at the fridge, putting away the sliced cheese and the orange juice – she'd forgot to buy the smooth one again, but Meredith resisted to point that out and pretended to like the fruit bits even if she had to swallow hard to get them down. "Hurry up, Meredith, or we will never get out of here."

"Mommy, are you going to pick me up from school today?"

That day daddy hadn't come for her and she had been sitting alone with Ms. Underwood, coloring red circles in what felt like an eternity was still way too easy to recall. At first it had been kind of fun being the only child there. She could press the piano keys without anybody yelling at her, or crawl into the large wooden house and pretend she was in a cave hiding from wild bears. Ms. Underwood had given her grown up tasks, like cleaning the tables and putting the glasses from the afternoon snack in the dishwater machine and she had felt proud to be helping. But as the minutes ticked by, Ms. Underwood had started to pace and her calm smiles had changed to strained, and after the third pointless phone call, exasperated and it wasn't fun anymore.

Even though she knew mommy had come at last, and that she hated it when she asked, she couldn't help it. She had to be sure, because if you weren't, then one day people could just disappear.

"Yes, Meredith," mommy said with a sigh. "I'm picking you up today, but we have to go. Bring that sandwich if you want, we need to get you dressed."

"I want braids," Meredith tried. "Like Jenna." The girl sitting next to her in school had worn her long, dark hair that way yesterday and Meredith had been watching them in awe.

"Jenna's afro-american," mommy said, ushering her from her seat. "braids like that won't go with your hairtype. Let's move, shall we?"

Meredith obediently stood up, leaving her half-eaten breakfast and went out to the hall. They were living in an apartment with three rooms now. Her house in Seattle had been much bigger, but mommy said they should get a house as soon as they had settled down a little. Meredith didn't know when that was. The hall was pretty narrow, but mommy insisted on having each thing on its place, so it was clean and easy to find stuff. She bent down to make sure her red boots were safely on her feet and then reached for her jacket. It was the one daddy had bought for her last spring, and she hadn't grown out of it. She hoped she never would. It was pale pink with flowery lining and even though she knew he had thought it would be impractical when she got dirty, he hadn't been able to resist her when she had tugged at his sleeve and promised him how much she liked it.

Mommy whirlwinded out in the hall, her feet already in her pumps and her shoulder bag in her hand. She threw on her coat, then bent down to zip Meredith's jacket.

"You have to learn to do this yourself," she sighed, but with no real irritation in her voice. "You're a big girl now, Meredith."

She impatiently ushered Meredith out so she could lock the door and had already started the car when Meredith climbed into it, putting her backpack at the seat beside her.

"Mommy, when can I sit in the front without a car seat?"

"When you're big enough," mommy answered absently.

"But you said a was a big girl," Meredith pointed out. "Car seats are for babies."

Mommy didn't answer that, busy swearing at a red light as she was. Meredith looked out of the window. The Boston mornings were so much more stressed than she ever remembered from Seattle. Of course, it used to be daddy who took her to day care and he usually let her sleep in. Mommy was almost always gone when Meredith had breakfast. She and daddy used to walk, too, since mommy took the car to the hospital. Sometimes they stopped by the park and daddy let her climb the monkey bars while he held her securely, or pushed her on the swings. He almost never said they were in a hurry.

"Okay, Meredith, no more daydreaming." Mommy's voice broke her thoughts. "Don't forget your backpack. I packed your lunch box. Have a good day."

"Bye, mommy," Meredith said in a small voice, knowing there was no point in prolonging the fact that she had to go inside the school all alone. She trudged over the school yard, trying not to walk into someone. They had managed to arrive at the same time as the school bus and what seemed like a billion of kids were running towards the entrance at once.

She quickly put on her slippers and hooked her jacket on the strawberry that represented her place in the cloakroom. Getting the zipper down was no big deal and she wished mommy could see that.

