The car ride home was a quiet one, but Skye was grateful for the reprieve. She was sure May and Phil were anxious to talk with her and Jemma about everything that had been said with Mrs. Hinton – that was their signature style, Skye was coming to understand – but they seemed to be holding themselves back. Skye appreciated how much the pair of them took their cues from her and Jemma. Not everyone would have paid close enough attention to tell that neither one was particularly interested in having a conversation.
Jemma was tapping peacefully, her eyes far away but in the kind of way that told Skye that Jemma was thinking hard about a lot of things, not that she was slipping away from the world, so Skye let her be. Skye was doing a lot of thinking, too, if she was being honest. She was trying to roll the different words and pieces of Mrs. Hinton's explanations around in her mind, trying to smooth them out so they felt less abrasive, or if that wasn't possible, then maybe to find little cracks that she could wedge her fingers into and cling on until understanding finally melted into her brain.
She had been told for so long, by so many people, that everything she failed at was all her fault. Everything that was hard for her was just because she wasn't up to the task. She wasn't good enough. It was hard to unravel that message from the coils it had the rest of her thoughts snared in, but if she understood what Mrs. Hinton had been saying, then maybe it wasn't really all true. She wasn't sure. She was still confused, and she could feel a pinching in the space between her eyes the longer she tried to make sense of it all. Even if what Mrs. Hinton had said was true, Skye still wasn't positive she liked the idea of the school being able to point at her and call out the names of all of the things that were wrong with her, that made her less competent and capable than her classmates.
Some people, like Jemma, liked to be able to name things and label them and categorize them. Doing that helped Jemma understand the world around her, Skye knew. But Skye wasn't like that. She didn't like forcing things into one box or another, or deciding that putting things into categories meant you could infer meaning about those things, especially when it came to people. She didn't want anybody telling her who she was just because she looked a certain way or her brain worked differently – she'd had enough of that over the last 13 years.
"We're home," May said, pulling Skye out of her tangled thoughts and forcing Skye to realize that the car had stopped moving a while ago.
"I'm going to go and start on dinner, if anyone would like to help me," Phil said cheerfully. "Or you can start working on your homework, instead." His eyes twinkled mischievously, like he knew that there was no way Skye would ever choose homework over cooking. Skye surprised him.
"Can I work on my homework in my room tonight, instead?" she asked. There was a long pause, as May and Phil processed the peculiarity of Skye's request.
"Sure, sweetheart," Phil finally said. He looked a little sad, and Skye wondered briefly if she had hurt his feelings. She hoped not, because that wasn't what she had been trying to do. "Will you still let me look over it once you're finished?"
"Yeah," Skye agreed, in an attempt to mend the fence she'd just demolished. She clambered out of the car and headed in towards the house.
Bobbi was waiting in the living room when Skye walked in, and she looked up expectantly.
"How'd it go?" Whatever had been bothering Bobbi ever since Skye had gotten back from Sheboygan had mostly worked itself out in the last day or two, although things were still a little stilted between the pair of them. If Skye hadn't been so reluctant to talk about the meeting, she would have leapt at the chance to have a normal conversation with her older foster sister again. Instead, she could only manage a short reply.
"I don't know. Fine, I guess." Skye stood stiffly in the middle of the room, waiting to see if Bobbi was going to press her, or if she was going to be free to disappear upstairs like she wanted to.
"Oh. Okay. That's good."
"Yep." A few more seconds of tense silence dragged out before both girls gave up and Skye turned stoutly towards the stairs. She didn't know how to tell Bobbi that she wasn't being short to be rude or to blow Bobbi off. It wasn't that she didn't want things to go back to normal between her and Bobbi, she just didn't want to talk about the meeting or to have to tell her that she was more messed up than she had originally thought. At a loss for the words to explain herself, Skye didn't look back once as she vanished up the stairs.
Back in the car, Jemma watched as Skye had made her way into the house as quickly as she could without outright running to get away from them. Under different circumstances, Jemma might have felt hurt that Skye clearly didn't want to be around her at the moment, but she could tell that Skye was heating up for a supernova was trying her best to calm down in the only ways she knew how to.
