The same but different:
A/N: I had this stuck in my head and so I thought I would see where it goes,of course I don't own the programme of characters.
Erin sat on the sofa,with the T.V on but she wasn't really listening,she was day dreaming,something she had always got in trouble for at school but it wasn't her fault ,she was dreaming,dreaming of getting as far away from Chicago as she of having a new name and a new life thinking about all the adventures she could have, but in reality was she was stuck,stuck in Chicago and stuck with her mom,her brother and whatever boyfriend her mom had at that particular time.
"Miss Lindsay eyes at the front and pay attention." Mrs Brown would say when she was not paying attention to the explanation of the homework they had.
Or
"Erin if you don't pay attention you can spend the evening staring at the wall in detention." Mr Larkfield would say when she was meant to be watching him explaining how to solve the algebraic equation on the board.
Erin had never seen the point in school or paying attention to it,she was only really there to stop her mom from being fined,what was the point of her going to school if she was just going to turn out like her mom.
Erin spent a lot of time in detention but she didn't mind. In fact she tried as much as she could to spend as little time as possible at home,so when she wasn't in school or in detention she was in the library or at the shopping mall.
Erin would get home after detention to find the house empty and quiet ,sometimes Teddy would be in his room or other times he would be out with friends until the early hours of the would go into the fridge and reheat some pizza in the microwave or boil the kettle to cook some ramen. But Erin liked it when the house was quiet, it was worse when her mom came home drunk or high,or when she would stand in the kitchen shouting at her boyfriend. She tried to avoid her mom as much as possible,she liked to be invisible if she made her presence known she would risk having bottles thrown at her head.
Like Erin, Nadia daydreamed but unlike Erin she saw the lessons as opportunities to write herself a story and re write her life in math class she imagined herself as a maths genius solving an equation that would revolutionize the world and everyone would know who she in English class she imagined what it would have been like to be Scout Finch or to be her music class she imagined that she was at Julliard playing in front of a crowd who had payed to come and see her parents had never come to see anything she was in,they hadn't even ever been to a parent teacher conference and from the age of seven she had walked herself and her siblings to school.
"You're a big girl now Nadia,you're not a baby stop crying ." her dad would say as she cried because she didn't want to walk to school in the cold.
Unlike Erin,Nadia tried to be home as much as possible to protect her mom and siblings from her dad when she was little,if he was shouting at her,or if she suggested that he go to a bar with his friends she could stop him from lashing out at her mum,but it did mean that she would often receive the full force of his anger. She was ten and Lucas and Alexi were seven and four when her mother left,she packed her bags and left and never came back and Nadia never heard from her again.
When Nadia's siblings weren't hungry and couldn't eat all their dinner,it would sent their dad into a fit of anger.
"You will stay at the table until you eat the food you've been given,don't you leave the table until you've eaten it all." he spat.
Lucas and Alexi were younger than Nadia and she wanted to protect them,the would sit at the table trying to finish their would end up eating what they couldn't eat as well and sometimes,when her dad was feeling particularly cruel he would cook way too much food and still force them to eat it would finish all three meals to the point where she was so full she would be sick .If the Lucas and Alexi made too much noise their dad would make them sit outside in the cold until they learnt to behave.
Nadia was thirteen when she started to hang out with the older kids from her school at the park or the mall,they would smoke weed together and get drunk. She was fourteen when she got home and found her eviction notice on the door of her house and her dad and Alexi were sitting on the front packed their bags and took them the police station and told them go told them she would come and get them later,but of course she never broke her heart but they were better off without her,no one wanted to foster a fourteen year old who dropped out of school and ended up crashing in a squatters den.
They had both led similar lives but Erin had been saved and Nadia had been lost.
"Mommy,mommy." Erin was shaken out of her day dream.
"Can we watch a movie and eat popcorn?"the girl asked.
Erin smiled at the little girl.
"Of course we can."
The little girl giggled with excitement and snuggled into Erin's lap.
Erin smiled as she stroked her daughter's hair,she had so much love for the little girl more than she thought was humanly possible and she was glad that even for a brief time she had been able to share some of it with Nadia.
A/N: Thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed, if you want to read more about Erin's past i've written another story called Home is where the Hurt is.