Callie did see Stef again. Whether out of habit, or because she truly enjoyed their coffee, Stef didn't suddenly disappear.
Still, something felt off. Their fight had been on a Thursday, and when she didn't see Stef all weekend, she started going over the afternoon in her head incessantly. How could she have been so awful? Moments before, Stef had been touching her face, telling Callie how much she mattered. And how had Callie repaid that kindness? It didn't matter that she had been afraid and rattled. Stef had been nothing but good to her, and she had lashed out, like always.
When she finally did see Stef, and all that passed between them was a quick, fleeting smile, her apprehension only deepened. The second time Stef visited without saying a word beyond thank you, Callie tried to tell herself that this new relationship would be better, would be safer, for both their sakes.
They had both made assumptions about one another. Now, Stef knew she had a crazy boyfriend, and Callie knew that Stef had a group of people who took far more precedence over Callie. They might never have...whatever they'd had before, but as long as Callie could maintain a modicum of Stef's respect, this could be enough.
She'd given up trying to understand why Stef suddenly meant so much to her. Callie now simply accepted that from the moment Stef had pulled her hand back after scaring her in that hospital hallway, her opinion had begun to matter. It had solidified into respect when she gave Callie her business card, and to adoration when she didn't completely ignore Callie's e-mails. None of this was fair to Stef, who was just trying to live her life, and finding Callie in her way whenever she turned a corner. But this was what Callie did - she got overly attached to people. All it had taken was one look from Liam that said you are special, and she was hooked.
Truthfully, she was not as jaded and self-protective as she liked people to think, not by a long shot. With Stef, as with Liam, she had felt seen, and she desperately wanted that feeling back; to be noticed, not for the girl that remembered your order by the third or fourth time you came in, but for just…Callie.
It was strange, wanting to be appreciated, when you didn't like seeing yourself at the exact same time. She wasn't sure exactly when those feelings of disquiet had started. Somewhere around the time that Liam had begun seeing her body, and not her face. If it weren't for Jude, she couldn't say whether she would even still be at that house some nights. But Jude kept her grounded, kept her tied down, even if it was the last thing she wanted to be.
Jude also forced her to keep moving. She did not know how to fix her own life, but his life had the possibility of being better. Whatever she could do now to make things easier for him in the long run, she would not hesitate .
Unlike her own, Jude's unhappiness was external. Some days, like the afternoon he presented her with a Judy Blume book that couldn't have possibly come from his elementary school library, she couldn't help resenting him. Did he appreciate nothing she was doing? She was working before and after school, coming home exhausted every single day, only to have to deal with his stupid impulses?
God, that wasn't fair to him. All Jude really understood was her being gone for hours on end. When she had first begun working, she had given him some of her tips as a sort of allowance, hoping having money of his own would stifle his urge to simply take. But there weren't many places he could go in their suburb, especially without friends to explore it with. In retrospect, she should have explained her intent behind the allowance, but talking about his stealing only seemed to upset him. Now, months later, here he was, holding out a book and babbling about how it was about a teenaged girl, how he had thought of her right away. Callie's attempts to protect him were, once again, making things worse.
"Whoa, slow down. Monkey, where did you get this?"
"Around." His eyes dropped away from her face, fixating on the spine of the paperback in both their hands.
"No, really, where?" She tried to catch his gaze again, and he lowered his head entirely.
"A store." His voice dropped as well, barely above a mumble. "I went to Walmart with Liam the other day. You were at work, and he was bored, so he let me come. First we went to a sporting goods place, 'cause he wanted to look at golf clubs. Then to Walmart."
"And he bought you a book about a fifteen-year old?" They both knew the answer to this question. Please don't lie to me, Jude .
He kicked the side of her desk. "No. I got this for you, 'cause I thought you would like it. I should have saved it for your birthday. Maybe then you wouldn't be asking so many stupid questions."
She noticed that he had said got instead of bought, and her heart sank. "Liam doesn't know you took this."