More than being hurt, she was worried for Skye. Not an unfamiliar feeling of course – it was, after all, one of the things she was best at – but she was worried, nonetheless. 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4. She was worried that Skye was drawing the wrong conclusions from what had been said in the guidance counselor's office, and she was worried that Skye was going to start pulling in on herself, pulling away from Jemma and from Phil and May and Bobbi, too. Jemma didn't know how to balance between giving Skye the space she needed to cool off and working hard to put up a fight for Skye, to pull her back in to the right gravitational orbit.
"Jemma?" May's voice interrupted her apprehensive musings. The sound was cool and soothing, like gentle stream water babbling along across a stony bed. It helped to temper some of the hot-feeling anxiety that was sparking up in her belly. "Are you ready to come inside?"
"Almost," Jemma said. She didn't usually like to spend too much time in the car. Usually cars were too tight and too cramped and felt too unreliable. Every bump in the road or jostling of the tons of metal and fiberglass made her chest a little tighter. She didn't think about the accident every time she got in the car anymore – it had been a few years since she had been able to recondition her brain to focus on other things during car rides – but she still had to tap to keep the memories of screeching tires, twisted metal, and acrid smoke at bay most of the time. Right now, though, she wanted to give Skye as much of a head start as she could, and if that meant staying in the car a few extra minutes, then that was what Jemma was going to do.
"I know there was a lot of information to process during that meeting with Mrs. Hinton," May said. "Do you want to talk about anything that happened in there?"
"I… I don't know," Jemma said, after a moment (long enough for 28 taps). "I'm still thinking, maybe."
"What kinds of things are you thinking about?" Phil asked. Since he was in the front seat, Jemma couldn't see his face very well, but she could practically hear the gentle smile in his voice. She liked how Phil was always so interested in the things that interested her. She wasn't sure if he really did like all of the same things she did (she suspected not), but either way, he always wanted to know what she had to say, even when it was hard for her to say it.
"Gravity," Jemma settled on. She didn't think she should tell about all of her Skye-related worries, at least, not out right. It didn't seem fair to talk about Skye when she couldn't be there to explain herself, but she could talk about gravity and still get the same message across. "I'm thinking about forces that pull, and what happens when things get out of orbit, or when orbits change. Gravity is one of the strongest forces in the universe. It holds our world together, keeps the Earth from straying too far away from the lifeforce of the sun. It makes the tides move and the moon change its appearance. When gravity is upset, things can be dangerous. Unpredictable."
"Things are usually much easier when they can be predicted," Phil nodded. "It gives us time to prepare."
"I excel at preparation," Jemma murmured. May and Phil chuckled, and she blushed, realizing she had said that out loud.
"We've noticed," May said kindly. "There were some kind of unpredictable things that came up tonight. How are you feeling about that? I'm afraid we didn't really give you much time for preparation…"
"Fine, I think," Jemma told her. "I think I need to do more research before I know how I feel. I don't know very much about the things Mrs. Hinton was saying, beyond the basic biology. I need to know more to understand better. I don't think they've upset my gravity, though." Only Skye's gravity was upset, but Jemma didn't say that part.
"Well, if you feel like your gravity is upset at some point, you know you can come to us, if you want," Phil said seriously. "We can try and help you put it right."
"Would you help anybody? If their gravity was upset?" Jemma wondered.
"Of course," May assured her. "Phil and I both want to help as many people as we can. We wouldn't want anybody spinning off out of orbit, now, would we?" Jemma watched as May's eyes flicked up into the rearview mirror and met her own. They were happy eyes. Calm eyes. Eyes that shone like the stars in Ursa Major. A trustworthy constellation. That had been her mother's favorite one.
"Is there someone you had in mind?" asked Phil. "Someone who might need some help with their gravity?"
Jemma didn't say anything, just tapped, but she felt like Skye's name hung in the air regardless. 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4. S-K-Y-E. M-U-S-T S-A-V-E S-K-Y-E.