When all the kids in her class had settled down in their desks, waiting for Ms. James to start the morning assembly, it was as noisy as always. Beside her, Jenna squirmed in her seat to talk to her best friend Lynn in the row behind them. Meredith had no one to turn around to like that even if she had been in the class for almost a semester and a half. She gazed longingly at Jenna's braids. She wanted to reach out and touch them, but didn't dare. Mommy didn't like to be touched, and maybe Jenna would get mad at her if she tried.

Balancing her tongue tip on her lips, she instead concentrated hard on copying the letters from the blackboard as Ms. James had asked them to. She had been able to write her name for a long time now and she knew she got all the letters right because Ms. James had told her so. One of the boys in her class, Joey, used to write his name backwards. Ms. James said it was because he had lived in Egypt before he moved back to Boston, and that's how they write Arabic. Meredith thought it was silly to write backwards, but she hadn't said that.

She was taken out of her thoughts when Ms. James asked her and Matthew to help distribute papers and crayons to the class. Meredith eagerly took the box with the crayon sets and handed them out to her classmates. She knew what was coming. Ms. James would get the book they were in the middle of, and they got to paint while she read aloud to them from it. She was happy they got to listen to stories in school because mommy never told her any. She'd thought that was because she was too big, but since they did it in class, she wasn't sure anymore.

Grabbing the last crayon box and sitting down at her seat again, she carefully put her blank paper aside and started with lining up the crayons in even rows, sorted after color. Except for the red ones. She never used those anymore. As Ms. James started reading from the chapter where they had ended last time, she took the brown crayon and drew a large circle. Listening absentmindedly to the words, she filled her circle with small figures. Without realizing it, she'd soon drawn a little girl with a man and a woman next to her. She'd used the yellow crayon to color the girl's plaits and the dark blue one for the woman's clothes.

"In the evenings, after he had finished his supper of watery cabbage soup," Ms. James read, "Charlie always went into the room of his four grandparents to listen to their stories, and then afterwards to say good night."

Meredith froze just as she was about to paint stripes on the man's shirt. That was what she used to do too when they still lived with daddy. Not that they used to eat watery cabbage soup – it didn't sound like it tasted very good – but he was the one who used to put her to bed at night and he always, always read her a story. Most nights, she begged him for more and more until he had to put on his serious voice and say that she had to sleep but one night, when she had been snotty and tired all day but when it seemed impossible to sleep, he had swept a quilt around her and taken her out on the front porch. She'd sat in his lap while he slowly rocked the old swing back and forth and quietly pointed out the stars for her.

She felt a heat inside her and bit her lip the absolute hardest she could not to cry. It was silly to hope for mommy to do that. They didn't even have a porch or a swing here. When she had the flu last fall, mommy had taken her to the hospital and she had slept in one of the small rooms with beds while mommy was working. Even if mommy said there was no better place than a hospital when you got sick, she still missed her own bed and daddy's calm humming in the kitchen. But he hadn't come to see her since mommy had packed their things and taken her here. She had often wondered how far it was. Once, she had looked at the large map over America that hung in their classroom.

"Ms. James," she had asked shyly after having studied it seriously for a long time. "I can't see Boston."

Ms. James had laughed, but it was a gently laugh, and she had bent down beside Meredith. "This is just a map over the states. Boston is in Massachusetts. It's over here."

Meredith had pondered this for a moment. "And Seattle?" she had prompted.

"It's in Washington," Ms. James had said and pointed at the other side of the map.

On the other side of America. It must be far. Meredith didn't remember much of when she and mommy took their trip, but she had a fleeting memory of a road that never seemed to end and that mommy had told her to sleep all the time. Daddy could be on his way in his car, but it was so far that he hadn't got here yet. Or he didn't know the way. Maybe he would never knock on the door one night, when she was watching The Muppet Show and mommy sat at the table reading important job papers. Maybe he would never laugh and call her his little troll again.

Angrily, she reached for the black crayon instead of the green one she'd used to color the shirt. If daddies could just stop coming, then they shouldn't be in her drawing. Holding the crayon in a tight grip, she wielded her hand in sweeping gestures over her paper, almost completely hiding the man and his green shirt with no stripes.

