ONE
There was a time when Leah would have run up to him and flung her arms around him the moment he walked up to the front door, usually before he’d even had a chance to knock. When she would have almost knocked him over with her hug and then pulled him into the house of whatever foster home she was staying at those days.
Some of them had been nice, others had been less so, but there had been a lot of them. And in each one that Leah was shuffled through, she changed a little, withdrew a little bit more into herself.
Aaron gazed into his younger sister’s eyes, and his heart ached. She had been such a cheerful, normal teenaged girl, but now, he barely recognized the sullen, defiant sixteen-year-old who stared back at him. She might have the same cornflower blue eyes as always, and the same features, but those features were pulled into a scowl most of the time, at least when she was around him.
“Leah, you know the house rules,” Julie was the one who ran the group home, and she was tough as nails, a no-nonsense type. But then, by the time a child got to this particular group home, it was because everyone else had given up on them. This was a place where Aaron knew that they put kids in to keep them as safe as possible until they aged out of care.
“Yeah, whatever,” Leah said, with a dismissive roll of her eyes, tossing her long auburn hair back over her slender shoulders. Too slender. She wasn’t eating enough, Aaron would bet on it. “I just stayed out for one night, Julie. It’s not the end of the world. People do it all the time.”
“When they’re sixteen?” Aaron broke in, and Leah turned to glare at him, but the look was different from when she did it to Julie. From Julie, she seemed to expect that sort of thing, but when she gazed at Aaron, there was hurt in her eyes, a disbelief that her big brother, who had once been someone that she idolized, would take the side of her enemy.
“You haven’t done any of the required things,” Julie continued, seemingly not even noticing the tense exchange between the siblings. “Your room is a mess, and you haven’t been keeping up with your chores, or the program work.” Leah was in a program, as were all the kids who were in this group home, and she wouldn’t be able to leave this house until she had finished the work. “Not to mention, your school called again. They say you haven’t been to class in a week and a half.”
Leah shrugged but didn’t even bother denying it. And that broke Aaron’s heart, made him feel like it was shredding into jagged little pieces in his chest because there had been a time when Leah had loved school. She’d always been bright and brought home good grades, even better than Aaron himself had in high school.
But she was now in danger of flunking right out of her sophomore year of high school, and she didn’t even care. She didn’t seem to care about much of anything, and Aaron sighed and dropped his gaze, looking at the floor, covered in worn, faded blue carpet. It was at least clean. There had been other places which Leah had been through that weren’t.
His sister was suffering, and it was his fault. At least partially. It was a guilty burden that he knew that he would carry for the rest of his life, even if he did get her back with him. But he’d been trying to do that for years now, literally years.
“Am I dismissed?” Leah snapped to mocking attention like the world’s most surly soldier, snapping a sharp salute toward Julie and clicking her heels together sharply. It was so intensely rude, and Aaron sighed as he looked into her eyes, which were so remote.
That was probably his fault, too.
“Yes. Go do your homework,” Julie directed, and Leah turned on her heel so that her wavy reddish hair spun out around her, then stalked off out of the room that Julie used as her office.
“Aaron, you’re her only family, correct?” Julie asked, as though she didn’t know already. She had the details of every kid that she had in her house memorized. Hell, it wouldn’t surprise Aaron to know that she remembered every kid she’d ever had, every tragedy, every story that had gone so horribly wrong.
“Yes.” Aaron dropped down into a chair, and it was a relief to surrender to it, to just let gravity pull on his body. It was always so exhausting to come here, which was probably part of why he didn’t come as often as he used to. “Our parents were both only children.”
Julie nodded briskly, and she was stern and no-nonsense, but there was also compassion in her eyes. She cared, even if Leah couldn’t see it. But then, Leah was so wrapped up in her own pain she couldn’t see much of anything else.
“And your parents were in an accident two and a half years ago, correct?” Julie prompted, but Aaron didn’t take the bait. He just nodded briefly, not interested in being drawn into a conversation about this.
For a long moment, a tense silence stretched between them, and then Julie sighed and looked down at the mounds of paper which covered her desk. Aaron literally had no idea what color the desk itself was, it was so utterly burdened with papers, and all of those papers, Aaron knew, represented a child who needed help.
“Aaron, I’m going to level with you. Leah doesn’t belong here.” Julie steepled her fingers, peering at him over them. “She has a chance to get out of an unfortunate situation. She’s bright, and charming, and clever. And more than that, she has you.”
Aaron snorted softly. Yes, she had him, and always would, but she didn’t seem to want that. More and more, she was pulling away, and Aaron knew it even as he felt utterly powerless to stop it. It was like he was caught in a current, being swept far out to sea, watching his little sister standing on the shore but powerless to get to her.
“You’re the ace up her sleeve, Aaron,” Julie continued, undeterred by his snort. Undoubtedly, she’d learned to take worse, she couldn’t be anything but tough to have the job that she did. “Help her. Get her out of here.”
“I’m trying, but …” Aaron started, but Julie held up her hand, indicating that she wasn’t quite done yet.
“She just has to finish the program. The State of California requires that before she can be placed somewhere else. So help her. Encourage her to do it. I can only do so much.”
How frustrating it must be to have her job. To know that these kids hated her for doing what she needed to do and that they would never trust her, not really, because she had been pretty much put into the role of their jailer. This was a strong woman, passionate about her work, and it would always go unappreciated.
Well, not by him, he could at least give her that much. So he nodded and rose to his feet without further comment. What else was there for him to say, for either of them to say? They both wanted the same things, to keep Leah safe and healthy and to get her out of this place, which they both knew was usually just a step along the path toward jail, at least for a lot of kids.
Neither of them wanted Leah to be one of those kids, and Aaron nodded slightly to Julie as he left. This woman was on his side, on Leah’s side, if she would only see it.
Rubbing at his temples, his eyes, Aaron headed for where he knew that Leah would be. Like many teenagers before her, she had gotten in trouble and then stomped off to her room. As he got closer, he heard the loud heavy metal music, blaring loud enough that it was probably in danger of causing hearing loss.
Aaron raised his hand and knocked, but she didn’t answer. Maybe she couldn’t even hear him, with how loud her music was. The wooden door was actually trembling with the force of it, and he gently pushed it open and walked inside.
She had her phone plugged into a set of speakers, which she had pumped up to the max. Silently, Aaron turned it down to a more reasonable level, where they had a chance of actually being able to hear each other.
