Little Wonders (chapters 2&3 posted, chapter 1 re-writte

This is something I started without any plot in mind, and everything started to come together. This is the story of Jenna Philips, an awkward extrovert who lives under her mother's opressive roof. Stolen away in the middle of the night by the McCarthy family, the only people in Black Creek to show Jenna any sort of kindess, they take her to their house on the lake, far, far away from Black Creek.

At this place, Jenna learns about the small hours and the littles wonders of life.
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Chapter 1: Jenna Philips

It would be kind of sad to be busted stealing a five dollar journal from a Borders and be locked up with people who steal guns or five thousand dollars in a bank holdup only to be hit in the face with a dye-pack fifteen seconds later. A few months ago, I would have still been a minor and they couldn’t have done anything to me. Sucks being an adult sometimes.

1: Steal a book. Check.

That was it, everything on the list. I was barely eighteen, and I had completed an entire list of things to do before I died. Sighing, I looked up at the clouds passing by and thought how stupid Jenna had been to make such a short list. Well, I thought, catching myself, it isn’t short. Just short enough to do in a few months if you have the attention span.
I was proud of myself, in a weird way. I stole a book, and I was proud.
Jenna Philips had made me strange.

In Black Creek, two weeks should have been long enough to know everyone’s name, get in their business, and know about every last notable family’s history and their dark secrets. In two weeks, Jenna Philips hadn’t talked to a single person of the less than three hundred person town, let alone any of the forty kids she’d be in class with.

Most of the guys thought she was a boy, too, because we’d only ever seen her from the back. Her bright orange-red hair was cropped and razored short, just above the nape of her neck and spiked, longer around her ears and shorter in back. Unlike most girls in Black Creek, who didn’t even own a pair of jeans, Jenna wore one pair of overalls that were stained with five year old paint, mud, and blood everyday over some old, ripped band t-shirt that she had probably stolen from her dad’s closet.

The first time anyone had seen her with the top of her overalls down, the clasps undone, and hanging around her waist, we were finally able to see that she was, indeed, female. That day she wore a slightly tighter shirt and her hair was pulled behind her ears.

Two weeks after she moved there, she walked into the high school, a freshman just like the rest of us; awkward, and stripped of all seniority we’d thought we’d held in our last year of middle school. That ‘seniority’ was nothing more than a fragile illusion, easily taken away by smirking high schoolers, even ones who had been freshmen just the year before. It didn’t matter. We were new meat.

Bands kids, the ones who had marched in the middle school with the high schoolers, or the ones who had been ‘managers’ (pack mules) for the band, were greeted with open arms and squealing friends. Cheerleaders and jocks found their niche quickly with the rest of the muscle-bound idiots and mini-skirt wearing girls doomed to a life of whore-dom.
I used to think that cliques, to the group that I ran around with, didn’t matter. In our little middle school world, there was no such thing as being accepted into something so private and secret as a clique. But apparently, the high school doors changed the old geeky, nerdy girls into tight-shirt wearing little dog having idiots and made everything all about being in a group apart from the one you used to be in.

I, apparently, was immune to the high school doors.

Jenna Philips was too, it seemed, when I saw her sitting with a heavy black hoodie over a tunic she looked embarrassed to wear. The hoodie went about mid thigh, leaving only a little more of the tunic showing, but she couldn’t do much about the white leggings or wedge heels that made my own feet hurt just looking at them.

Another thing was, she was soaking wet.

“Hey,” I called, waving and looking probably a bit too eager. Something about how quiet she was intrigued me; most new girls threw themselves at people just to meet them. She had, in no way, made any sort of attempt to meet anyone.

She turned her face up from her bag, which she’d been rummaging through furiously. “I hope you’re not going to throw a water balloon at me, too, are you?” she mumbled, dragging out a pair of black shoes without laces, tossed off the heels, and slipped them on.

“Water balloon?”

Rolling her eyes, she brushed her hand through her hair, small, sparkly droplets of water ran out, and grabbed my hand. “See? Some butt head threw a water balloon at me when I was walking out of my house. I would have gone back in, but I already had all my clothes with me. See?” She pulled her bag up, and inside was her paint spattered overalls. Somehow, she had fit those heels in between the overalls and an Algebra I book.