She didn't realize until Ms. James bent down at her desk that she had stopped reading the story and that the other kids already had rushed against the door to play outside during recess. Refusing to look at her teacher, she grabbed the dark gray crayon, but she didn't have it in her to make the lines large and thick this time. At last, she let the crayon go and just sat there, not wanting to look down at her paper and not at her teacher.

"Meredith," Ms. James said softly. "I see that you wanted to finish your drawing before taking a break. Do you want to tell me about it? Is this you?" She put her finger at the girl with the yellow hair.

Meredith pressed her lips together and didn't answer. She didn't want to talk to Ms. James. She didn't want to do anything at all.

"Meredith..." Ms. James began. "It's okay to talk about it."

"No!" Meredith pushed the crayons and the paper over the edge and stood up so quickly that the chair fell backwards. It wasn't okay to talk about it. Each time she asked mommy about when daddy would come visit, she got that strange face and said that Meredith should go to her room. And if Meredith asked again, her voice got cold and dangerous. It wasn't okay. She knew her mommy wouldn't like her drawing either. She had painted dark colors before on her papers. Ms. James had talked quietly with mommy when she came to pick her up that day, and then mommy had been in a bad mood all night. It wasn't okay.

"Meredith," Ms. James said. "I understand if you're upset, but that's not how we do it here, which I'm sure you know. We don't knock things of our desks or make our chairs fall like that. Now, I want you to pick your things up again and..."

"No!" Meredith shouted again. She didn't really know why. The bad feelings were just welling up inside her chest and she couldn't do anything about it. She turned and ran out of the classroom, only stopping briefly to grab her jacket. She ran until she almost couldn't breathe anymore, which was when she reached the high fence that surrounded the soccer field. She sank down at the ground with her back resting against the fence. Fumblingly, she put on her jacket, but once again, she couldn't get her zipper up. She had no scarf either. Mommy had forgot that this morning. Trying not to mind that the wind was chilly, she drew her knees up to her chest and focused on not crying. Daddy had told her that you could get rid of the bad feelings if you just kept thinking happy thoughts. She tried, she really did, but it seemed like every happy thought she could think of had something to do with daddy. That just made her think about how he was not here and that was a sad thought.

She took a shallow breath to keep the tears at bay and when she looked up again, two big boys stood before her. She thought they maybe went to third grade, because she vaguely recognized one of them as a boy that once had come to walk Lynn home together with her brother.

"Are you here all by yourself?" one of them asked her. She bit her lip. His voice wasn't nice. It wasn't like he was worried about her and wanted to make sure she was okay. Still, she nodded cautiously. The boy exchanged a look with his friend and snickered.

"Jake, did you forget your hat at home?" he asked and grinned broadly.

The other boy run his fingers through his crew cut. "Why, Rob, I think I did," he replied and laughed at the private joke Meredith yet hadn't been let in on.

"Sorry, girl, Jake needs one," the first boy said and before Meredith knew what had happened, he snatched her hat, the brown and white one with funny furry balls in strings mommy had brought home for her after two ear infections.

"Give it back," she said, clumsily getting back up on her feet. "It's mine."

"'It's mine'," Rob imitated with a mock voice. "Well, now it's Jake's. Unless you take it, of course."

He held it teasingly out for her. She knew there was a snag in it somewhere, but she reached for it anyway. Just when it was out of reach for her, he threw it over to Jake, who easily caught it. He put it on and pretended to pose like one of the models she'd seen on T.V. Knowing it was meaningless, she walked over to him and tried to get it back. The boys seemed to have a great time and tossed it back and forth, laughing at her futile attempts to take it back, until something burst inside her. It was like with Ms. James. She hardly knew what she was doing when she ran right into Jake, shoulder-first.

"Stop it!" she cried. "It's mine! Stop it!"

At first, he seemed perplexed, like he hadn't been ready for a little girl to take up a fight, but then he took a step backwards and pushed her hard. Despite stumbling a little, she didn't fall though because Rob was suddenly close to her on the other side. He pushed her over to Jake. In the corner of her eye she saw something brown and white lying at the ground, forgotten for this even more funny game. After the fourth or fifth push, a hard one that almost made her slip in the mud and that surely would give her a bruise on the left shoulder, she let out a shrill cry. It was like a monster was let loose in her chest. She kicked and waved her fists and didn't care where she hit. They looked actually stunned, no matter that she was tiny or that she was a girl. Her desperation seemed to scare them a little bit and not until someone took her in the arm and simply lifted her away from them, she stopped.

