Upstairs, Downstairs, Surprising Twists of Affairs on At Home

Robert Harrison

March 16, 2021 5:11 PM

Upstairs, Downstairs, Surprising Twists of Affairs by Robert Harrison

Robert Harrison had no magical skill, had not even known magic was real before Miss Jessica had suddenly been swept off for most of the year by people who could do it, but anyone observing the transformation that overcame him as soon as the doors of the transport center opened might have doubted the assertion. One moment, he was seated in the front seat of the car, seemingly absorbed in a book on his e-reader, and the next moment, the device had vanished and he was outside the car, waiting for his charges to approach so he could open the first door.

A single glance to the left informed him that young Oliver – normally Mr. Hayles’ day driver, but tonight appointed to handling Mel and Mara – had managed the same transition, and he allowed himself the slightest hint of a satisfied nod before he looked back to the front – and immediately frowned, as microscopically as he had nodded before, as he realized that Miss Jessica was leading the group and that her posture was…wrong.

Normally, he would have been able to say something more specific about it, but the current combination was not something he recognized, which was concerning in and of itself – one of his major tasks, at least when she was home, was keeping Miss Jessica in order, and one of the reasons teenagers were often considered difficult charges was because of their ability to become inexplicable. Miss Jessica, however, had not done so ever before, and she had been sixteen since February and entirely herself at Easter in April. Now, though, she seemed – if that was possible – if she was halfway between being furious and being what the staff euphemistically referred to ‘unsettled’ among themselves – one of those states where she began by digging her nails into her own arms or hands, then progressed, if not diverted or soothed, to crying hysterically, pulling her hair, and occasionally babbling irrationally. ‘Wrong’ was a thing Robert rarely was even prepared to tolerate being, but he hoped, just now, that he was….

“Good evening, Miss Jessica,” he said as though nothing was wrong when she was within easy speaking distance. He opened the door. “Welcome home.”

Jessica forced a smile, which he took as a good sign. “Hi, Robert,” she said. “Can I borrow your phone?”

For once, she managed to take him by surprise – not an easy feat when he’d been with the family for as long as she’d been alive. “My….”

“Phone,” repeated Jessica, with a touch of impatience reminiscent of her haughty mother. “Please. I need to look something up.”

Puzzled, he shrugged and handed her his work phone. She forced another smile and a ‘thanks’ as she slid into the car and her parents, both looking anxious, caught up with her; over their heads, he could see Mel and Mara just stepping outside. Leaving them to Oliver, he greeted Mr. and Mrs. Hayles and closed the door firmly before looking left again to make sure the Moraleses were also safely behind glass and metal. Seeing that they were, he nodded acknowledgement to Oliver and got back into the driver’s seat.

“Jessica,” Mrs. Hayles was saying, “You cannot be serious…”

“I don’t know yet,” said Jessica, clearly paying only the bare minimum of attention necessary to answer; her attention was all on the smartphone in her hands. “I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on. Hold on a minute.”

“You’ve been friends with this girl for years and never bothered finding out what her parents do?” asked Mr. Hayles, sounding stunned.

“Demonstrably,” snapped Jessica.

“Jessica!” scolded her mother.

“Can you just give me a minute?!”

Robert did not need to glance into the rearview mirror to imagine the expressions on Arthur and Rosalie’s faces. They were not used to being spoken to that way by anyone, much less Jessica. Her father had taught her that external appearances were to be prioritized, her mother had taught her that emotions were beneath her, and Robert and Carmela had raised her to be a polite, self-disciplined child. All that had combined to a façade which rarely cracked at all, never mind cracked in front of her parents. Silence fell, uncomfortably thick for everyone but Jessica, as she muttered to herself a bit, her fingers fumbling around the phone’s touchscreen from unfamiliarity with the device. Finally, though, after about forty minutes of working their way through traffic, she suddenly turned the phone off and sighed.

“I’m sorry,” she said, though she still sounded distracted and slightly annoyed. “That awful woman – she completely freaked me out, I had to figure out what was going on for sure – “

“Yummy mummy type?” asked Mr. Hayles.

“I wish. Some momtrepreneur glamfluencer thing.”