She stood up, pulling the overalls out of her bag and taking the hoodie off, and slipped the overalls on over her tunic and leggings. The hoodie went back on directly afterward. It was like she’d forgotten I was there when she looked up, almost terrified, and bit her lower lip. “Hey…don’t tell my mom I changed back into these, okay?”

I shrugged and just stared at her, bewildered. She was genuinely terrified that her mom would find out she’d changed back into her old clothes. “I just met you, and I don’t even know your mom or where you live,” I reassured her. Rolling my eyes, I slipped my thumb and forefinger across my lips. “Don’t worry about me. Lips are sealed tight.”

“You’re not funny,” she said, a hint of a laugh hanging under her words. Quickly, she held out her hand to me, her wrist littered with chunky plastic bracelets that looked like they were taken from some 80’s hooker. “I’m Jenna Philips.”

Blushing, I put out my own hand and shook hers, saying, “I’m Wilbur McCarthy.”

She snorted, trying to cover up a laugh. “You’re kidding. Wilbur? Like the pig?”

Sighing, I nodded and took my hand back. “Yeah, like the pig.”

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Jenna never changed from the girl who snuck her old dirty clothes into school under her mom’s nose. The only thing that did change was her hair. Once she got bored with her pixie hair, she let it grow out but kept razoring it. In our Junior year, she dyed the under part of her hair a deep, scarlet red for a two-tone look. Her mom wasn’t happy. Also, she used to have all her teeth.

In our Sophomore year, she got into a fight because Lizzie Fleet wouldn’t stop spreading a rumor that Jenna was lesbian. After school one day, Jenna beat the snot out of her, off school grounds, and she lost a front tooth. Now she can’t say anything staring with an S without whistling.

In our Senior year of high school, closing in on graduation all too soon, I found her in a tree, straddling a branch probably about as big as she was.

“Jenna? What are you doing?” I called, laughing and staring up at the two-tone red hair that stood out from the bright green leaves. She looked down, leaning to the side. The look on her face told me she wasn’t completely sure as to what she was doing.

Grabbing the trunk, Jenna pulled herself up and stared down at me, making sure I was in sight no matter where she stood. “I am…hiding from my mother…” she called back, holding tighter on to the tree. In her hurry, she had apparently forgotten her fear of heights.

“Jenna? You okay?” I cupped my hands around my mouth and called, making sure I was still able to see her. There no way I could lose the color of her hair in the greenery.

She looked around herself, scanning the branch she’d been hanging on and then at the trunk. “Uh… Wilbur? Can you come up and get me?” She called back, her voice quivering as she spoke and looked around at the ground.

Sighing, I threw off my backpack, slipped on a pair of gloves, and grabbed the trunk. It took about an hour all together to climb up there, convince her to stop hanging onto the tree, and then get her back on solid ground. She walked around the other side of the tree and got her bag, which looked like everything else she owned; old and covered in ten year old paint.
“Thanks,” she mumbled, shrugging the bag onto her shoulders. “Mom was in one of her moods again, wanted to put a dress on me… You know how it goes.”

I shrugged and rolled my eyes. “I don’t really know, but I’ll take your word for it and go ahead and say sucks for you,” I replied, staring upward as we walked the long, dusty sidewalk. We were walking in the way of her house, and I knew that any minute she would throw herself on the opposite side of me and do her best to hide.

Ten minutes after we started walking, she crouched down, low, and did her best to hide. I knew how she was, and I knew how much she hated being found by her mom. We walked fast past the yellow paneled house with blue shutters. On the outside, it was a pretty little house where in white-fence suburban reality a nice, apron wearing mom would be with her nice, loving husband, genius cheerleader captain daughter, and quarterback hunk of a son lived.

In reality, Julie Philips didn’t even own an apron, she had divorced her dead beat, poor excuse of a husband after Jenna was born, and Jenna was barely scraping a 3.0 GPA.

“You could have gone on to my house, you know,” I said once we got out of sight of her house. She sighed, tugging at the clasp of her overalls and picking at a piece of loose paint.

“If I went the other way, Mom would have known where I went,” she explained. “But if I ran the other way, she would have thought I’d go to Dad’s place. I got to keep her guessing or this mother-daughter relationship will not work. But if you’d been here, I wouldn’t have had to try to divert my mother, Wilbur…”

I rubbed the back of my neck. “It was my day to clean the classroom.”

She rolled her eyes and put her arms out at her sides. “That’s a good way of saying you got detention, bucko.”

