Jade had never really liked her house. It had always been that to her - a house, not a home. She knew she was lucky, of course; it wasn't a five-storey, multi-million dollar piece of architecture, or an open-plan setup like Tori's, but it was a four-bed house in LA, regardless of the actual suburb it was based in, so she could never complain about the actual brick and mortar in which she lived. However, there was a reason that she'd spent most of the past two years holed up in a tin can, and it was that being at home either meant spending time with a family that hated her, or being surrounded by reminders that she lived with a family that hated her. So to be cooped up in the room that she was given only because she was stupid enough to get pregnant at 15, in the middle of the day when she could've instead been at the school she enjoyed, was a real sign that her life had made a sharp turn in the past few weeks and months.
Unfortunately, the reality of life had begun to hit her, in a way that she'd try to push out of her mind when she'd made that life-altering decision over a year prior. Looking after Toby for almost every hour that she wasn't in school meant no time for the work she was set outside school hours, in addition to a lack of time to earn money for herself. Sure, at present, Beck was earning a wage, and her mom was taking care of daycare, but that didn't stop Jade waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, awoken from dreams of her eighteenth birthday, cast out on the street with no home, no scholarship and no savings with which she could pay for the costs of two lives.
On days where she entertained reality in its entire, ugly glory, she would add 'no college fund' to that list. Of course, nobody really expected her to consider that these days. She was easily intelligent enough, but the raised eyebrows and swallowed words each time she happened to mention the prospect had her keeping the dream well and truly back in the pipeline. It's not like she could afford it on her own, anyway. She wasn't sure at what point any money in her name had ceased to exist, but she tried not to imagine that it was from birth. It hurt less to believe that her mother had given up on her when there was a reason.
She'd tried to wait out lunch for as long as possible, knowing that whatever she could consume would be depressingly pitiful. Begrudgingly, she'd taken a few cans of soup and some bread, fruit and graham crackers from Beck's last time she'd been there, refusing to touch the more expensive-looking items which had onviously been bought for her benefit. She didn't need Beck's pity. Unfortunately, she'd also had to avoid the milk, cheese and yoghurts which would have greatly improved her dry, protein-less diet; anything she would have to store in her family's kitchen would be taken, and there was no chance she would be able to claim it as her own without being accused of thievery.
At two pm, the swansong of her stomach had become too difficult to ignore, so she picked up a banana and two slices of stale bread from her dwindling stash of Beck's food, and tried to ignore the dark spots in her vision as she walked down the stairs.
Jade wasn't healthy, she knew that. She felt constantly nauseous and faint, and if it hadn't been for the weight dropping off her by the day, or the fact that she hadn't had sex in weeks, she might've been inclined to take a pregnancy test. Her period hadn't come, naturally, given that her body was currently just about the least hospitable environment a baby could hope to have.
Her hands dusted over the walls of the house in an attempt to keep herself steady, although she would vehemently deny this if questioned. This is how she had always walked - with an air of wonder and intrigue. She almost laughed aloud at the utter falsity of this statement. To have an air of wonder and intrigue, you had to care about existing.
The kitchen felt dull and grey, despite the outside light streaming through the uncurtained windows. On the table lay evidence of a suburban family morning - two empty coffee cups, Amber's half-eaten toast, and Luke's empty cereal bowl. Jade's breakfast had been a bottle of water and a graham cracker.
Now, her task was to build on such a nutritious start to the day with whatever she could surreptitiously pilfer from the refrigerator. If David caught wind of her taking anything from this communal resource, she would be due a likely public dressing-down that would only use up more time that she didn't have.
This meant that any meat, fish, dairy, and most vegetables were off-limits. Essentially anything actually worth consuming. Left for her was the drawer of vegetables which were trickling towards their best-before date, and any peculiar-looking jar pushed out of sight, behind Luke's cheese strings.
With a sigh, Jade took out a hunk of lettuce which was, thankfully, still green. With this, she could have a salad of wilting lettuce and stale 'croutons', with a dessert of a single banana. Delicious.
She had a little subdued hope that there might be some forgotten old thing in the cupboards - some out-of-date cookies, or cereal that hadn't quite yet turned to mould. However, after a few minutes of fruitless searching, all she had found was dry goods, and an unopened packet of Oreo's which she didn't dare touch.
Then she froze.
Loud clattering sounds alerted her that there was a key in the door, and therefore someone about to enter. The best case scenario was that it was Amber, although more often than not she hung out with friends after college, traipsing in to eat in the early evening. Luke would obviously still be at school, whilst her mother and David should, in theory, both be at work. However, one was much more likely to have come home early than the other.
Jade looked around for an escape. She had only a matter of seconds before the person would enter and hear her moving around. She wouldn't reach the stairs. There was the garden of course - if the door was unlocked she might just be able to...