“Dear God.”

“And Sadie never told her who I was, because I’m guessing she knew exactly how that would end,” said Jessica grimly. “Which is about how it did – damn Sra. De Matteo – “

“Jessica!” exclaimed both of her parents at the same time. Rosalie picked up the thread alone. “You do not talk like that, young lady – “

Traffic ground to another halt, and Robert glanced in the mirror again. Jessica was clearly not paying any attention at all now, letting Rosalie talk and talk while she thought about…whatever it was she was thinking about….

The grounds staff and the maid were only day workers and Robert was doing the driving, but the housekeeper was waiting to greet them. Her smile faded rapidly, though, as she looked between everyone. “Is everything….”

Jessica forced another smile and pecked Eliza on the cheek. “Everything’s fine, Mrs. Martinez,” she said. “We’re all just really tired. Long evening.”

“There were some very vulgar people who found out who Arthur was,” added Rosalie.

“So I’m just going to go have a bath and go to bed,” said Jessica, but that wasn’t what the way she walked up the stairs suggested. She seemed, Robert feared, to have settled on being very, very angry.

* * * * * * * *

“You really don’t know anything….?”

“Well, I could hardly go ask, Eliza,” said Carmela’s voice tartly.

“Oh, of course not, but – “

“We’ll ask Robert when he comes back in,” said another male voice – Oliver’s. Oliver was not supposed to be here, but here he was. Robert sighed and entered the kitchen to find the housekeeper and nanny-and-or-Mr. Hayles’-chief-mistress in a close knot with the day driver. They all looked at him expectantly at once.

“I really have no idea,” he said wearily. “Jessica was looking up something on my phone – I’m assuming something to do with what one of her friends’ parents does. I gathered that she and Arthur don’t approve of whatever it is the mother does, at least….”

“Mara said that the kids who were with them were both Jezi’s friends,” said Carmela. “The boy is not well in his head, and Mara couldn’t think of much of anything about the girl except that her name’s Sadie and she follows Jessica around.”

Robert nodded. “She said something about ‘damn Sra. De Matteo’ – “

“That’s the boy’s mother,” said Carmela. She frowned. “Mara was good friends with the girl in that family, but she decided to start dating someone racist….”

“With a name like De Matteo?” asked Oliver incredulously.

Robert exchanged glances with Carmela. They both knew that racism was…different, where Mara and Jessica were now, but even Eliza didn’t share that knowledge, never mind a member of the day staff. “I’ve not met many racists who weren’t hypocrites somewhere along the line, Oliver,” he said dryly, to save the situation, and tried to change the subject. “Arthur thought the mother might be a ‘yummy mummy’, whatever that is, and Jezi said she’s a – “

“She’s a mommy blogger.”

They all turned at once to stare in surprise and consternation at the very strange sight of the lady of the house standing in the doorway of the kitchen.

Rosalie Hayles smiled very faintly, without parting her lips, at their surprise, but made no further comment on it. There was, after all, very little comment she could reasonably make. It was rare enough for her to descend into the depths of her own kitchen at all, and rare for her to speak to any of the staff as equals; for her to do both at once was, Robert thought, at best nearly unprecedented.

Not, of course, that she was a bad employer – far from it. She was generally respectful, generally sympathetic to the fact that the help was not composed of non-human entities. She always, however, had kept a distance between herself and them, most unlike Arthur and Jessica, and as far as Robert could remember, she rarely even showed much in the way of warmth or humor even toward her husband and daughter – a stance particularly striking when he contrasted it to her politician relatives, who put some much time and effort into trying to portray an image of wholesome good ol’ boys, Ordinary People Just Like You, relatable figures who could easily befriend any member of the public who somehow gained access to one of their south Georgia compounds. Rosalie, though, in her French clothes and minimized accent, had always made a clear distinction between herself and the rest of the world, even inside her own home.

Now, however, she stepped down into the kitchen and joined them at the table, as though she was an Ordinary Person Just Like Them. She looked at Eliza.

“Could I have some tea, please?” she asked.

Herbal tea bags were taken from the cabinet, water boiled, and soon the kitchen filled with the scents of mint and lemongrass. The staff waited.