"I think it's very compassionate of you to be thinking about Skye right now," May said quietly. She had understood Jemma's message. "We're all going to do our best to make sure she's okay. Phil and I, and Bobbi, and I know we can count on you, too." She paused, then turned around in her seat to face Jemma. "We're not going to lose her, Jemma. We're not going to lose any of you. We're going to make sure everyone is anchored right where they need to be."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
Upstairs, Skye sagged behind the safety of her closed bedroom door, sinking limply onto her bed. All she had wanted while they were in the meeting was to go home, but now that they were home, she didn't know what to do with herself. She was tired of thinking about Mrs. Hinton and dyslexia and all of the other doctor-sounding words that had been used that night. She wished she could forget the whole meeting entirely and just keep on thinking that she was a lazy screw-up. It didn't feel good to think that about herself, of course, but it certainly felt easier at the moment than the alternative.
Skye flopped back onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling. If she were Jemma, she could count all the little bumps and peaks of the textured plaster that covered the space above her head. That would make her feel better. But she wasn't Jemma, she was Skye, and counting spots on the ceiling was boring. She rolled over onto her stomach and dangled off the side of the bed, fishing out her computer parts from the spot where she had them tucked away. Working on her computer wasn't boring, and it would help her take her mind off things.
She'd been running into somewhat of a roadblock with her computer the last few weeks. There were still a bunch of parts that she was missing, and since she wasn't spending nearly as much time traipsing around back alleys and the junk bins behind pawn shops as she once had, she was a little short on supplies. She had some of the parts, like her fan that she'd pieced together, and the motherboard that she'd managed to pry the broken parts off of, but she had no way to connect them all together, and no way to get any of them hooked up to a better power source than the AA-battery she'd asked to borrow from Ms. Amador at school. All she had in front of her were a bunch of useless parts that didn't fit into anything that worked, anything that was whole.
Helplessly, she fiddled with the loose wires she'd pulled out of a broken digital clock back at St. Agnes. She twisted the frayed copper around the cathode knob of her battery and held it in place with her thumb, then used her other hand to guide the other end of the wire towards what she hoped was a receiver on her motherboard. When nothing happened, she tested the wire on just about every exposed surface she could find on the motherboard, hoping that somehow, she'd get lucky and see something blink to life and tell her that she had done something right. Nothing did.
Skye scowled at the battery in her hand. She jabbed the wires towards her fan piece next, trying to jump start something there. All she wanted was a tiny whir, but the fan wasn't cooperating either, and it sat, dead, silent, and unmoving in her hand. Unmitigated frustration and anger flared up inside her chest and, before she could think about what she was doing, Skye squeezed her hand shut, crushing the flimsy spokes of her fan in her fist.
In an instant, Skye regretted it. She dropped the battery onto the bed beside her and cradled the now crumpled fan in her hands, trying to smooth the plastic back out into its intended shape.
"No, no, no," she hissed, blinking back tears. How could she have done that? She had worked so hard to get the spokes straightened out in the first place, and now she had gone and wrecked everything. It was no use. The fan was beyond saving.
Furious at herself, Skye chucked the fan away from her, sending it flying into the wall across the room. She didn't want to look at the evidence of her failure – her failure to control her temper, her failure to fix the things that were broken, her failure to make anything work. The fan hit the wall with a dull thwack, and the sound felt good. It was like Skye could feel the impact of the fan hitting the wall in her bones, even though she knew that probably wasn't possible.
She looked down through her tears at the battery, the motherboard, all of her other broken, useless pieces that she would never be able to put right, and before she knew what she was doing, she was flinging those across the room, too, each one smacking into the wall and making its own unique sound of surrender. She hated her stupid computer project. Thud. She hated not being able to do anything right. Clunk. She hated all of the pushy grownups at school who wanted her to read better, to get better grades, to be something she wasn't. Thwip, thwap, thwop. She hated herself for turning out to be just as useless, hopeless, pointless as everybody had always told her she would be. CRACK.