Jude gave the book a half-hearted tug, but she held fast. "No. He was looking at hats forever. He told me I could go around by myself, as long as I came back. I looked at clothes for a while, but people kept asking where my mom was. It made me mad."
"What kind of clothes?"
He stayed silent long enough to confirm her suspicions. "Dresses," he finally admitted, giving up on the book and turning to stare at the bare half of the room. "There were some really, really nice ones. I didn't even touch them, I promise, I just looked. But then people were giving me weird looks, so I went to the book section. There weren't any mean people around there."
"It still wasn't okay to just take this. You know you're not allowed to go places and take what you want. That's why I have a job. If I tried to use my phone without paying the bill, I'd be stealing from the phone company."
"Wouldn't they just turn it off, like they used to do with our lights when we lived with mom and dad?"
She hadn't known he remembered that. "Yeah, but that's still the same thing. You didn't get caught, but it doesn't mean it's okay. Come on, we'll go take it back now." She grabbed her purse off her desk, mentally counting out that day's tips. "If we're lucky, maybe the manager will just make us pay for it and - Jude?"
He had slipped away, silent in sock clad feet, his present to her sitting splayed open on the bed. Surely, he had to know she wouldn't have been able to accept this. Jude knew what he was doing was wrong; she could see that in his phrasing. But he also appeared to do it in response to something. He had been looking at women's clothing, and people had disapproved. Did he steal when he was mad? Jude so rarely got mad, which was maybe part of the problem.
If he had waited to give her this on her birthday, which was just over two weeks away, would she have asked him questions? Probably not. Maybe he had wanted her to know. That had to count for something, right? No, she needed to stop making excuses for him. That was how they had gotten here, because she kept putting the problem out of her mind. This wasn't just stealing random food, or thinking about taking gardening tools. His problem was getting bigger, not going away, and she had no idea how to help him.
Phil and Hannah didn't like problems, especially if they had the potential to involve law enforcement. She suspected half the reason Janet was ultimately sent elsewhere was because the police had gotten involved. If Jude continued on like this, it was a matter of when, not if, he would be caught in the act. If he was lucky, he would only have to deal with an in-store security guard. But it was also possible that an actual police officer would be called. They would want to scare him, which would be easy. More importantly, it would also piss off the entire Olmstead family.
What if he was sent away? Her chest tightened at the thought, sweat prickling across her back. She couldn't be good enough for both of them; she couldn't protect him from himself. But she also couldn't stop working - they needed that money for both their futures. She only had four more years before she turned eighteen. Jude would be fourteen, and she could certainly adopt him then. But she would need money to support them both, and possibly go to college. She needed a steady, year-round job. If she kept this up, Mary Anne and Logan might let her work close to full time over the summer, which would help a lot.
All of this meant running away was out of the question, not that she had the first idea of where to take him. But what could she do? Bill might have some ideas. He had offered her therapy when he had first been assigned to her case, something she had refused upon learning that she and Jude wouldn't be seen together. Those first few weeks, the thought of even sleeping in separate rooms had been too hard to contemplate. She had been so convinced that she would wake up one morning, only to discover that Jude , too , had disappeared in the night.
Now, their situation was vastly different, but there must be therapists for this sort of thing. Having someone to talk out the things that made him stressed to the point of stealing would be helpful to Jude, but how could she make it happen? She couldn't contact Bill without Hannah and Phil finding out, and Liam had said they would not be pleased if any more attention was brought on their family. She felt trapped, and that feeling was making her panic. Some good big sister she was turning out to be.
Not knowing what else to do, she found Liam later that night. Jude had once again refused to be read to. She had told him that everything would be all right, and that they would figure this out together, but he had remained silent, motionlessly staring at the wall and flinching away from her good night kiss. At the very least, she knew Liam wouldn't reject her advances. She decided to start out with that. If he were in a good mood, maybe he would be more receptive to helping her brainstorm.