“I don’t think Jessica knew,” said Rosalie finally, not blinking at the fact that enough tea had been prepared for everyone to have a cup, as though they presumed to socialize with her. “Jessica kept trying to defend the girl, I think – the girl hadn’t told her mother who Jessica was, even though she knew.” There were murmurs of approval around the table, and Ros smiled faintly again. “I told the girl I appreciated that,” she added, “but I don’t know how much impact it made – that woman seemed completely delusional.” She made a contemptuous noise through her nose. “She seemed to think that her Instagram career meant she was equal to Arthur,” she explained incredulously, “and that we had any interest in listening to her complain about how the girl needing to go to that school had affected her income….”

“She said that?” asked Oliver incredulously.

“She did indeed, and seemed to think we should have had Jessica on the Internet all these years, too, for any pervert who stumbled across her pictures to fixate on and harass,” said Rosalie. Her lip curled. “I despise vulgar people,” she muttered into her tea.

“Did she say anything to Je – Miss Jessica?” Robert caught himself. “To upset her so?”

Rosalie smiled faintly again. This might have set a new record for smiles per hour from Rosalie inside the house, with the exception of the time House Beautiful had come to photograph the rooms and gardens. “I know you all call her by her name when you’re talking to each other,” she said. “And – no? I don’t know?” She sounded bewildered. “Jessica almost acted as if she liked the woman, and wanted to work with her! But then, as soon as they went away…” She shook her head. “I’m afraid this is going to be a bad lesson for Jessica,” she concluded. “Even going – away – like she has, she’s not a little girl who can afford to make friends with just anyone.”

16 Robert Harrison Upstairs, Downstairs, Surprising Twists of Affairs 0 Robert Harrison 1 7

Jessica Hayles

March 16, 2021 5:49 PM

Upside down and round and round. by Jessica Hayles

Jessica had not used her laptop since Easter, and had used it only briefly then, so it was hard for her to be sure what was up with the amount of time it took to start up. Had it always been this slow? Was it really as slow as it seemed right now? She had finally, after drumming her fingers with impatience on the edge of her antique desk between attempts to click on anything, thrown her hands up and gone to take her shower and let the thing work on its own precious time.

Consequently, she did not look terribly Insta-worthy as, for the second time in her life (the first having been in the car ride home, when she’d hastily thrown together a profile on Robert’s phone in order to access Sadie’s Other Life), she logged into the site and pulled up the hashtags she wanted. At least, she thought, she had used a computer enough before she had been yanked out of this world that some things were still half-natural, at least to figure out….At one point she removed the towel turban from her hair once she remembered it was there, but this only made her look more bedraggled, damp red locks tumbling down her back, as she spent an hour going through material, growing more unnerved with every click.

Finally, her hands shaking, she shut off the browser and opened a blank document instead.

Felipe – it’s Jessica. I’m typing – rattled though she was, she paused for a moment, remembering that he might not know what typing was for all she knew, much less a computer. - that means I’m using a Muggle machine to write – because I think my handwriting would be total trash right now, so this is easier.

Thank you for trying to help Sadie out with her mom – I’m not sure it worked, because of the sort of person I think Mrs. Chalmers is, but it was wonderful of you to try. No more telling yourself you’re not a good person after that, okay?

I don’t know if there’s even a version of that woman in the wizarding world? They use the same kind of machine I’m using right now, but in a different way – they take pictures and videos (a video is…like a picture that moves, but it talks, and it always says and does the exact same thing every time you press a button, it never changes) and put them on something called the Internet, where millions of people can see it. People like her take pictures of their handbags and their shoes and their kids – especially their kids – so they can make it look like they have this perfect family – like, even more perfect than our families pretend to be. And people who are good at it – lots of people look at their pictures and videos because they wish their families were like that, and if enough people like one family specifically, then companies start paying people like Mrs. Chalmers to use their products in the pictures and videos, so other people will go buy those things because they want to be like her.

Somehow, irrationally, going through the task of trying to explain social media to a wizard was soothing her – perhaps simply because she had to think to do it, rather than just reacting to things. She carried on.