I smirked, and smacked her on the side of the head with the back of my hand. She had never once stopped being the Jenna I’d met, changing into smuggled clothes, in the middle of the high school hallway. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

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My mom was waiting in the doorway when me and Jenna walked up, grocery bags in hand from a quick trip around the block. Jenna never wanted to go the straight, narrow way. If there was a winding, curving way, a way that rose and fell with everything else and didn’t cut a way through the earth, she would take it in a heartbeat. The beaten path was always overlooked by her.

“Wilbur Charles McCarthy,” my mom said, whispering. It wasn’t a threatening way, where as it was to most kids the mom saying your full name line would mean certain death of the social life for at least two weeks, prohibiting everything except chores and reading. The way my mom said it, it was more or less relieved.

“Picked up some groceries,” I said, holding up the bag to her. She looked back at me, her lips pursed and her brow drawn together fiercely. “Sorry…”

“My fault,” Jenna yelped, holding up her free hand and smiling on one side of her mouth. Mom turned her attention to Jenna and raised an eyebrow. “I was running from my mom and got stuck in a tree, so Wilbur had to play Superman and rescue me. All my fault.”

Mom shook her head and smiled, rolling her eyes up and sighing. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, grabbing both of us by the shoulder. Letting go of us, she grabbed Jenna’s bag from her and ushered us inside, where the warm smell of an oven-ready pizza lingered through the living room.

Slumped over a newspaper, as usual, was my dad. I smiled and walked over to his chair, the normal recliner every dad has, and leaned over him. “Hey, Charlie,” I said, smiling. He looked up and smirked. I’d never called him anything different, and if it bothered him, he had never shown it.

He was my dad, mom’s live-in boyfriend, and as far as everyone else was concerned, her common-law husband. As far as unplanned pregnancies went, I wasn’t a terrible mistake, or if I was, Mom and Charlie never said anything about. They looked happier than any other unmarried, child-having couple I’d ever seen. Of course, Charlie knew and accepted the fact that I was his, and Mom was never sleeping around like some of the idiots you see on TV.

Reaching back, he patted me on the head, just like when I used to lean on the arm of his chair when I was little. “Welcome home, Wilbur,” he said warmly and looked back just in time to see Jenna walk into the kitchen with Mom. “Welcome home, Jenna,” he called, turning his head slightly.

In a second, Jenna came back out of the kitchen, looking surprised. She looked around the room, and smiled. There was a small fireplace near the TV, and on the mantle were years upon years of family portraits. In my freshman year of high school, there was a new addition to the photos; a small, red headed girl with baggy clothes and a bright smile.

“Thanks, Charlie,” she said, smiled, and went back into the kitchen.

Nice work - it's well written, the characters make sense, and it's got the right level of description in it. Just a couple of typos:

“No, I don’t think so. My mom would somehow just know I was there and steal me back from him,” she said, dropping her arms across her chest to where was holding the strap on her messenger bag.

That should be where she was.

she might have been done and her hands blackened from the granite

Should be graphite, not granite. Granite's a really hard rock.

Anyway, it's still really good, and I'm looking forward to reading the next part.

Billy wrote:Nice work - it's well written, the characters make sense, and it's got the right level of description in it. Just a couple of typos:

“No, I don’t think so. My mom would somehow just know I was there and steal me back from him,” she said, dropping her arms across her chest to where was holding the strap on her messenger bag.

That should be where she was.

she might have been done and her hands blackened from the granite

Should be graphite, not granite. Granite's a really hard rock.

Anyway, it's still really good, and I'm looking forward to reading the next part.

Thanks. I've been writing this thing nonstop, so I most likely will make a few typoes like that. I should have personally caught the granite/graphite thing since I draw like a mad woman.

Thank you very much! I'll be sure to fix everything.

Chapter 2



“You really don’t mind me staying here for a while?” Jenna asked for the millionth time since Mom told her she could stay in the guest bedroom until she wanted to leave. In our Sophomore year, after Jenna had become a normal add-on to the McCarthy family, we got a bed, dresser, curtains, and mirror in the guest bedroom. Because we never really used the bedroom for anything but storage, we gladly gave it to Jenna and were able to partially break my mom’s pack-rat habits. There was still stuff from when Mom was certain she was going to have a girl instead of a boy. A plush pink rabbit sat lazily on Jenna’s window sill, one black button eye missing.