For once, she was able to break their kiss without making him upset. There was no good way to segue into this kind of conversation, so she just told him everything from start to finish, hoping for the best.
She hadn't expected laughter. "Holy shit, you foster kids are insane! What the hell did Jude want with Mrs. Matthews' gardening crap?"
"God, I don't know, but can you focus?"
"Sorry, it's just so stupid! He's gotta know his sister's loaded and wrapped around his little finger."
She pinched his arm, which launched them into a full-on tickle war. Even as she muffled her giggles in his shirt and begged for mercy, she couldn't help feeling lighter than she had in days. This was the Liam she enjoyed, who smiled and laughed with her; who was fun.
"God, this is the best shit I've heard in weeks," he gasped, once they were calming down. He ran a hand through her hair, kissed the corner of her mouth, and she couldn't resist deepening it into something more, sliding a hand into his hair and urging his mouth open. He made a low, appreciative sound at the back of his throat, and she laughed against his lips.
Nothing ended up being resolved, but she was too elated to dwell. If she could get Liam to act like this all the time, maybe they could both deal with Jude? She could get Jude to tell one of them if he were feeling overwhelmed, and they could have a list of productive things to counteract it. Liam was home a whole lot more than she was. It would be good for he and Jude to have something in common. Liam could learn that Jude was a great kid, and Jude would realize Liam wasn't always so intense.
The only thing she hadn't felt comfortable sharing with Liam was the obsession with women's clothing, a fascination of Jude's for as long as she could remember. From a very young age, he had been in love with their mother's few fancy dresses, running the silk through his fingers. When she would try them on, he would clap in delight. Hannah had a large variety of cocktail dresses, and Callie was willing to bet Jude spent a lot of his alone time in their walk-in closet. Callie herself owned very little makeup, and almost all of it had been given to her by Jude .
Did his fascination extend beyond simple admiration? If he actually wanted to try on dresses, that would be a problem. Phil was a superfan of Alex Jones - she wouldn't be surprised if was his computer's homepage. One of Phil's favorite dinner table rants went on in great detail about how the government was taking over the world, and turning people homosexual through chemical warfare. If he knew his foster daughter had been friends, however briefly, with a lesbian cop, she would be packing up her stuff that same night. And if he got wind that her younger brother liked wearing women's clothing, they wouldn't even have that luxury.
Liam didn't necessarily share his father's politics, he mostly endured them to get a beer or cocktail out of the conversation. One of the few things the Olmsteads were strict about was their son's restricted access to their liquor cabinet. Still, she didn't relish the conversation about Jude's sexuality, and it wasn't her secret to share. If Jude wasn't ready to talk about it with her yet, he certainly wouldn't take kindly to her mentioning it to Liam.
But if it was adding to whatever else was bothering him, should she force him to talk about it? No. He had never pressed her about how she knew Stef. He had a right to secrets, just like everyone else. She wished she could talk to Bill, who was constantly in motion, but who she believed truly meant well. If she could explain the situation, and underscore that their placement was going great otherwise, then maybe…
But no, he would ask why Hannah or Phil hadn't brought this to his attention, and Callie had no good answer to that. If she told Hannah, would she think to call Bill? Callie tried to remember overhearing any conversations with Janet's social worker, or to Janet herself, about treatment options. The only "treatment' Janet ever got was an ever increasing list of meds. Would they medicate Jude for stealing? Janet had flitted from diagnosis to diagnosis faster than Callie channel-surfed. When she was on her medication, she was constantly sleeping or docile. Callie suspected she often stopped taking them cold turkey, which would just restart the cycle.
She would not allow Jude to go through any of that. If he got put on medication, she would be at the appointment with him, so she could understand the side effects and why they thought it would help, but she desperately hoped it didn't come to any of that.