The problem is, they’re all totally fake – I think like at least once a year, there’s a huge scandal because it turns out one of these people is running an adoption scam or just abusing one of their kids behind the scenes. And I’ve been looking at Mrs. Chalmers’, and – that’s not Sadie. At all. These people make the people on the company billboards look natural, and the digital art people airbrush those things so much you can barely recognize some of the models afterward. So now I’m totally freaking out because I don’t know how bad this psycho is in private and how she might act now that she knows about me, since as it turns out S isn’t really the type to act like a pimp, and also because – am I like that woman? Is that how I treat people? Or how I ever did?

I’m so sorry if I do, or if I ever did. I’m so sorry. If I ever do it again, stop me, even if you have to hex me to do it.

I don’t know what’s what about this summer – it turns out Daddy promised my baby sister we’d go to Italy sometime to make up for her not getting to come to Sonora tonight, because she threw a fit about it or something. You and your family go there sometimes, right? If you’re going to at all, then let me know, we’ll hook up, or you can just come with us if you want to/want to get away from whatever’s going on with you. I’m about to try to write to Sadie – I wish we could all just steal the company plane and go – somewhere without all these crazy adults. I feel like I’m okay in the head compared to them, and two hours ago, I wasn’t able to stop thinking about how much I wanted to hit Mrs. Chalmers with a chair.

Sorry this is kind of incoherent. Keep in touch. Love, she printed off the document, and once it had had a moment to dry, she picked up a pen and scrawled Jessica in her own hand. The same pen was then used on her pretty stationery, first in a bland pile of nonsense in case her friend needed a cover document, and then again in the actual message.

Dear Sadie,

Are you okay? I’m so sorry about the Concert, I wasn’t sure what was going on and I’ve never been great at thinking on my feet. I hope I didn’t mess anything up for you.

All that stuff I said to your mom – well, like Daddy said, it’s up to mine what I do and stuff, but I’ll get more of a say in it than I was kind of implying I would, so I’ll ask you: what do you want me to do? I can probably manage that spot sometime this summer if that would make things better, or you could come here and try something with the marketing department, or I can try to just make the whole thing go away and blame my mother. Let me know.

I’ll try to explain to the owl to only approach you, but just in case, I wrote that other note in case you need to show her something, and I’m bundling up whatever samples I can find to send with. I just made an Insta in the car – [insert insta username] – if you want to message me through that. Let me know what’s up.

Hugs,

Jessica.

She did all that the next day before finding Robert to go to the nearest wizard post office, but also did one more thing: write a completely simpering note to Mrs. Chalmers herself, just in case Sadie really needed leverage. Accordingly, she added a ps to the real note:

PS – the note to your mom is just if you need it, not really for her unless you need it. J.

16 Jessica Hayles Upside down and round and round. 1442 0 5

Sadie-Lake Chalmers

March 19, 2021 4:07 AM

Layer upon layer by Sadie-Lake Chalmers

Whether or not the owl had been given specific instructions, it was only ever likely to have been Sadie who removed its missive. Her dad was getting the hang of them, and her brother would occasionally poke them out of nosiness, but he’d apparently had his fingers bitten too many times to really want to try it again – especially if it meant tearing himself away from his ipad. Her mom would not go near them. Not that that meant she wasn’t interested, of course. The subject of Jessica (and when she would write, and what opportunities there would be if only her parents would let her) had been well-worn since returning from the concert. It crawled under Sadie’s skin, and made her want to scream. Worse though, was the thought of Jessica diving into the @CharmingChalmers archives… Jessica’s impulse to look, to stick her nose against the glass like Sadie was some animal in a tank, was one she was all too accustomed too. It was how businesses like her mom’s were profitable in the first place. And Jessica had no reason not to stare. Sadie hadn’t told her not to. It still hurt that she wanted to though. That she was going to see all that. During the days between the concert and the arrival of Jessica’s owl, she alternated between hopelessness and anger – at her mom, at the world, at Jessica. Not that it ever so much as rippled the smooth surface – not when she was where anyone could see her anyway.