Charlie looked at her over his paper and rolled his eyes. “Like I said earlier, welcome home, Jenna,” he laughed and folded the paper over and set it aside. Mom smiled and walked around the table, setting a plate of pizza in front of everyone before sitting down herself.

“We love having you here, Jenna,” she said, completing the normal ritual of making Jenna feel like she belonged in the family, though she looked nothing like us. Though Mom was blonde and the poster child for the Arian nation, Charlie and I were both tan with dark almost black eyes, thick eyebrows that drove Mom insane, and long black hair. Mine was longer than his, though, and pulled back in a low ponytail that Jenna loved to pull whenever I wasn’t paying attention to her.

I smiled at Charlie from across the table and took a bite out of the pizza. At times, he was nothing more than a boyfriend who hung around the house, acted more like an uncle than like a dad to me. Took me to parks, movies, played baseball with me, but there was that sort of emotional detachment. At other times, it would be like Mom and him were actually married. They’d be all cozy and snuggled up on the couch, and somehow I’d end up right in the middle of both of them.

In those moments, I seriously thought about calling him Dad.

Dinner passed with nothing but the norm. The usual how was your day and fine, thank you along with embarrassing stories told from childhood and then Jenna told about how she somehow got away from her mom before being forced into a white eyelet lace dress with strappy Greek-styled sandals.

I could only imagine her prancing down main street with a floppy straw hat and bag that she could probably live in, it would be so big. I could just see her chewing gum, chatting on a pink cell phone, her ringtone being some annoying pop thing, and a little Chihuahua in the bag, looking irate.

I laughed to myself, making Jenna look at me questioningly. I waved it off, she shrugged, and went on making me sound like the savior of the year. “So he’s like your Superman to your Lois Lane or something?” Charlie mumbled, smiling at her. Jenna smiled wide, and I laughed again at the missing tooth. She never got in trouble for it, since she hadn’t fought during school. She may not have been extremely book smart, but she had common sense.

“Well,” Charlie said, grabbing his plate and taking it to the sink, “it’s nice having you here, Jen.”
She looked up, almost surprised, and smiled at Charlie again, winking. He turned up one corner of his mouth and patted her on the head once he passed her by. She stuck her tongue out as he looked back before walking through the threshold into the living room.

Jenna and I began to stand from the table, plates in hand, when Mom made a small noise to stop us and grabbed our plates from us. “Don’t worry about these,” she said, swallowing a large piece of pizza and yanking the plates toward herself. She turned toward me. “Wilbur, go help get Jenna settled.”

Settled, I thought, stopping when she said it. It sounded so final, as if she never intended on Jenna leaving. I shrugged and grabbed Jenna by the shoulder, steering her toward the little room we kept for her, fully furnished, all for her.

It took Jenna no time at all to get settled into her room again. It was kind of small but not ‘crawl space under the stairs’ sort of thing. Her bed was a really light colored wood with this thick quilt comforter that my aunt Chloe had sent me when she had somehow gotten it into her head I’d turned gay since the last time she’d seen me.

In the corner, the first thing Jenna ran for, was a half finished drawing in charcoal, white charcoal, and every type of graphite she could get her hand on. It was a strange drawing of a woman smiling, and all her teeth had faces, and she had about ten large, black, glassy eyes. It wasn’t one of Jenna’s more disturbing things, though, so I couldn’t complain.

Once she was done with whatever it was she was doing, Jenna flopped on the bed, laid out spread-eagle and glanced around the room as if she were someone finally coming home from college, but sprang up again quickly and began raiding her dressers, trying to find something. Once found, she jumped up with a mismatching bright orange shirt and black and red plaid pajama pants.

I winced at the plaid and groaned. Just that year, our band had had a Scottish theme and the poor drum line had to wear kilts, even the boys. Those marching had to were a plaid sash, clipped to their uniform by a single safety pin. If you were to ask them later, especially the boys, they’d tell you there was nothing safe about the pins.

“I’ve seen enough plaid for one lifetime,” I said, leaning against the wall of her room. She wrinkled her nose, knowing exactly what I was talking about and snickered slightly under her breath. Jenna knew exactly how much I hated plaid by this time; I’d been a water boy for the football team and had to see it every game.

“Plaid is a staple in the fashion scene as of this decade,” she mumbled, slipping the pants on, right in front of me. I can still remember her underwear; powder blue that said ‘Midnight Rodeo’ on the back, black lace lining the top. Jenna never minded undressing in front of me. Turning around to stare at the mirror behind her, she put her hands on her hips, puckered her lips, and turned her nose up. “Get used to it, darling.”

