By March, Jody had settled back into the gym, having become Amy's regular sparring partner once more. As for Amy, she had, to Jody's relief, taken not getting into the regional team surprisingly well. Rather, she behaved as if the list of names had never gone up on the noticeboard, continuing to take digs at Jess, Emily, and the other girls, though Jody sometimes tried to stop her, ignoring their comments about her not being in the team, and training as if she had proper matches coming up right around the corner. Jody took it a little more easily, taking each day as it came and just being grateful that she'd been able to get back into the ring at all after the prior month's drama.
Today, however, she was running a little late. May-Li had had to pop out for an emergency, and since Mike had already been out accompanying Charlie on a supervised visit to the local prison, she'd been forced to leave Jody in charge of the young'uns, even though Ryan and Alex were both older, until the respite care worker could arrive and take over. Getting off the bus, which she could now afford again because she'd paid Tyler back, Jody jogged to the front of the gym and immediately made her way to the changing rooms. She usually changed into her gym wear before leaving the house but between Taz yelling at Sid and Floss and Jay falling out, she simply hadn't had the time. Finding an untouched spot in the corner, she began to strip down to her underwear, but soon realised she wasn't alone; a voice reached her ears from the other side of the room, where the tiny one-pound lockers were located. A voice she recognised well.
"Yes, Mum, I'm fine... Yeah, I just sparred right now... Coach says I'm doing great."
Jody raised an eyebrow. Amy didn't usually spar with the others because they either didn't like her or were scared of her. And coach? What coach? Only the people in the Junior, Youth and Elite boxing teams had coaches; the rest of them, the recreational boxers as they were known, only had gym trainers.
"Well, you can tell him. I'm tired of being stuck in the middle, and it's not just me. It makes"—a locker door creaked, muffling some of the speech—"too. Just because he's always smiling like an idiot, it doesn't mean he doesn't care!" Jody suddenly heard a sniff and froze. Was there someone else in the room besides herself and Amy, witnessing her eavesdropping on her sparring partner? Working up the guts, she cautiously peered around the corner but saw no one else around. Then, another sniff made its way to her ears, only this time it was obvious that it was coming from Amy herself. "No, it's not because of that. It's because I wish we were fucking normal!"
Normal. Jody remembered wishing for the same thing as a four-year-old, thinking that 'Daddy' could've made that happen by coming back and making 'Mummy' and the rest of them happy. It'd never happened, of course, and even though she was happy now, she'd never quite reached the state of being normal. Was that even possible as a care kid? There was nothing normal about having to tick 'carer' instead of 'parent' or even 'guardian' on a Parents' Evening slip. She shook her head—there was plenty of time for dark thoughts when she was in the ring—and shrugged her comfy sports hoodie on, realising that Amy had stopped speaking but was still sniffing. She suddenly felt guilty; Amy crying just seemed wrong, almost impossible, and she felt wrong for having sneakily listened in on such a thing.
Placing the last of her casualwear into her bag, she patiently waited for Amy to leave the room before doing the same.
.:. QK .:.
Later on, as they trained together, Jody was unable to tear her eyes away from her sparring partner. It was as if what she'd heard in the changing rooms had opened her eyes to something, perhaps the fact that things in Amy's life weren't as they should be, and now she couldn't unsee it; the bags under Amy's eyes were suddenly all too glaring and her pasty pale skin, too pale to be healthy, hard to miss. She couldn't believe she'd never noticed before. Not once had she thought that Amy's life was perfect but she hadn't thought that things were bad enough to bring the girl to the point of tears either. That too, on a phone call with her mother, the parent she was supposed to be fond of.
"Are you alright?" she found herself asking, against her better judgement.
Amy narrowed her eyes. "Yeah. Why wouldn't I be?"
Jody was quick to answer. "No reason."
"There's no such thing as 'no reason'. No one ever asks anything for 'no reason'. Spill."
Wincing, Jody knew she was done for. Amy was known around the gym by face, if not name, for her anger, and took the invasion of her privacy especially badly. One time, around a month ago, one of the other girls had stolen one of her shoes 'for fun' and had paid the price by getting punched square in the face. The worst part was that the gym trainer on duty that day, the one who'd alerted Jody to the fact that she and Amy had the same last names, had treated the incident as a mid-spar error and thus Amy had got off lightly. If she had to guess, Amy would consider eavesdropping a worse violation than her shoes being stolen, and rightly so.