Happily, either the instructions or fate saw to it that Sadie was, at least, alone when she received the owl. Otherwise, who knew what levels of impatient hovering at her shoulder her mom might have done. At first, as she read through the first sheet of Jessica’s letter, it seemed like that would not be an issue. It was barely any different to usual, just chattering away about nothing in particular, as if nothing at all had changed. Thank god.

But then Sadie got to the sheets underneath. Layer upon layer of letter. Layer upon layer of lies. Of course, she was in no position to criticise on that front.

She would almost definitely have to show her mother, omitting the middle sheet, of course. She would have to reply to Jessica. But what to say? Her friend seemed genuinely concerned about her, and still to want to be her friend, but Sadie had no idea how to fix this. She wanted her mom and Jessica and Jessica’s parents to all be happy with her, and was fairly sure there was simply no way of achieving that. She wanted Jessica not to have a password to her entire past but it was already too late for that. She wanted to yell and scream at everyone in the whole world to just leave her alone, but she couldn’t, and anyway she probably didn’t mean that. She supposed she would be lonely if they really did. But right now, it seemed appealing.

She sat down, trying to think what to say to Jessica. It was hard to know when she didn’t know what dirt she had raked through already – the last thing Sadie wanted to do was encourage her to dive any deeper – or without being sure what Jessica herself wanted. It seemed impossible to believe she could want to rebel against her parents, or want any element of Sadie’s life, but her letter talked about it almost like she did. Or like she thought that getting involved would be doing Sadie a favour… She did not want to push Jessica away but nor did she really want to let her any further into this than she absolutely had to. She wished she knew what answer Jessica wanted to hear. Or that she could just ignore all of it entirely. Making it all go away was by far and away her preferred option.

Dear Jessica,

Thank you for your letter, and for your concern. Of course I’m alright. I’m not sure what you think you might have messed up or done wrong. If you’ve been reading stuff outside of Instagram about my family, none of that’s true.

It’s kind of you to offer, but I really get the impression that your parents don’t want you being involved. Of course, if you’d like to, I wouldn’t want to stand in your way. Whatever you think is best. Your parents seem to have a lot of concerns about putting you in the spotlight though, and I wouldn’t want to worry them.

Thank you for the latest samples. That’s very kind of you. I’ll probably stick to owls if that’s okay with you.

Hugs,
Sadie.

13 Sadie-Lake Chalmers Layer upon layer 1480 0 5

Felipe De Matteo

March 20, 2021 12:17 PM

Connection upon connection by Felipe De Matteo

Felipe had received Jessica's letter in the midst of doing basically nothing. He'd taken to gardening, as he'd done the previous summer, and watching out for Leonor, as he'd done his whole life, but that was about it. There wasn't much for a defunct heir to do on his would-have-been estate and there weren't many people that wanted anything to do with him and who had access to him. He might've spent more time with the muggles of Cuidad De Matteo if any of them would have wanted him around especially but they were mostly ambivalent at best and reverent at worst, so that wasn't where he was going to spend his time. Besides, the last time one of the De Matteo siblings had fraternized with their subjects, bad bad things had happened. Felipe was doing his best not to think about those bad things when an owl arrived with a letter from Jessica.

It was frustrating to see that he hadn't helped at all and also that he apparently had completely misunderstood something or other. He was pretty sure everything in Jessica's letter made basic common sense to him - he had, after all, seen a typewriter before, and newspapers and things featured important people sometimes so that sounded a bit like some of the other stuff she was talking about - but the fact that she'd seen fit to explain it made him think that he'd missed something big. And he'd brought his mother into it. Or she'd brought him into it maybe, since she'd been the reason he'd approached in the first place.

Another thought stood out to him as he read the letter though and he wasn't sure precisely what to do with it. Honesty, the sort that was marked by transparency and initiative-taking, was not his strong suit. At the same time, this was Jessica. Being honest with Jessica was much easier, which was odd actually since it hadn't ever really gotten him very far. She'd been more likely to chew him out than anything else in most cases, although their shared lack of reasonable mental health provided some common ground upon which to improve that approach.