I snickered. She did her stupidly fake French accent at the moment she said darling. “Come on, Fluffy, Mom will freak if I stay in your room too long,” I mumbled, throwing a ball at her from across the room. She squealed when it hit her.

“Remember, Wilbur, remember I am a lady,” she said, puckering her lips again, swinging her hips as she walked out beside me. I noticed The Diary of Anne Frank on her bed and rolled my eyes, tossing it onto her night stand before following after her. Ever since freshman year after we did a unit on the Holocaust, she’d been obsessed with every sort of book that had to do with the subject. She told me she once watched Schindler’s List five times in a row.

“That’s it,” I called after her, flipping her in the back of the head when I caught up to her. “No more quoting Anne Frank or Mrs. Van Daan for you.”

She turned her head slightly to the side where she could see me and groaned. Walking into the living room and falling down in front of the fire, spread out like she’d just fainted, she turned her attention to Mom and Charlie, who were all cozy on the loveseat. “Ma’am, your son is a spoiler of all things fun,” Jenna said, yawning widely.

Mom smiled at her and then glared mockingly at me. Jenna kicked up her legs and rocked to an upright position. “I’ll bet he doesn’t even believe in the Easter Bunny anymore, does he?” she said, looking disgusted. Mom shook her head and Jenna gasped, sarcastically, before laughing again.

I won’t lie to you and say that Jenna’s laugh was like a thousand birds singing or was the same pure sound of church bells, because it wasn’t. It was more of a raw thing that she never seemed to learn to control, something that just came up as hard as it could and she couldn’t do anything about it. Whereas other girls could keep it to a series of giggles or something, it was always extremely funny to Jenna, which in turn made it seem even funnier to the rest of us.

Charlie, who was nearest Jenna, kicked her playfully in the back, making her nearly roll over her head. I could suddenly see a strange Cirque du Soliel act in my head and laughed. She turned around quickly and stuck her tongue out at me. She turned over on her back, her knees in the air and staring at the ceiling.

“You should paint the ceiling like the Sistine Chapel,” she mumbled, staring off to a place we couldn’t go. Mom stared at her questioningly and rolled her eyes, smirking.

“The Sistine Chapel?” Charlie asked, and I was tempted to smack myself in the head. He was a great guy, really he was, and if I didn’t look like a mini-me, I would have questioned paternity. Jenna looked up, making sure he was serious, and, sadly, his face was as serious as Jenna was shocked.

She began making small circular motions with her finger, trying to make sense out of it for him. “The…church with all the pictures of the angels on it,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows. Charlie looked perplexed and nodded, looking away in deep thought. I knew where I got my lack of being able to learn from.

Mom sat up, patting Charlie on the shoulder and moved around the room, walking slowly if not anxiously. It was almost as if she were pacing. “Jenna, sweetheart, do you need to call your mother?” she asked tensely, and to this Jenna bolted upright, swinging her legs under her. She swallowed hard.

“Do you want Hurricane Katrina coming through your home?” she answered, and none of us commented on her use of metaphor. It was all too true. Julie Philips was a force to be reckoned with when it came to her daughter, even though Jenna would always say Julie hated her and that the feeling was mutual. Sometimes I wonder if it was just on Jenna’s side, but then I remember how much Mrs. Philips detests me and forget about it.

Mom sighed, shrugging, and waved it off, sitting back down with Charlie. Jenna made herself stand, but then flopped back down into a chair-and-a-half we had in the corner where I was sitting. Making sure she was comfortable, she got herself as close as humanly possible to me.
I caught Charlie smiling at us from across the way. I smiled back, quickly, and turned back to some movie on TV, though I don’t think I watched it. I was too distracted by Jenna after she grabbed my hands and made me hold her around the waist. To this day, I can’t really remember if I was uncomfortable, or if was so natural I just couldn’t think.

The movie lasted a long time, I remember, up till ten thirty and Jenna was fast asleep, or just acting. Mom walked over to us and nudged her awake, pushed my hair back to get my attention, and kissed my forehead. Jenna looked up groggily and buried her face in a pillow by head.

“Come on, guys,” Mom whispered, pulling on my arm. “It’s late. Get to bed.”