It all came back to talking with Hannah. Before last week, she might have considered bringing this up with Stef, who would have been able to remain objective. Obviously, that was no longer an option. Instead, they would find a time when Hannah was alone in the house, and go from there. Ideally, Jude would lead the conversation, Callie could just be there for moral support. If she could coach Jude before this, get him comfortable with the idea of telling people when he was upset, maybe he wouldn't feel quite so out of control. Her Wednesday evening shift nearly over, she resolved to bring up the idea the moment she got home.
Ten minutes before closing, Stef wandered in - speak of the devil. She was in her uniform, but Hernandez was nowhere in sight. Now that she had a solution to the Jude problem, Callie was inspired. Conscious of Taylor beside her, she scribbled on the bottom of Stef's latte.
Sorry for the other day. Blame it on tweens?
CJ
She didn't get to see Stef noticing the message, but half an hour later, while counting out tips, Taylor found a cryptic note amongst them. Nothing to be sorry for. You remember what I said.
"The hell do you think that's supposed to mean? Oh god, you're not keeping that, are you?"
She shrugged, trying not to smile, and continued cleaning the espresso machine. A lot had been said that afternoon. Was she supposed to remember that she deserved good things, and the look in Stef's eyes when she had said so? She stilled, feeling phantom fingers on her skin, and sighed. She had possibly made their relationship just as complicated as before, but it felt good to dispel some of the awkwardness. With Stef's note giving her newfound confidence, she went home to Jude.
Seeing fear in her baby brother's eyes would never not chill her. This time, knowing she was the one to put it there, made her feel sick. "It'll help," she repeated for the third time.
"I'm sorry I took the book. I'm sorry! I'll go with you to bring it back."
"Buddy, it's not about the book. It's…this has been going on for a long time, and I should have helped you figure it out sooner. I'm the one who should be sorry."
"No!" It came out high and strangled. "I'll stop, I will. Just please, I don't want anyone else to know. Please, Callie. Please." He might have begged more, but he was sobbing too hard for words. He fought her embrace at first, but eventually clung to her, his hot, frantic breaths blasting against her neck.
"Okay, okay. We'll figure something else out. Shhh, it's all right. It'll be all right."
But it wasn't all right. Liam, who had at first found the whole situation hilarious, now blamed every lost item on Jude. Inevitably, they were all recovered, and Jude was growing more confused by the day. "Why would I take his stuff? I never even go in his room."
When she confronted him about it, Liam would just shrug. "You never know. The minute I don't ask him will be the time he took something." They both knew this wasn't true, and she couldn't tell who his behavior was meant to get more of a rise out of.
The idea that Liam would deliberately slip up and reveal to Jude that she had broken his confidence tore at her. It had been nearly a week since telling Liam, too long to confess the crime to Jude. If she told him now, he would panic all over again. But if she waited, he would be even more angry. As with everything else, she was stuck.
"You look like shit," Taylor told her that Saturday morning.
"Honestly, I feel like it." She was too drained to argue with her, good-naturedly or otherwise.
"Make yourself one of those coconut things. Wait, never mind, your anti-coffee friend's coming this way."
Stef and Lena came in, a younger girl with them. There was a brief argument, when - wait, was this their daughter? Whoever this was, she was certainly not biological - wanted a blended coffee drink and both adults refused. The possible daughter ordered a smoothie, looking incredibly put out. Callie shot her a sympathetic smile.
"Hey, no fraternizing with my baby. That one's a coffee drinker," Stef stage-whispered to Lena.
"Oh, they lose their innocence so young."
This was clearly a tactic to get smoothie girl to smile, something she was trying her best not to do. Callie felt some of the tension bleeding out of her, even though none of this was meant for her benefit.
"Don't look so stressed, CJ."
On the other hand, maybe some of it was. Stef lingered behind Lena and their maybe-daughter, even though she could have just as easily gone with them to a table and come back for their drinks.
Finishing up with Lena's chai, Callie tried out a smile. Taylor didn't bother hiding her wince, and Stef laughed outright. "Okay, don't look like that, either."