Panicked, Skye froze and looked around the now debris-strewn room and realized that the last piece she had thrown – a heavy plastic block with a plug hanging off of it that she had once hoped to convert into a power source – had hit a lamp instead, and that the lamp was now in pieces on the floor, along with the rest of Skye's wreckage. She scrambled to the ground and tried to clean up the mess as best she could, but she didn't get far before a knock punctuated the air.
"Skye?" came Phil's voice from behind the door. "Everything okay in there?"
Skye swiped her sleeve brusquely across her streaming eyes, trying to hide the evidence of her crying as well as the evidence of her outburst.
"Skye, can I come in please?" There was a pause as Phil waited for her to answer, but Skye couldn't get her voice to work. She was too focused on shoving all of the broken things out of sight without cutting herself on a shard of lamp or sticking herself with a sharp wire. She heard the sound of the doorknob turning, and she twisted around to shield the destruction from view.
Phil's head poked around the door, and it took him a second to spot Skye, kneeling on the floor and hunched over shattered pieces of plastic and ceramic, tears still falling freely from her face.
"Hey, what's going on?" he asked concernedly, worry wrinkling his forehead. "Are you okay?" He took a step into the room and surveyed the scene before him. "Here, Skye, scoot back a little. I don't want you getting hurt on any of that stuff."
"I'm sorry," she gasped, still scrambling to collect everything, as if holding all of the broken pieces together might somehow make them all go away.
"It's okay," Phil said softly. His voice was even and gentle, but there was something firm in it, too. A teacher voice that told her he meant business. "Just leave that stuff, all right? Come over here and sit with me for a minute." He sat on the edge of Skye's bed and gestured for her to do the same.
"I have to clean it up, I'm sorry," she said again. She could hear the words that Phil was saying, but for some reason, they weren't going through, and all she could think about was the mess in front of her. She had to clean it up. She had to be good. May and Phil had told her weeks ago that she wasn't supposed to throw things in the house, and she had completely disobeyed them yet again.
"Skye, I mean it, we can clean that up later. Put it down for now, okay? Please just come talk to me." Slowly, Skye lowered her shaking hands and dumped everything she had been holding. Fragments of lamp, loose screws, bits of wire, and chunks of plastic tumbled back onto the floor. "That's good," came Phil's voice. "Just leave it there. Scoot over this way." Coaxed by Phil's words, Skye did as she was told. The blind terror that had overtaken her at the prospect of being caught mid-destruction was starting to ebb, and a deep exhaustion was starting to take its place.
"Come here, sweetheart," Phil said. He held out a hand to help boost Skye to her feet, which she took. Nervously, she perched on the edge of the bed next to him. "Can we talk?"
Skye shrugged. She wasn't sure she was going to have much to say, but she got the feeling that, unlike earlier, Phil wasn't going to let her off the hook quite so easily.
"What is all that stuff?" he asked. He sounded like he was actually curious, not like it was an accusation, and the unexpected question was enough to catch Skye off guard and prod her into answering.
"Computer parts. And the lamp. I broke it, I'm sorry."
"It was kind of an ugly lamp anyway," Phil said with a wave of his hand. "I mean, don't tell Melinda I said that, because even though she secretly agrees with me, it was a Christmas gift from her mother a few years ago and she has to at least pretend to like it, but really, it won't be missed." He smiled reassuringly, but Skye didn't exactly feel comforted by the admission. "Where did all the parts come from?"
"Around," Skye shrugged again. "I was saving them up for a long time. From trash bins and broken stuff and things like that. I'm building –" Her voice snagged in her throat momentarily as she realized she needed to change her phrasing. "I was going to build a computer one day."
"Ah, so that's what you've been working on with that computer repair kit we got before school started," Phil grinned. "I'd been wondering about that." He didn't seem mad at all that Skye had been keeping her project a secret from him. "Can you show me how it all works?"
"None of it works anymore. I broke it all. But it wasn't working before that, anyway, so it doesn't really matter."
"At least show me what all the pieces were for," Phil suggested. He leaned over and plucked the cracked motherboard out of the pile on the floor. "What about this? What does this part do?"