Despite that, Jody couldn't bring herself to lie. Rather, she couldn't come up with a believable one that would explain why she was concerned about Amy in the first place. If Amy tried to punch her, she would just have to retaliate. After all, they were at the gym.
"I, uhh, I didn't come straight here today," she confessed, mentally preparing to defend herself if necessary. Amy widened her eyes and shook her head as if to say 'so?'. "I went to the locker room first, to change out of my home clothes."
The implications behind Jody's words seemed to dawn on Amy fairly quickly as she narrowed her eyes again and pursed her lips but none of the things Jody had expected from rage and yelling to stomping and punching came to pass. Instead, Amy cast a glance around their surroundings before leaning in and saying, "Tell anyone, and I'll thump you."
Relaxing, Jody dropped her (mental) defensive stance but crossed her arms. No matter how much she'd calmed down over the years, she didn't take kindly to being spoken to like that. She'd already had to silently bear Millie's domineering attitude last week; she wasn't going to take the same from her possible younger sister.
"I'm not going to tell anyone," she said, the corners of her lips twitching, "but I doubt you could thump me."
Amy scoffed. "Oh, yeah? You wanna bet on that?"
"No," Jody answered honestly, licking her lip. "I know I could still take you, though." Amy rolled her eyes; Jody forced herself to keep a straight face. "Like I said, I won't tell anyone, if"—all traces of amusement promptly disappeared from Amy's face—"you tell me why you lied to your mum."
That sure elicited a reaction out of Amy; she flared her nostrils, her eyes wildly darting around the gym, and just when Jody thought she was safe, Amy grabbed her wrist and dragged her to a secluded corner. Jody's initial shock wore off as Amy's vice-like grip began to hurt, and she managed to shrug the younger girl off.
"Oww!" she let out, taking her right punching mitt off and proceeding to rub her stinging left wrist. "A little warning would've been nice."
Amy stared back at her, unapologetic. "Like how you just warned me?"
"I wasn't actually going to do it! Why would I tell anyone that? No one 'round here would believe me, anyway; they don't like me because I spar with you."
"That's not true," she insisted, her tone a little sombre. "Dalton still likes you, even though you two broke up."
Jody smiled small. "No one besides him, then." Amy raised an eyebrow, placing her hands on her hips. Jody sighed. "Look, Amy, I really wasn't going to tell anyone. I just said it to get the truth out of you."
She didn't understand. Why would Amy lie to her mum that she'd sparred or that she had a coach? What did she hope to achieve?
"Look, you don't have to spar with me," Amy said, averting her gaze. That was a first; she was never shy about making eye contact, or rather, staring other people in the face. "One of the other girls who didn't get in left; you can take her partner. It's not too late to get the others to like you. Just tell the idiots that you don't like me and watch how they fall at your feet."
"I don't want them to like me," Jody replied, frowning. "And that doesn't answer my question. Why did you lie?"
Amy's eyes immediately snapped back to hers. "That's none of your business."
Jody felt her temper rise at the familiar words. Yes it is, she wanted to say, because you're my sister, but let the words dissolve on the tip of her tongue; she couldn't say that without one-hundred per cent surety. "You know, lying never gets anyone anywhere. Actually, forget that. Think about your mum. What did she do to deserve it?"
"You don't know my parents!" Amy suddenly snapped, her eyes flashing dangerously. She took the punching mitts from Jody, yanking the remaining one straight off Jody's hand. "I'm heading off to the punching bags. You can go home now like you always do."
Noting the time on the gym's huge digital clock, Jody decided to pack it in for the day. Not because Amy had dismissed her, but because she still had homework to do. In any case, she'd promised many people, including herself, that she wouldn't burn herself out again and she was determined to keep her word. She was lucky she had people who cared for her. Perhaps Amy didn't.
.:. QK .:.
A couple of hours later, Jody sat at the foot of Tyler's bed, finishing up her Science homework. Over the last few days, she'd discovered that Tyler's place was a much more conducive environment for actually concentrating on studying and getting her work done. At Ashdene Ridge, it was a very different story. Mike and May-Li did their best to get everyone to study at the same time, in their own rooms, to encourage peace and quiet but it hardly ever worked; once left to their own devices, the younger kids got bored and started jumping around, making noise, which meant that the older ones, including Jody herself, often became distracted and reached for their mobile phones. Jody honestly didn't know how she'd managed until now.