Her exhaustion was quickly giving way to far more distracting waves of confusion. Was their fight over, just like that? Stef hadn't attempted conversation in over a week, and now she was talking to her like normal? Granted, Callie hadn't broken out of her barista persona until writing that note. Could Stef have been waiting for her to make the first stab at conversation?
Whatever it was, the shift got significantly easier to get through. During a lull, Callie made herself the same smoothie Stef and Lena's daughter had ordered, quickly determining it had nothing on caffeine.
She came home to an empty house. All three cars were gone, and Jude was nowhere to be seen. Had Liam finally done what she'd been hinting at, and taken him out somewhere? In her exhausted haze to get ready for work, she'd forgotten her phone on the charger. When she went to get it to ask what they were up to, it wasn't there. Had it fallen behind her desk? She gave the area a half-hearted glance, only finding a series of paperclips and several old homework assignments. Okay, so her phone didn't appear to be anywhere in her room, but she simply didn't have the energy to be overly concerned. Jude was having fun, and that was all that mattered. Liam would hold this over her head for days, but she'd make it up to him later...somehow. He'd probably want to take off her shirt. Ugh, she'd have to think of something else…
Sprawling across her bed, she only intended to stay there for a few minutes. The next thing she knew, she was waking up four hours later, her arm completely numb from where she'd fallen asleep on top of it.
There were faint noises from downstairs, but Jude's voice wasn't among them. He would have come up to tell her about their day, wouldn't he? She crawled off her bed, trying to wake herself up fully. It was around 4:30, so they could still be out.
"You up here, monkey?" She meant to sound playful, but the question came out slow and sleepy. When was the last time she'd passed out like that, and on a Saturday, no less? She must have been more exhausted than she'd realized. Her name tag from work was still clipped to her shirt, and she stuck it in her purse, double checking that her phone hadn't been there all along. Nope, still no sign of it. As she splashed cold water on her face, she tried to imagine Taylor going a whole day without her fancy smartphone. Nope, would never happen.
Changing into more casual clothes, she then wandered into Jude's room, looking for clues. His jacket was gone, but nothing else looked out of place. Her brother was crazy neat, making her own slightly disorganized desk look like a nightmare in comparison. When he had asked what she wanted for her birthday, she had seriously told him to reorganize her room..
Cocking her head, she tried to figure out who had come home. At least two feminine voices echoed up to her, which meant Hannah had company. Maybe she would know where Liam had taken Jude for the day. If it was close enough, Callie could go and surprise them. Huh, that was weird. Double Fudge (the last book in the series), which they were about a fourth of the way through, was missing. Whatever paperback they were reading always sat on the corner of his desk, their page marked with the same cat shaped bookmark that had come from god knows where. He wouldn't read ahead without her, would he? This was the only Fudge book she had never read, and even though it had clearly been written years after the rest, she still liked it. More importantly, they had read the entire series together thus far.
She found Hannah in the kitchen with one of her friends. They were sitting at the table with cups of coffee, studying some sort of paperwork. "Oh, Callie , you remember Evelyn? She works with me at the foundation."
Honestly, Hannah's friends all looked alike to her. Or maybe it was that they always gave Callie that same, slightly pitying look. Sure, Hannah never introduced Callie as her foster daughter, but she didn't have to. Comments like 'her difficult life' or 'she's been doing so well, since…' were never far beyond her introduction. If she'd known Evelyn was here, she might have left on her work clothes. They were just a nicer shirt and khakis, but they gave off a better impression than jeans. Well, maybe not when she'd slept in them all afternoon.
Her and Evelyn exchanged stupid small talk for a few moments. Both women seemed pleasant enough, but it wasn't like Callie to interrupt…whatever they were doing.
"Do you have work tonight?" Hannah finally interjected. "She got herself a job down at that coffee shop near the library, isn't that great? I don't think I've ever had such an ambitious one before!"
God, it sounded like Callie was a show dog. "No, I worked this morning. Um, do you know where Liam went?"
Hannah laughed her public places laugh, shrill and short. "I never know where that boy is."