"That was the motherboard. It's supposed to be like the computer's brain. It processes all the data. I pulled it out of the old computer that the nuns used at St. Agnes. They had to throw it away because one of the other kids found a lighter and got kind of carried away with seeing which things would melt or not. For the record," she said, allowing herself a small smile, "computer plastic does melt if you hold the flame there long enough. The stone basin with holy water in it at the chapel doesn't, but the little wafers you're supposed to eat at Communion burn up in a flash."
"While I admire the commitment to experimentation," Phil chuckled, "I'm guessing the nuns didn't quite see it that way."
"They're not big fans of people playing with fire, especially with the holy stuff," Skye said. "You have to take a bunch of special classes at the church before they even think about letting you near all the fancy candles."
"I can't say I blame them," smiled Phil. "I wouldn't want anybody burning down the things that were important to me."
"I guess not," Skye conceded. She looked down at the fractured piece of hardware in Phil's hands. "Having your stuff broken doesn't feel very good."
"No," Phil agreed. "It doesn't. Do you think you'll be able to fix it?"
"I don't know. Maybe. But probably not. It was already broken when I got it, and now it's just a hundred times worse because of what I did."
"Do you think you could talk to me about what happened? Why you wanted to break your project that you've been working so hard on?"
"I…" Skye faltered. Hot shame flashed up her face. "I didn't mean to. I know I'm not supposed to throw things. I just… I got so angry." Her voice cracked on the word, but she pushed the embarrassment aside and forced herself to keep going. Phil was being so nice, and she owed it to him to try and talk, as much as she didn't like what she had to say. "I was trying to work on my computer, because I was trying to calm down, but none of the pieces were working how I wanted them to, and it just made me feel… pointless. Everything in front of me was just a bunch of broken junk, and no matter how hard I worked on it, that wasn't going to change. It wasn't going to get better no matter how much I wanted it to. It was stupid for me to think I could ever put all the pieces together, and I don't like feeling stupid, so I got mad and…" She gestured towards the heap of shattered debris on the floor.
"It sounds like maybe you weren't really mad at the computer pieces as much as you were mad at something else," Phil suggested quietly. "Do you think that might be true?"
"Yes," Skye whispered. "I'm mad at myself. I'm mad at myself for being a bunch of junky pieces that don't work together. I'm mad at Mrs. Hinton and the school for telling me that there's something wrong with me. I'm… I'm mad at you and May for making me go." She hadn't meant to say that last part, but it slipped out before she could swallow it down. You were never supposed to tell a grownup you were mad with them, especially a foster parent. That almost never ended well. There was a long pause, as Phil thought carefully about what Skye had just said. When he finally spoke, his words caught Skye completely off guard.
"Skye, I'm really proud of you."
That was not the reaction she had been expecting. She swung her eyes off of the motherboard in Phil's hands and up to his face instead, searching for an explanation.
"I know it's not easy to talk about how you're feeling, but you just did a really great job of explaining yourself to me," he said. "For what it's worth, I don't think for a second that you're a bunch of junky pieces that don't work together. Also, I'm so very sorry that we made you do something you didn't want to do. Sometimes we don't have a lot of choice when it comes to certain obligations, but that doesn't mean that we couldn't have talked about it more. That's my fault, and I apologize."
"It's okay," Skye murmured. "I know you were only doing it because the school said we had to. I was just mad about a lot of things."
"Which you have every right to be," Phil told her. "You're allowed to be angry with the things that upset you, and it sounds like the meeting with Mrs. Hinton did that, whether that was the intention behind the meeting or not."
"I know you said that having dyslexia and ADHD doesn't make me broken," Skye said, an edge of desperation creeping into her voice, "and I want to believe you, but I just… I feel broken. I feel like I can't do anything right. Nothing I do or say or try ever turns out how I want it to, and I'm just… tired. I'm really tired of being wrong all the time. I'm tired of being a screwup. I'm tired of letting people down."
"Skye, you aren't a screwup, and you are not letting anyone down. Not me, not Melinda, not your friends or your teachers or Bobbi, and not Jemma. I know it can be really hard to feel like that's true, especially when things don't come as easily to you as you want them to, but I promise you it's the truth."