She hurried to the door and yanked at the handle, hearing the key turn behind her. One door unlocked whilst the other crunched with a dramatic sense of unyielding. Jade deflated and turned around as the front door swung open. There was no escape now. She sullenly headed back to her pathetic plate and resumed her task.
"What the hell are you doing here?"
Jade lifted her eyes to see her stepdad leering from the doorway. His lip was curled up, almost twitching. Jade wasn't sure that the anger peeling off him in waves was appropriately matched to the situation.
"Making lunch." She said, ripping apart the iceberg lettuce in her hands.
"It's two o'clock, why aren't you at school?"
"I had a free period."
"Bullshit. You're skipping class." David snarled, diverting his anger towards the coat which he was hastily pulling off.
Jade merely sighed in response. A lie would appear crystal to David, seen right through to the reality which he had already guessed. Anyway, even if it was the truth, he'd never believe her. David always made decisions about who Jade was as a person and stuck to them determinedly.
"I don't know what the hell you think you're playing at, but if you're still here in five minutes then you can say goodbye to that daycare. Why the hell should we be paying for someone else to look after your spawn just for you to truant all day instead of getting an education?"
Spawn. Jade despised him.
"I'm here because I'm trying to get an education." Jade argued, biting her tongue to prevent herself from also pointing out that David didn't pay a single cent towards Toby's daycare. "I can't catch up on homework in class."
David laughed violently. "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. And the cheek of you to think I'd believe that." He spat, shaking his head. "I tell Katherine every single day that you have no manners and no clue about the real world, but I guess I'll have to add no brain to that list."
Jade just shook her head and turned away from him. She could feel her hands shaking as she mixed the measly salad before her. Just seeing David's face made her blood boil.
"And look at that." David continued, unfazed by his stepdaughter's disinterest. "Not only are you skipping classes to stay home in the room we allow you to live in rent-free, but you're also eating the food that we buy for ourselves. And what are you doing with the lunch money I pay for then, huh? I bet if I went up to your room right now, I could find five different types of drugs within five minutes."
Jade could bet against that, not only because it wasn't true, but also because she knew that David routinely scanned her room while she was at school for anything valuable, illegal or embarrassing. The constant displacement of items and scratch marks below her furniture had opened her eyes to this years ago, and it was largely why for so long the vast majority of her belongings had been jumbled up in Beck's RV. Now, her precious few trinkets (the most prized being the matching necklace she shared with Beck that she still couldn't bear to give up) lay underneath the mattress of Toby's changing table. She knew that no matter his desperation or sadistic desire, David wouldn't step foot near that. She wasn't even sure he liked kids full stop, but she was sure as hell that he hated hers.
As for the lunch money, she didn't see much point in mentioning that she hadn't been given any since she'd fallen pregnant.
"You want to act older than you are, then you can pay for your own meals too!"
She was sure that David knew this, but he would use anything to feed his own agenda.
"Turn around and look at me when I'm talking to you, for god's sake!" David yelled, and the plate before Jade rattled. She remained unmoved.
Her eyes still firmly fixed on her lunch, Jade felt David before she saw him. The tiled floor boomed under his forceful walk, and she almost braced for impact as the bigger man grabbed her arm and swung her round to face him.
It might've been funny, if she hadn't been so angry, how his nostrils flared and his eyes flickered. He looked like a resentful reject of the dragon society. Jade thought he was utterly pathetic.
"You will listen to me when I'm talking to you, you pathetic little girl! I've put up with you for twelve years and I am sick and tired of it! The only thing keeping you in this house is the law, do you know that? I'm calling your mother; we'll see what she has to say about this." Spit pooled in the corners of his mouth as he leered over her, before marching off into the hallway to make the call. Jade's arm recoiled as it was released, and she wiped it with her other hand as if to rid it of his touch as she sat down to eat. She might as well enjoy her wilted leaves if she was about to become barred from them as well.
From the hallway, she could hear David's raised voice as he relayed the situation to Jade's mom. She wished she could say that she resented David for having turned her mother against her, but the truth was that the two women had never got along. Jade knew she had been an accident which had derailed much of Katherine's life and, whilst the older woman was not so harsh as to explicitly state this, she made no real effort to stop Jade from deciding it for herself.
"I know, and this time it's not just the classes - she's not even in the building, it's ridiculous!"
Jade simply rolled her eyes. As if enacting her homework-job search juggle whilst physically under the Hollywood Arts roof was any different.
She'd been warned for missing classes many times over the years, although that had decreased significantly once she'd secured a place at Hollywood Arts, where she was actually learning skills she felt she would use in later life. She was easily smart enough to understand algebra, but she was so often kicked out of class for complaining that it held no use for her future as an actress that she simply stopped turning up.
