Page 19 of Breaking Rules
“I don’t, actually.” Keli squeezed Evanne’s hand. “I already took my things to a hotel before I came here, so I’m free to spend as much time with you as you want.”
Wonderful.
Eleven
Lumen
After our littlephone sex session, I thought I’d hear from Alec on a little more regular basis. Instead, I hadn’t even gotten a text since that night, and it was now Friday evening. And no, I hadn’t only been waiting for him to reach out first. When I hadn’t heard from him by Wednesday afternoon, I’d texted him something I’d hoped was flirty, but now worried had sounded immature and flighty.
Hope you slept well last night. I know I did. Enjoy your time with your family, and tell Evanne I said hello.
I hadn’t let my disappointment in the lack of contact take over my week, though. With an unexpected amount of extra time, I decided to do something good with it. For me, that meant spending the week at the group home, doing things with the kids, and trying to get through to Soleil.
Unfortunately, she’d maintained the same silence as she had when I’d taken her home on Monday. She still hadn’t told me why she’d called me or why she’d come to the school. Knowing what I did now about her past, it would take a while to get through to her. Some of the other kids had their own walls up, but none of them had come to me the way Soleil had tried to, and I was determined not to make her regret it.
“Come see!” Diana Whitmore was thirteen and full of more energy than I could ever hope to have. “You can’t leave until you see this!”
I let her drag me to the far side of the room. Mai had asked me to come to dinner with her family, and it was getting late, but I had enough time to see one last thing.
“What do you have for me, Sylvia?”
She giggled like she did every time I called her that. When I’d first found out this bouncy, happy child was obsessed with Sylvia Plath, I’d been surprised, but the more time I spent with her, the more I saw that the energy she expended was to keep at bay the darkness she held inside her. I didn’t know what that darkness was about, but I hoped that she knew she could come to me if she ever wanted to talk about it.
“Look!” She pointed at a piece of paper hanging on the bulletin board. “We had to write a poem for school, and I got an A!”
“That’s great!” I gave her a hug. “I’m proud of you.”
“Thank you.” She beamed from ear to ear, bouncing on her toes. “My teacher said if I want to, I can turn it in for our school magazine.”
“Good for you!” I might not have felt the same connection to Diana that I did to Soleil, but I would always support the positive things in these kids’ lives.
“Thanks!”
After a few more seconds, something else caught her attention, and she bounced away. I gave a quick look around to see if Soleil was still hiding in the corner, but she’d disappeared. Brie probably knew where she was, but I wasn’t going to go looking for her. It was a fine line to walk, letting a kid like her know I was there for her, but not being too pushy.
I caught Brie’s attention and gestured toward the door. She nodded and smiled, then turned back to Kaitlyn and Kevin Parsons. From the somber expression on all three faces, I wondered if they were discussing Kaitlyn aging out of the system next year and how she hoped to be able to take custody of Kevin at that time. He was a little over a year younger than her, so even if she couldn’t get custody of him, he wouldn’t be in the system too long without her, but Brie was worried that any time apart would be difficult for the two of them.
There had been times growing up where I’d thought it would have been nice to have had a sibling, but as I’d gotten older and realized how often siblings were split up in foster care, I’d become grateful to be an only child.
It wasn’t until after I’d left the system that I’d found something like a family, and it was them I was on my way to see.
The bus was running late, which meant Mai was pacing by the time I let myself into the apartment. She pointed at me, glaring, and I held up both hands.
“Hey, I can’t control the bus system.”
“Right. Sure.” Mai sighed. “But you get to explain that to my mom.”
“Until I have a car, there’s really not much of anything I can do about how prompt I am,” I reminded her as I headed to my room. “Or how prompt I’m not, I guess.”
“You know that, and I know that, and I’m pretty sure my momknowsthat. Whether she’ll accept that as a reason for us being late to dinner is another story.”
“I’ll explain it to her,” I offered. “We both know that she likes me better.”
Mai laughed. Lihua’s preference for me over her daughter was something we’d been joking about since I’d answered Mai’s ad for a roommate three years ago. She’d taken me home for a family dinner two days after I’d moved in, and it’d been there I’d met Mai’s mother and siblings. Bao, Chang, Yun, Xue, Jie, and Ru, all of them immediately treating me like one of the family. I was another little sister to tease and protect, and it wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced before.
She and I couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds if we’d tried, but every member of her family treated me as if I’d always been there with them. Working at the family massage parlor while getting my masters’ degree in education had only solidified it. I still struggled to accept it at times, but I was getting better at it.
Fortunately for me, dressing for family dinner was easy. Dress pants and a casual long-sleeved blouse paired with sensible shoes. Unlike my roommate, I never needed to worry about whether or not an outfit was too revealing to be appropriate. It just wasn’t my style. Lihua tended to be old-fashioned when it came to how her children dressed and behaved. To say that Mai didn’t always meet those standards would be an understatement. Mai often flat-out defied them. Or she did something like tell her mom that she’d found a Chinese doctor to date but neglect to mention that Armani Hobson was only partially Chinese and mostly a mix of Haitian and Caucasian, just to see her mom’s reaction the first time Hob came to dinner.