He tucked the letter into his pocket as the owl flew off to the estate's owlery for snacks and rest and continued working on the plot he'd been weeding for several more hours before he finally sat down to respond. When he did so, it was from the safety and privacy of his own room. He'd thought that the interim hours would have provided words but they seemed only to have shaped his ideas more than anything and he stared at the page a bit before finally dipping his quill into a pot of ink - it was probably fancy because that's what his family generally had on hand, but he knew that Jessica would have had more to think about it than he did - and pressed the tip to the page.

Dear Jessica,

I want to first apologize for being less helpful than I had hoped I might be. I appreciate your honesty in letting me know that and taking the time to explain things that are possibly even further out of my area of knowledge than magic once was to you and your family. You have taken to your newness much better than I dare hope I could take to mine, so I'll leave it in your hands and say only that I trust you. If I can do anything to help you or Sadie, let me know.

Your question, and your request to be hexed in given circumstances, are harder for me to respond to. I want you to know first that I have never seen an ounce of similarity between you and that foul woman. Even when we argued years ago and when I was upset over the secret of your sister, I was upset only that you'd been taken in by a system that didn't have your back, not that you were the sort of person who would choose such secrecy on your own. That is an argument perhaps best left behind us, but I wanted to be clear that even when we have not been close, I have never considered you like that woman.

Which brings us to the hard part. I think that you put in words what I was never able to when you and Zara had your falling out. Zara, I'm sure, understands the things you outlined in your letter much better than I ever could, and has been the subject of the sort of manipulation you mentioned as well, albeit in different ways than it sounds like Sadie is. I think you put well, if accidentally, the way that Zara perhaps perceived your approach. I don't know if there's anything for you in that, but it seemed like an opportunity to better express through your words what I was never able to with my own. I hope you don't mind a bit of overstepping on my part - please let me know if I have forgotten myself.

Take care of yourself,

Felipe

22 Felipe De Matteo Connection upon connection 1434 0 5

Jessica Hayles

March 31, 2021 5:04 PM

Won't you guys just let me rescue you? by Jessica Hayles

There was no real time, Jessica thought, for forming complex thoughts. Between worrying about her friends, fending off worry from her parents and staff, and trying to get everything in order before she was swept off-schedule to Italy, the best she could manage by the time she found a moment at her writing desk was a vague simplicity, more an emotion – mild irritation – than a thought: why will they not stop being difficult and just let me rescue them?!

This sentiment made composition difficult, something especially apparent as she worked on her first missive.

Dear Felipe,

I’ll give you this much, you’re no coward (unlike the person I’m not allowed to name). I’m glad about that – best argument you’ve put forth yet for the version where she’s a good person I had a misunderstanding with instead of just being a little person who gets off on making others feel small and who got butthurt when I didn’t kiss her ass -

She’d gotten up and done some yoga, reminding herself that she was supposed to be a lady. Ladies did not talk about asses or getting off. It was bad enough that she was pretty sure she had admitted she knew what a pimp was in the last letter. She crumpled that paper up and started again.

Dear Felipe,

I was talking more about the whole magic thing, when it came to acting like Mrs. C – how upset I used to be about my life getting removed. I wasn’t thinking too clearly – she was talking about Sadie being an inconvenience right in front of her, and that was what offended me, and I think I was thinking something along the lines that “did I ever seem that rude and vulgar when I would admit that I was so unhappy back in the day,” and hoping I never offended you so much that you wanted to hit me with a chair back then. Maybe – like I said, I wasn’t thinking too clearly when I wrote my last.

Still, you made an interesting point. All I’ll say about it for now is that I’m not mad at you, and I’m glad you were bold enough to say it. It’ll take a lot more evidence before I seriously consider the possibility that the person I’m not allowed to name is a good person, or at least not as bad as I think she is, but it’s good to see that the guy who always argued with me about the roles of the powerful in society is still in there. And she had drawn a smiley face beside that, to hopefully slightly reduce any sting in it, or indignation on behalf of the person Jessica wasn’t allowed to name.