She wasn't entirely undistracted over here, though. Every once in a while, she found herself peering up from her work to look over at Tyler who was sat on the other side of the bed, surrounded by a mountain of textbooks. She didn't even know why she did it—it just seemed to happen on its own—but she relished in the stupid giddy feeling she got whenever he looked up at the same time as her and their eyes met. Like now.
This time, however, he broke the silence. "Do you want something to eat?"
"I shouldn't," she answered, only for her stomach to rumble. She blushed as his eyebrows comically flew upwards. "It's nearly six. Mike and May-Li are gonna kill me if they find out I snacked before dinner."
"Who says they're gonna find out?"
"You know what they're like. They'll sniff it out like a couple of retrievers and then out me in front of the whole table."
"True, true," he agreed, but smiled expectantly at her.
Sure enough, she grinned in return. "But let's go anyway?"
Without another word, they leapt off the bed and raced downstairs, like they used to at Ashdene Ridge when their shared bowl of popcorn ran out. It amazed her that she could sit there on his bed and think not so appropriate thoughts about him but then act like a child around him, with him, the very next second.
She reached the kitchen first, less than a second ahead of him. "Ha! Beat you!"
"Didn't want to trample you on the stairs, did I?" he asked breathlessly, placing a hand on the nearby counter. "Oh, Mum's not here. Now's our chance!"
Tyler proceeded to rummage around for cookies in one of the cupboards, and Jody took on her old role of look-out. She noticed a pot on low boil, indicating that the family were not ordering takeaway tonight, and wondered just where Sally and Kamal were. Kamal had returned from overseeing his business with Tyler before Jody had arrived, and she knew that Sally was off today because she'd come up to Tyler's room earlier to check on them. She suppressed a giggle, recalling Sally's stern reminder to keep the bedroom door open at all times.
As Tyler finally located a jar of cookies, the patio door slid open and Jody jumped to attention. She tried not to look dodgy as she felt Tyler press a cookie into her hand from behind the counter, slipping it into her pocket as Sally, Kamal and a vaguely familiar young woman all walked in from the garden. Tyler popped up from further behind the counter, right in front of the sink, muttering that he'd dropped something.
"Oh, hi Tyler," the young woman said, smiling cheerfully. He replied in kind, grabbing a glass and turning the tap on.
"Sabrina, this is Jody," Sally introduced, looking back at the woman. "Jody, this is Sabrina, Kamal's sister."
Jody politely exchanged greetings with Sabrina, finally recognising her as the woman she'd filmed with Kamal at the church hall. She caught the glass of water Tyler slid her way and thanked him, supposing this was his excuse for the two of them being in the kitchen in the first place, and Sally watched the exchange in poorly concealed suspicion before checking on her cooking.
Kamal joined his wife at the cooker, looking over her shoulder at the pot, and then looked back at his sister, furrowing his eyebrows. "You know, Sab, I don't think there's enough for five in here."
"Try telling that to your nephew or niece," Sabrina quipped, rolling her eyes at him, albeit with a smile. "I'm starving."
Instantly and automatically, Jody's gaze dropped to Sabrina's abdomen. It looked totally flat to the untrained eye but as Sabrina lightly patted it, her blouse pressed against an unmistakable swell, and at that moment, Jody knew her brother was a goner because Millie's stomach had looked exactly the same last week.
Here, Kamal was going to be an uncle again, and back at the rundown estate, Jody was going to become an aunt.
A/N: I really regret watching the Series 7B trailer because believe it or not, I actually planned a prom chapter ages ago. Now I'm worried that it's going to end up being too close to the actual episode. :(
As always, thanks for the reviews!
yourfire—Yep, you're absolutely right. Luke was just 15 when he had to live with Denise and Kingsley again after they got out of prison. After Jody got taken into care, he was basically on his own; he moved out as soon as possible but it wasn't easy for him.
Charlie—I can't believe I took 50 chapters to introduce Millie. It's ridiculous. If Millie is indeed pregnant, then Luke is stuck in a situation of his own making (literally). Sadly, a lot of couples end up resenting each other IRL and as care kids, the DG lot would be a little wary about marriage/relationships. I mean serious relationships, not Candi's fairytale fantasies. I think that's why Tracy's line in the Series 6 finale about Mike showing the kids that love does work by marrying Fiona is so great. I love it.