A/N: Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, B99 – write a fic that starts and ends with the same letter.

Sister to Sitter

She'd liked kids for as long as she could remember, but she'd never really thought about becoming a baby-sitter. It was Mal who'd put that thought into her head.

Not that she minded. She loved it.

She could have just as easily hated it.

Someone else's kids were very different to her own brother and sister after all.

She knew that enough from school. From the neighbourhood. Old and new.

But they liked her, and she liked them. The kids. Their parents. Mostly, anyhow. The earlier ones that had really cemented her in to baby-sitting.

And she was glad, because those were some really fulfilling moments in her life. Baby-sitting. Being with the BSC. With those friends she never would have made if the original quartet hadn't invited Mal to join to the club. If they hadn't rejected her initially, causing Mal to make her own little offshoot and look for someone else, anyone else – who happened to be Jessi, the same age and equally insecure about things. Different things, but things.

That was what made the idea even more appealing. Because it made her belong somewhere that wasn't just the dance floor.

Because she couldn't be so narrow-minded to live only for the dance floor. Or so focused. Not when there were other things in her life. School. Home. Her siblings. The people around her.

It always came back to people in the end. Her reasons.

The reasons she'd been scared. The reasons she'd been insecure. The reasons she got along so well with Mal, who'd just learnt the sting of not belonging somewhere. And though Jessi felt for her, she really did, she was glad as well. Because it meant Mal could understand. And it meant Jessi wouldn't be alone.

But, in the back of her mind, she was still worried. That the moment Mal was accepted where she wanted to be, she would leave. Vanish. Or others wouldn't prove as nice and they'd wind up ostracised.

But, though some people weren't as nice as others, neither of those things happened. Mal remained her new best friend at Stonybrook. She made new friends. Found new grooves: horse books, their younger siblings – and, from there, babysitting and their two-person club sprung.

At that point, Jessie hadn't met the BSC. But she was about to.

And they weren't as uptight as Mal's original assessment of them had degreed.

In all fairness though, Mal hadn't been wrong. Not at all. They'd been uptight with her. And unfair. But they'd learned from that. And they were just a bunch of thirteen year olds that were taking on a lot of responsibility: promising parents safe and reliable baby-sitters. And of course parents would have more reservations the younger the sitters were.

But they'd seen Mal in action before and that helped them. And they watched them just to be sure. It wasn't like she'd feared: she'd be found incompetent for silly reasons or, worse, she'd do something horribly wrong. And it wasn't that the child, or his parents, had a problem with her being the sitter. They didn't close the door in her face. Yell abuse at her and cast her out in shame. Give her a harder time than she deserved. But rarely did young children do that. It was the older ones who learned from their parents, from the people around them. That was what she liked about kids.

And though she did meet families who were concerned over her skin colour or her ethnicity – or even openly distasteful – they were vastly outnumbered by the rest who really couldn't care less.

And all that was a huge help in first impressions.