Whenever she ended up having enough time, Callie liked taking showers at night and skipping the crazy bathroom fights in the mornings. That night, once she'd finished her own homework and read two chapters of Jude's book with him, she got her few minutes of peace. As she stood in the mirror after towel-drying her hair and putting on pajamas, she realized that there was a line of red on the right side of her thin blue tank top; one of her cuts had started bleeding again.

Stef and Lena were in their room, working on the seemingly never-ending stream of laundry that came from having 5 kids. Callie quietly knocked on the open doorframe. "Hey, love. What's up?" Stef asked.

"Um, I think I need another bandage."

Lena noticed the blood on her shirt. "Yeah, I'd say so," she agreed. Stef went to grab the first aid kit from the bathroom. Lena shut the bedroom door so they had some privacy.

"I think we've got waterproof band-aids," Stef told Callie as she looked for the box, "So you shouldn't have to take those off to shower."

"Thanks. I thought I could take care of it myself, but it's kinda awkward." The cut was the one she'd given herself accidentally; it was rougher and wasn't in her usual location.

"It's no problem." As Stef put some antiseptic on her, she tried to remember what Callie's wounds had looked like the previous morning. She was pretty sure this wasn't a new cut; it seemed unlikely that Callie would come to them for help with bandages if she was secretly still hurting herself.

Lena sat on the bed beside them. "You didn't do all of these, did you?" she softly asked their foster daughter, indicating one of the other scars on her body.

Callie looked to see which one she was pointing to, a mark on her right shoulder blade. "No, that was Phil, my last foster father."

"What happened? If you don't mind talking about it," Lena amended.

"He hit me with a stick. I probably wouldn't have the scar if it hadn't snapped in half and cut me."

Stef looked up at her in shock. "Why would he do that?" Even after everything she'd seen fostering and on the job, she'd never been able to understand how anybody could even think of doing things like that to a child.

"I don't remember. Jude made a mess in the kitchen or something. There was always an excuse. As long as he was hitting me instead of Jude, I didn't care."

"Nobody has any right to hurt you," Lena told her.

Callie shrugged. "He wasn't the first one. Or the last. This was from juvie," she pointed to a scar on her left side. "That's the only time anyone's ever been unhappy that I was leaving. The one on my leg is from a girl at our first group home."

"What else?" Stef softly asked, hoping that sharing the trauma would help her.

Callie went through her litany of injuries, a list that she'd never talked about with anyone else before. No one else, besides Jude, had ever cared. "I can't see the most important one," she told the moms.

"Why not?" Lena wondered. Callie reached up and undid the ponytail she'd been wearing. Once she'd parted her hair the right way, a scar on the right side of her head became visible.

"That came from the car window, in the accident where my mom died. Jude's got a couple little scars, too. We were asleep on the back seat…" She took a deep breath before continuing. Just like the finer details of what had happened with Liam, this was a part of her life that she didn't usually share with anyone. "We woke up to a nightmare. Somehow we just got a few cuts and bruises while our mom and two other people died a few feet away. I can still hear how Jude cried... The nurses and paramedics all said that we were lucky. Like being there to watch your life fall apart was a good thing... There were a lot of times that I wished our dad had killed us, too," she softly admitted.

Stef and Lena both wrapped their arms around her. They'd gotten the general details about the accident from Callie and Jude's CPS files, but neither of their foster children had ever talked about it before. "We are very glad that you survived," Lena told her, "Although we wish life afterward hadn't been so hard for you."

Callie sighed and wiped her eyes. "I wish we'd come here sooner. I wish we'd lived here all along."

"We do, too, honey," Lena promised her.

"I don't have much time left," Callie continued. "I'll be 18 in a year and a half. I used to pray so hard for that day to come. I could adopt Jude, then, and make sure he was safe and out of the system. But now… now it seems so short."

"When you turn 18, you'll be a legal adult," Stef told her, "But you will always be one of our babies. Nobody's going to be forcing you out the door, love. If you want to go to college locally and live at home, that's fine. We will be very happy for however much time we have with you in the house."