I propped myself up on my elbow, making Jenna groan and roll over on her side. “Why can’t I sleep on the chair..?” she asked unintelligibly. Charlie walked over, smiling from ear to ear. Jenna nodded her head to the side and smiled at him.

“Because, that’s where I’ll be sleeping if Fran gets mad at me tonight,” he said, flipping her in the ear. He turned his attention to the loveseat and laughed. “I don’t think I’d fit on that, do you?”

Jenna shook her head and made herself get up, wobbling on her feet. I got up a second after her, feeling the wall to the door between the living room and the kitchen. Jenna had always made fun of me, saying that sleep made me blind. It made her paralyzed from the waist down.

Mom walked by me, kissing my forehead again, saying, “’Night, sweetie.” I waved her off, mumbling something that she translated as “I love you, Mom,” which is probably what it was supposed to be. Charlie just patted me on the shoulder, which was his way of saying what Mom said, but in the ‘man way’, as he said the first time I asked. I was five and he was trying to look tough, which he did at the time. Now, he just looked stupid saying it.

I caught a quick glance of Jenna stumbling into her room and then heard a loud thud. I rolled my eyes, knowing she’d probably fallen against the wall or missed the bed on her way down. Not bothering to switch the light on, I felt against the bookshelves and posters that lined my walls, nearly knocking over my own easel in front of my bed.

My own bed was a lot like Jenna’s, except it was tucked into the corner of my room under a tilted window. Moonlight sifted through the checked window, spreading across the room like fairy dust, as Jenna would say. I crawled like a hermit under the black comforter and red sheets of my bed, covering my head with a pillow. Somewhere in the back of my head, I was telling myself I would suffocate if I kept it over my head all night, but realized I was too tired to care, but moved it enough to where my nose was partially uncovered.

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I don’t remember falling asleep. But I remember waking up.

The hallway light we always kept on flew into my room through a crack, catching a little doll eye of a plush rabbit that was stuffed between a Neil Gaiman novel and Cornelia Funke. I rolled over, pushing the pillow off my head after realizing it had stayed on for three hours, I realized after turning to the goblin green glowing alarm clock by my bed.

“Wilbur?” I groaned in the darkness, turning on my stomach, trying to comprehend who might be waking me up in the middle of the night. There was a shuffling of feet across the room, and then another whisper. “Wilbur, are you awake?”

I turned over on my back, propping my head up and squinting, in hopes that maybe sleep hadn’t deprived me of my eyesight for once. Wrestling against the tangle of red and black, reaching for the glasses I reluctantly used, but obviously needed. My eyesight wasn’t terrible, but it was bad enough where I should have worn them every day but refused. Then there was the laugh when I slipped them on. It was uncontrolled, though muffled now by hands.

“Jenna?” I whispered through the darkness, only barely noticing the red hair through a halo of light shimmering through the door. She quickly turned, shutting it behind her and moving into the moonlight. Something wet shined on her face, and now I felt bad after then realizing how harsh I’d probably sounded.

Dropping to her knees, she shuffled across the hardwood, moving books and papers out of the way until she was by my bedside, her head resting between her crossed arms. She had her lips pressed together and shuddered, her eyes darting from me to my hand by her elbow.

“Hey, Wilbur,” she said in a quiet, airy whisper. I made a small hum and patted her on the elbow to show her I was listening. She swallowed and wiped her face with one of her hands, leaning her head to the side. “Can I sleep in here?”

I sat up quickly and looked around awkwardly. Sighing, I didn’t know how to tell her, “No, you can’t, now wipe off your face and go away.” I didn’t have it in me. I scooted over, patting the empty space. She smiled, crawling into the space and pulling the covers up over her. It reminded me of the last time she’d slept with me, and that time Mom and Charlie weren’t exactly happy about it.

They lectured me on not doing anything with her no matter how many times I assured them she’d had a bad dream and wanted someone to sleep with. My mom said then, “There isn’t much to do, Charlie. My dad warned you about not doing anything with me and then nine months later Wilbur popped out. Just don’t be stupid, sweetie.”

Before I could tell Jenna to keep her distance, she had her arms wrapped around my waist, and I found myself drifting back into sleep, not caring, but not before clasping my hands over hers. I could feel the smile spread across her face and burry her face into my back.

“Wilbur?” she whispered again, and I mumbled something, keeping my eyes closed. “Thank you.” I opened my eyes, only slightly in surprise, then smiled and tightened my grip on her hands.