"Well, I was just wondering where he took Jude."
Hannah's smile turned to genuine confusion. "Jude? Liam left by himself around the same time I did. I was going to my luncheon, and he said he wouldn't be back until after dinner."
She might have continued speaking, if Callie hadn't grabbed the back of her chair for support. "Wait, Liam left? Alone?"
"Yes. Pulled out just ahead of me."
"But…I got home at 1:00, and Jude wasn't here."
Hannah's smile was back in place, but Callie could recognize the subtle signs of irritation. "Don't look so alarmed, Callie. He's ten, not two. Certainly old enough to ride that bike of his around the neighborhood."
God, but they all just loved bringing up that stupid bike. It had been an old one of Liam's that he'd outgrown fairly quickly, so they hadn't lost any money over giving it to Jude. He seemed to enjoy it, often riding it to and from school, but it wasn't his most prized possession. And he certainly wouldn't have gone on a four-hour ride.
"I've been home all afternoon, and he hasn't come back." She sounded needy even to herself, and she forced herself to stop and breathe. It wouldn't do to panic in front of Evelyn.
"Well, is he at a friend's house? It's good for him to get out, he's always hanging around here."
He doesn't have any friends, she wanted to snap, but stopped herself just in time. "Don't you think he would have told someone? He has my cell number, he would have…oh, god." Suddenly, her missing phone made an awful sort of sense. "My phone. I left it when I went to work, and now I can't find it."
"My grandson takes my phone all the time," Evelyn laughed, sounding completely out of her element.
"Can you call it? I bet he has it."
"All right. But Callie, you're completely overreacting." She rarely asked Hannah for things directly, so they both knew how serious she was being. Hannah left to retrieve her purse, and Callie was half a second from pacing.
"Sit down, dear. It's all going to be fine." Evelyn pulled out a chair for her, sliding a plate of finger foods across the table. "Have a sandwich." God, she felt like she was in some outdated tea party from…some previous century.
"I don't seem to have your number in here." Hannah came back into the room, still looking through her contacts. Callie tried not to let the surprise show on her face. Hannah would call Liam the moment he broke curfew, so she had thought it was a requirement that both Hannah and Phil have the ability to contact her at all times. The year before, when Callie had convinced the Olmsteads to co-sign the plan with her, she had promised her phone would always be turned on and that she'd never ignore their calls - something that Liam did with increasing regularity. She had assumed that was what had ultimately made them agree . The next day, Hannah had instructed Liam to help her pick out a phone, under the stipulation that the money were to only come from Callie's first paycheck.
In that time, she hadn't received a call from either of them, though both their numbers were among the first she'd put in her contacts. She'd always thought that was because she was predictable, never staying out late, and always coming home when she said she would be there . Could Hannah really never have bothered putting Callie in her contacts? Regardless, she didn't have time to dwell on that now. Until this very second, she had never seen a reason to know her own number off the top of her head.
"Well, it's in Phil's phone, right?"
"Of course, I'm sure he wrote it down somewhere, but we're not going to bother him with this until he's home. He and Fred were only going to do nine holes, so they'll be back soon."
Fred was Evelyn's husband, who Callie knew even less about than his wife. "Okay," she said, because it would only make things worse for her if she argued.
"I bet Jude will beat them back." Hannah put her hand over Callie's for a brief moment, the longest physical contact they'd had in a good six months. The last time she could remember Hannah touching her at all was the night her wrist had been hurt, and even then it had been cursory.
She excused herself before the panic could fully overtake her . "Goodness, that one's a handful," Evelyn's distinct voice echoed to her on the stairs, followed by that shrill laugh of Hannah's. Jude did the best impression of that laugh…
She stood perfectly still, until her eyes stopped burning and her nose no longer tingled, but being motionless only made her heartbeat increase. "Where are you, monkey? "
author's notes : Apologies for the long wait, it's been a crazy week and a half. As usual, major thanks to starophie for a super quick, and excellent betaing..