"What on earth is going on here?" Ms. James looked sternly at her. "Meredith?"

She just shook her head, unable to say anything for herself. She looked down at the ground instead.

"She went totally crazy," Rob said in a high-pitched voice. "We were just talking to her."

"Yeah, we were just having some fun," Jake added. "She must be mental or something, just jumping on us like that." He touched his face, where there were several scratches and shook his head.

Summoned by the turmoil in their end of the school yard, Mr. Sutton in fifth grade came up to them just in time to hear Jake's statement. He looked suspiciously at the boys, but didn't follow up.

"Meredith?" he prompted. "Is that what happened?"

"They took my hat," she whispered when she thought she could look at him without crying.

She saw everybody's heads turn to the left, where it lain forgotten, the furry balls curling up around it, wet and muddy from being smashed in the ground.

"We were just goofing around," Rob said and shrugged. "Here," he said, walking over and holding it out for her. Meredith saw that he limped slightly and thought that she must have kicked his shins pretty hard. She knew it shouldn't, but it made her feel a little better.

"Meredith," Ms. James sighed. "I thought I made it clear earlier. That's not how we do it here."

"They shouldn't have taken something that was yours," Mr. Sutton said and looked sternly at the boys. "But it's not allowed to hit people like that, young lady. If something happens, you come to a teacher and ask them for help."

"I want you to say 'I'm sorry' to Rob and Jake," Ms. James went on. "If you do that, we can go inside and have lunch and forget that this happened. Doesn't it sound like a good idea?"

Meredith felt the monster in her chest roar to life again, but she forced it to keep quiet. It was no idea. Running and getting angry hadn't got her far today, no matter how unfair everything was. She looked up in defeat.

"Sorry," she said in a resigned voice, careful not to meet anyone's eye. She took the hat Rob was still holding out for her and turned around and started walking towards the school.

The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur. She ate her lunch – peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a little bag of Lays – and solved math problems from the black board, and participated unenthusiastically in the science experiment involving water and sugar everyone else seemed to think was really fun. Ms. James had tried to talk to her on the way into the classroom, but she hadn't answered, and she had been let alone be during class time.

When the bell finally rang, she slowly made her way out in the hallway together with the others. Not late like many days, mommy stood at her strawberry and waited for her. Meredith knew she should smile like a good girl, but she couldn't. She knew that any time now, Ms. James would pop up and tell mommy what had happened. And as if she had heard her thoughts, she stuck her head out of the classroom.

"Dr. Grey? May I have a word?"

Mommy gave her a strange look, but she didn't pretend to hear and tried to seem very busy taking down her jacket from her hook and changing from slippers to her boots. She heard mumbling voices through the thin walls while she slowly strapped her Velcros and angrily stuffed the hat into her pocket. Mommy would think it was her fault too. She'd bet she thought it was her fault daddy didn't wanna come as well. She didn't remember it, but she'd probably been this bad back in Seattle. Maybe she had been so horrible that daddy couldn't stand her anymore. That must be why mommy used to say what she always said whenever Meredith had done something she didn't like. She would use that voice that was some kind of mix between anger and disappointment that make Meredith shrink just by thinking of it.

"I thought I had raised you better than this."

She jumped when she realized the voice wasn't just in her head and that mommy was standing behind her. Without looking at Meredith, she started walking towards the parking lot, apparently not wasting any more time on this than that, at least not here in front of Ms. James. Meredith slowly followed, trying to focus on balancing her tongue tip at her lower lip, so that she wouldn't give in for the bad feeling once again.

Tonight, in her bed, if she curled up under the covers when mommy had switched off the light and closed her own door. She could cry then.

Author note: Please review. I don't feel like anyone is listen if you don't.