Callie looked up at them. "Do you really see me going to college?" she wondered. It had never been in her plans. Besides not having any money to pay for it, she'd always known that she would need to start working as soon as possible in order to support Jude.

Lena hugged her. "Why not? If that's what you want."

"I've never really thought about it…" Suddenly, her old life plan was in the trash, and a whole new world of options had opened up. "I guess things are different now, aren't they?" she realized.

The moms smiled. "Yes, they are."

Getting ready for school on Friday was slightly less chaotic than Thursday. They were starting to get their routine back. Lena didn't have an early meeting that morning, so she took the SUV and drove the kids to school.

"Meet me back here at 4 if you want a ride instead of walking," she told them as they got out of the car. "And have a good day!"

Callie was still thinking about the conversation she'd had with the moms the previous night. "Where are you going to go to college?" she asked Brandon as they walked toward the high school half of the building.

"Um… I don't know. I want to go to a music program, but Lena's always said I should look at regular schools, too. Just to make sure I have options in life. Why?"

She shrugged. "I've never thought about it. But I guess I'm starting to now." Thinking about college made her feel stunningly normal.

"Do you know what you want to study?"

"Not really."

Brandon smiled. "Probably want to think about that first. Then you can figure out where to go."

As they headed for their lockers, Callie got a strange feeling that people were staring at her. A couple kids turned away, giggling, when she looked in their direction. "What's going on?" she asked Brandon.

He shook his head. "I don't know. Probably just something stupid. I've got to get up to the music room; I'll see you in Algebra?" They had their second period of the day together.

She nodded. "Yeah, see you later."

Mariana and Jesus also noticed that there was something strange going on as they went to their first-period history class. People kept looking at something on their phones and sharing it with other friends. Whatever it was, everyone thought it was highly amusing.

By the time the class was over, Jesus was beyond curious. "What is that?" he asked one of the other boys as he tried to look over his shoulder at his phone.

The kid smirked and just handed him the device. There was a picture from Instagram on the screen, and Jesus' jaw dropped when he saw what the photo was of. "Holy crap," he muttered.

"Hey, let me see it," Mariana told him. Jesus tried not to let her, but wasn't successful. She was similarly stunned. "Oh, my God... This isn't good."

"Nope."

As Callie arrived in Algebra, her morning hadn't gotten any less weird. In her first period, several of the other kids had been giving her weird looks or were seemingly laughing at her. She was very on-edge as she slid into her seat next to Brandon.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"No."

They turned around when they heard a couple kids laughing again. The boys were staring at something on a phone screen. "What is so funny?" Brandon irritatedly asked.

Their teacher wasn't there yet, so one boy headed for the projector. "Time for another show," he announced as he disconnected the computer and plugged in his phone instead.

When the picture appeared on the screen, Callie's heart stopped. It was of her, dressed in nothing more than a tank top and underwear and lying back on her bed at the Olmsteads'. She'd almost forgotten about that photo. She'd barely been fourteen at the time, and hadn't had any idea what she was doing. Now, she could recognize that she'd looked like a total slut.

Brandon was paralysed in shock for a minute. The message displayed at the bottom, next to the poster's name (Liam Olmstead) was the worst part. His blood started boiling as he read it: 'SCREW YOU, LITTLE WHORE. OH, WAIT, I ALREADY DID.'

The teacher came in the room and stared at the screen. "What the hell is this?" he asked, horrified. The kid immediately unplugged his phone, but it was too late. There was no way to undo what had just happened. Brandon looked up as Callie bolted from the room, leaving her books and backpack behind. He quickly got up, ignoring that their teacher was calling their names, and went after her. He didn't mind that he had to shove one of his moronic classmates out of his way in the process.

"Callie!" he yelled down the hallway, but she was running away as fast as she could. "Callie, stop!" He started to follow, but she quickly disappeared outside. By the time he got out the door, Brandon couldn't see her anywhere.

As he turned to go back into the school, he was surprised to see that Talya had followed him. "Is she okay?" the redhead worriedly asked her boyfriend.

Brandon shook his head, his heart racing from more than just running through the school. "No, probably not."

TBC...