Chapter 3: Everything You Want Me to Be


There were voices in the kitchen. I opened my eyes, only slightly, and tried looking through the now fogged up lenses of my glasses. I barely moved, still feeling Jenna hanging around my waist. She breathed slowly, carefully, and snored softly every so often. I laughed almost, listening to her. She spoke unintelligibly in her sleep, and at first I put the voices off to just her speaking nonsense.

Then I heard Julie Philips.

My eyes widened and my back tensed, knowing the harsh voice all too well. Unlike her daughter’s, which had a slight dreamy, breathiness to it, Julie’s was sharp and too the point. I hated it, but when Mrs. Philips spoke, you listened. Just like Hitler, I thought, a slight bit of amusement with the grim meaning. She spewed nothing but poison with whatever she said.
I strained to listen, making sure not to move too suddenly and wake Jenna. If she heard her mom’s voice I knew she would panic, and when she panicked she couldn’t breathe. I bit my lower lip, letting out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding and closed my eyes. There was nothing to see, and so I just listened.

“Where is my daughter?” Julie hissed, stamping her foot lightly on the tile of our kitchen floor. Mom squeaked slightly, and by now she’d have her arms crossed defensively over her chest or be rubbing her forehead. Charlie, in some sense of the word, would become our… Well, there’s no other word for it except our protector. He’d be standing slightly in front of my door and in some way between Julie Philips and Mom.

I smiled at the thought, opening my eyes into slits. The moonlight was dimming slightly from behind a tree, casting ghostly shadows across the floor. If Jenna were awake she would have been preserving them in memory for future reference. I knew Jenna all too well to know that if anything were strangely beautiful, or beautifully ugly, she would draw it.

“Jenna’s asleep,” Mom said, whispering as low as she could, as if trying not to wake me. I smiled at her, now. From the time she had me, I don’t think she changed from the scared little teenager. Her voice always had some sort of childish worry in it, struggling to sound somewhat adult. “We’ll send her home when she wakes up.”

“I want her now,” Julie hissed again. There were quick footsteps following her speaking, and in a way I knew she’d walked towards Mom. I tenses more, gritting my teeth, wanted to think that Charlie was doing the same. Julie mumbled something I couldn’t hear, then made a small grunt. “I will drag her out of that bed by the hair if I have to. You aren’t her parents, you won’t keep her like you are.”

Mrs. Philips was getting angry by this time, I didn’t have to see her to know that. She had the shortest fuse of anyone I’d ever had the displeasure of knowing. “Where is she sleeping? With that boy of yours?” She murmured, probably looking around the kitchen in disgust.

Mom squeaked in shock and revulsion. Somehow, though she and Charlie hadn’t been the most virtuous people when it came to pre-marital sex, she acted like it was some alien concept that she just couldn’t grasp. “Julie, you’re making it sound like they’re…sleeping with each other,” she gasped, trying to wrap her mind around this somehow foreign word of teenage sex and pregnancy. In a way, it amused me. There were pictures of Mom, no older than Jenna, with a huge stomach and Charlie on her arm looking guilty.

“Wilbur is more responsible than Charlie and I were, and you don’t give your daughter the credit she deserves. Jenna is a wonderful girl,” Mom said, confidently. I would have given just about anything to see my mom’s face just about then. Usually, she looked stupid with a goofy grin or air-headed smile on her face. Mrs. Philips must have looked appalled.

“I want my daughter now,” she hissed, sputtering over her words as if the wheels didn’t quite click and my mom like that was something she hadn’t expected on. I heard Charlie sigh deeply. By then I could only imagine what he looked like. Did he look like he wanted to protect my mom? Me? I could only hope, and in that hope I could be content.

“You’re ruining her life, Julie.” My throat closed and a sense of pride washed over me. It was Charlie. In all my life, never had he said something so…fatherly? I guess that was the phrase for it. I couldn’t help but smile and laugh, clasping hard on Jenna’s hands.

But then I heard someone turn hard on their heel. I could only guess it was Mrs. Philips turning to face Charlie.

“Do not tell me how to raise her, you poor excuse for a man. Don’t either of you preach about responsibility when that boy is as illegitimate as any other bastard with a single mother and just because both of you live under the same roof doesn’t account for anything without a ring your finger,” she spat, tripping over her words as she spoke with venom.