Beck, on the other hand, had never skipped a class before he met her, as the 100% attendance certificates lining his parents' walls celebrated. She supposed that that was just another of his parents' qualms with her; that that perfect record fell once he found a troubled girl who sometimes needed chasing out of class and calming down. She guessed she couldn't blame them for being irked by that. Not that it mattered now, of course.
Out of eyesight, David was turning a rather unattractive shade of purple as he defamed his least favourite person. Jade had been the bane of his life for the past twelve years and he cursed the law for hanging its laws on neglecting minors over his head. If sixteen was old enough to procreate then it was sure as held old enough to provide its own roof. The girl was a spiteful leech; an anger-crazed, insolent bitch, and his greatest dream was that one day his wife would wake up and see that she was never going to grow out of this and put her foot down, once and for all. Katherine was frustrated with her daughter, of course, but, just like always, never enough. In this situation, she snapped, but didn't scream, down the phone, not simply because her daycare money was seemingly being wasted, but also because if even that couldn't be used to keep Jade in line, then what could?
"If she doesn't even seem to care about her son any more then she's a lost cause." Katherine sighed. "Just send her back to school for now. We can work out what to do later."
If David had his way then Jade would be sent to somewhere much harsher than school, but in an attempt not to disrespect his wife's wishes, he opted instead to scream at Jade to immediately vacate the house.
"Me and your mother will deal with you later but for now, I want you out of this house in the next 30 seconds or I'm calling the police to report you for truancy."
Jade raised her eyebrows, both at the poor grammar of the sentence, but also at the idea that he would want the police poking around asking questions about her home life. Nevertheless, she knew David well enough to know that his threats were never empty, even if exactly what he threatened didn't materialise, so she peeled off her stool and away from her leaves.
"And what? You're just going to leave that there for me to clean up?" David spat, pointing at the pathetic excuse for a lunch still on the counter.
"I didn't think I'd have time to pack it up in 30 seconds." Jade snarked back.
Like a cartoon dragon, David seemed to seethe out of his nostrils, pushing past Jade to grab the plate before stalking over to the other side of the room and dumping its contents into the trash.
"Cut the smart talk and get out."
Jade was more than happy to oblige.
The problem, as she was finding so often lately, was that she had nowhere to which she could escape. Beck's RV had once been her go-to, with her ex-boyfriend often finding her there when he returned from outings, or waking up to her letting herself in when he'd barely popped his head out of the bedsheets.
Obviously, that was now out of the question.
Instead, therefore, she opted for her other recently-neglected love, coffee. Jade's finances left much to be desired and she wasn't too stupid to realise that the meagre savings she had left should be spent on sustenance, but just as her stomach lurched, her head simultaneously pounded with caffeine withdrawals. Despite having little disposable income, she hadn't yet been forced to give up her coffee addiction, because Beck had always insisted on bringing her a cup to school, along with his own.
And then they broke up.
Jade wasn't sure she'd ever felt such a combination of simultaneous discomforts in her life, and she'd been pregnant for god's sake. It was hard to focus on her physical pains when the circumstances of her life were so dire, but it was equally difficult to focus on her headpace when her limbs and organs were simultaneously crying out in some sort of ugly choir. And right now all the could concentrate on was her need to inhale some caffeine before she fell asleep where she stood.
Ignoring the instinctive looks up from other customers at the tinkle of the bell, Jade marched up to the counter and placed her order.
Black. Two sugars.
Ostensibly dark, but sweet if you gave it a chance.
How poetic. How pathetic.
She caught the barista's eye as she passed over the cash, all coins retrieved from the depths of her pockets. She couldn't have been that much older than Amber, the girl, a pretty blonde that had been working there for a couple of years. It was this fact that triggered a twinge of guilt in Jade, realising in that moment that she didn't even know the girl's name.
The blonde gave Jade a brief glance as she took the change, and, for a moment, there was a glint of sadness reflected in her green eyes. Not pity, to which Jade had become so accustomed, but genuine empathy for what Jade had become.
Jade was sure that the girl must have seen the whole story pan out - from her first official date with Beck, at the table by the window; to her decaf orders accompanied by an unmissable bump; to now, whatever that looked like.
After a moment's pause, the girl opened up her till, but instead of filling it with Jade's money, she passed back exactly the same coins she had been given.
Jade opened her mouth in confusion, ready to argue, but seeing the girl's serious but genuine expression made her rethink. She wanted to fight back, slam the coins on the counter and insist that she didn't need anyone's charity.
But was it so bad to want it?
Instead of the ferocious response that would once have been in her character, Jade simply shot the unnamed barista a weak but genuine smile, and headed to the corner of the shop to wait for her order.