"I just wish things were easier. I wish I didn't have to fight so hard all the time just to be half as good as everyone else."
"Hey," Phil said seriously. He cupped a hand under Skye's chin and tilted her face up so she could see how much he meant what he was saying. His own face was shining with earnestness and something even deeper than that. He held it all in his eyes, guarded by the soft lines that marked the places where he smiled and laughed. There was something bottomless in the way he was looking at her, something strong and warm that made Skye want to wrap her arms around him and never let go. "You are just as good as everyone else, no matter how hard you try. In fact, if you ask me, I think you're better than most everybody else. I think you're exceptional, Skye. I think you're amazing, and nothing you ever do or don't do, no test you ever take, no grade you ever get, no invention you ever build… or scrap," he added, a playful twinkle in his gaze, "will ever take away from or change how amazing you are to me."
The urge that Skye had been fighting suddenly gave way, then, and she flung herself over towards Phil, squeezing him tight around the middle and burying her face in his shirt. Tears were leaking from the corners of her eyes, but for the first time in what felt like an eternity, they weren't tears of anger or frustration or pain. They weren't happy, exactly, there was something still heavy and melancholy tinging them, but they were filled with a comfort, a settling kind of understanding that made Skye feel seen. It was the kind of seeing she had only ever thought would come from Jemma. The kind of seeing that wasn't blind to her faults and shortcomings, but that still didn't want to look away. It wasn't the first time Phil had ever told her something like that, but it was the first time Skye felt like it wasn't all just empty air anymore.
They sat like that for a while, Skye holding onto Phil and crying softly into his button-down, Phil holding her back, stroking her hair with his free hand. Eventually, the tears stopped falling, and Skye pulled away slightly to grind the last remaining dregs of saltiness out from her eyes with a fist.
"You told me you wished things were easier," Phil murmured, his hand now resting on her shoulder. "I can't promise that things aren't still going to be hard sometimes, but I think that some of the things Mrs. Hinton suggested to us tonight might help with that. We don't have to decide anything tonight, but I want us – you, me, and Melinda – to at least think about it. To talk about it. I want things to be easier for you, too, Skye. I want to be able to help you. That's part of my job. Do you think we could at least do that? At least promise to have a conversation about it?"
Skye thought for a minute, then nodded, and Phil's face broke into one of his sunniest smiles. It was as if Skye had just given him the world, instead of the other way around.
Welcome back! It's been quite long, and I'm so sorry about that. Things have gotten really busy at work, which means my free time to sit and write is a little more limited, so it's been kind of slow going. Thanks for being so patient with me :) The third chapter of the burst isn't quite finished yet, but I thought you all might like to at least have the two that are finished, since I've made you wait so long! As always, I'm so grateful that you're here, and I would love to hear what you think!
Also, to the guest who's left so many wonderful reviews (since I can't respond to you directly via message!) - it was kind of a combination of both taking your suggestions and some planning! When I started writing this story (a long time ago haha) I wanted to include certain things in the girls that hinted at some of their potential diagnoses, and I tried to code them as best I could without going too much into stereotypes or things like that while still holding onto who they are as characters. For a long time I went back and forth on whether or not to leave those things as just coding/subtext, but reading your reviews/guesses about whether or not Jemma was autistic, Skye has ADHD, etc. (and Bobbi - we'll get to her!) gave me the push I needed to make those aspects of their characters more explicit in the text and include scenes that actually use the terms and start to move towards a formal diagnosis. So thank you for helping me to commit to moving the story in that direction! One of my biggest fears in taking this step with the characters is that I'm not going to do them the justice they deserve, or I'm going to misrepresent their neurodivergence/disability/etc., so if anyone has any feedback on how the girls are being portrayed, please let me know. I want this story to be as good as it can be, and I want the representation to be one that feels authentic while also honoring the characters for who they are. I've tried to root some things in my own experiences, or the experiences of people I'm close to (with permission, of course), plus I've done a fair amount of research, but I know there's always room for improvement!