The next thing I knew, my bedroom door was slammed open, knocking a book off the shelf, the room was flooded with light, I was temporarily blinded, and Jenna screamed when her mother grabbed her by the elbow and dragged her out of the bed onto the floor. But she didn’t seem exactly surprised, just not expecting it to be thrown down so hard.

In a blurry minute, I’d jumped out of bed and stood in an uncomfortable spot between Mom and Charlie, Jenna and Mrs. Philips standing in front of us. I didn’t look Mrs. Philips in the face, but kept on looking at Jenna, whispering, “I’m sorry,” over and over. She just rolled her eyes and shrugged. It wasn’t in a, “Yeah, whatever way,” more of a, “My Mom’s a bitch, don’t worry about it” kind of way.

Jenna squeaked when Julie pulled her closer harshly. She looked like she was about to go limp and just lay on the kitchen floor, which would have been typical Jenna, but instead she dropped a shoulder and cocked her hip to the side, glaring at her mother.

Mrs. Philips turned to my mom, smirking. “I can raise my daughter myself,” she said in a matter-of-fact way and turned her nose up at Mom and Charlie. “We don’t need your help. We are doing just fine.” And with that, she turned, pulling Jenna along with her out the front door and paraded through the dark streets.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Mom bit her lip and heard her whimper. Charlie held onto her shoulders and led her back into their bedroom, and somehow I made myself fall into step behind them, marching back into my own room, if only to lay there awake in the night with nothing but the ceiling or moonlit morning to keep me company.

Walking back into my room, I kicked the book that had fallen from my bookshelf, and, picking it up, my breath froze in my throat and my eyes prickled lightly. It was Charlotte’s Web.

_______________________________
“Why didn’t you come home?”

Jenna sat at the kitchen table, looking around her own kitchen and mentally comparing it to the McCarthy’s. She rolled her eyes at cobwebs in the corner of the room and rolled her eyes at the need for a mouse trap in the corner of the room where a small rat hole was always getting bigger. Crumbs were on the floor, swept next to the yellow garbage plastic can along with small pieces of cereal from a week ago.

Mrs. Philips slammed the table, making Jenna look up at her in surprise. “Answer me when I talk to you, Jenna,” she said through clenched teeth, her eyes wide. “Why didn’t you come home instead of running around with that boy? He obviously has his parents fooled, you know. He’s just as bad as them. Look at his name! Named after a pig. That shows you how much restraint they think he has…”

“He’s a good guy,” Jenna said quickly, boldly. She pressed her lips together fiercely and stared up at her mother. She breathed hard, looking away and crossing her arms, shivering. “If someone’s bad, it’s me. I got in bed with him. It’s not his fault.”

Mrs. Philips looked taken aback, staring down at her daughter. They looked so much alike, in her eyes. Of course, she never looked past the red hair and green eyes that made her look like a Christmas tree, otherwise she was a copy of her father. She had his slightly square chin with the hint of a cleft, the gap between his two front teeth, and the small slant of the eyes that made people guess stupidly that she was a red-haired Asian girl.

That was one reason Mrs. Philips detested looking at her daughter.

But at this time, her face softened as she leaned closer in on Jenna, smiling contentedly. “Sweetheart, you’re a good little girl,” she said, her voice coated in sugar and something honey like, too sweet for the woman using it.

Dark chocolate, Jenna thought, amused. She sounds like dark chocolate. Sweet at first, but bitter once you get down to it.

“You’re such a good girl,” she said again, stroking her red hair and the curve of her throat in one motion. She smiled then, looking dreamy as she looked at the long hoodie her daughter was wearing. Jenna had taken off her pants and thrown them over the back of a chair when the walked in. Now, for a second, Mrs. Philips could pretend that Jenna actually wore a dress. The hoodie went down to mid thigh, after all. A short dress, but a dress none-the-less.

“You’re everything I want you to be,” she went of, a hint of a laugh crawling from her throat as she spoke. The bitter chocolate was almost visible in the air when she spoke.

Jenna breathed in hard, staring at her mother softly, and pressed her lips together hard. She smiled now, and looked away for a mere second before turning to look back up at her mother. Jenna laughed now and crossed her arms over her chest. “Mom,” she said, making her mother look at her hopefully. “Tell me everything you want me to be. I’ll be sure to be as big a disappointment as possible.”

Jenna stood from her seat, turned on her heal, but not before shooting her mother a certain finger that got her chased into her room.