I know you said we should just leave the whole situation with M in the past, but you did say something I kind of want to look at, I guess? The system – well, I don’t think any system really has anyone’s back. It puts limits on everyone, and even if it works for someone today, the same boundaries can completely ruin that person’s whole life tomorrow. And even if you break one system, it looks like another one just springs up in its place. Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss. They call it a revolution because it always comes back around. Etc. etc. Maybe I was able to adapt – kind of – to “here’s a whole new world full of things you don’t know and can’t tell anyone about” because that was already something familiar to me. Having two sorts of family might be a little less extreme than the amount of secret-keeping that the Statute of Secrecy involves, but the basic idea of secret-keeping wasn’t new to me. So now I kind of wonder what it would have been like if I hadn’t grown up like that, or what would have happened if you had.

Does that mean anything, in the big, does-any-of-this-have-meaning way? I don’t know.

Over the holidays, though, I wrote something to you about finding a place to belong, and I’ve reconsidered my position there lately. I’m not so sure anymore that it’s a place we need – for me, at least, I think I just need to be needed. A place that works better with me in it than without me in it, so I’m not just filling space, standing there awkwardly and worrying what everyone’s thinking of me – or worse, about what’s not being done, or won’t get done, because I’m not doing it. I’ve been working on accepting it, and it’s better than it was, but that’s really, I think, why I got so angry, and sometimes I still get a little angry.

Back on the issue of being useful, though – if you need rescuing at some point, the offer stands. Otherwise, you take care of yourself, too.

Je tiens à toi, nos vies sont très difficiles,

Jessica

With Sadie, she took more care on the first try.

Dear Sadie,

I’m glad to hear things are okay – your mom just seemed really stuck on how she didn’t know who my family was before the Concert, so I was worried she might have chewed you out at home or something.

My parents are…complicated. I think maybe they think of me the same way they did when I was eleven – which is fair, I guess, since they haven’t really gotten to see me very much since then, have they? Plus they worry about it causing trouble if people ask too many questions about me, which I guess you do understand, huh.

I found out the morning after I wrote that other letter that my parents had decided we ought to go to Italy this summer, so that’s fun. As far as business stuff goes, I think they’re probably thinking of maybe promoting what your mom posts about us, or maybe something where I record a clip for you guys or something, while we’re there. If you see stuff that says it’s me, but I’m not actually talking, that’s probably actually someone from PR pretending to be me for publicity, so fair warning about that. I joked that they should just get the website guys to try to build a Jessica chatbot, and Daddy actually looked like he was thinking about it for a minute before he decided it would probably cost more money than it would make.

I hope you have time for your flower pressings and crafts this summer – I. I’m not sure if I can bring dried plants from out of the country, but I’ll look for you something pretty if I can. Or anything else you want or need, let me know.

Jessica

16 Jessica Hayles Won't you guys just let me rescue you? 1442 0 5

Sadie-Lake Chalmers

April 05, 2021 6:46 AM

Maybe? by Sadie-Lake Chalmers

Jessica wasn't mad. She wasn't mad and she wasn't judging. That was the definite impression Sadie was getting from her letters. She more seemed worried, which meant Sadie hadn't played happy families as convincingly as she should, or that Jessica had been reading horrible online articles about them. Sadie hated those, especially the ones about her dad. She really hoped Jessica didn't believe that stuff. Unfortunantely, it seemed more like Jessica had guessed at some of their real family dynamics.

Still, beyond that, she seemed to somewhat understand. A lot of the things she said resonated with Sadie. It didn't mean she quite knew what to write back. It was all the kinds of things she would have just nodded along to, or maybe given a 'yeah, exactly!' to if she was feeling bold. It was harder to convey that on paper - again, the page looked empty and didn't seem worth the paper she was writing it on if she didn't say more than that. She suspected she was supposed to spill in return but she still felt caught up on the fact that Jessica might already be judging them, and that she probably wasn't supposed to say half the things that she wanted to...

She wrote and balled up half a dozen drafts before she had one that she felt was acceptable.

Dear Jessica,

I think Mom's surprised that I wouldn't do something "useful" with the info rather than mad, but I never wanted to seem like I was just using you for promos. I wasn't. I hope you know that.

And yeah, I get what you're saying about families.

Italy sounds amazing! Have a great time! I have asked the owl to just bring this to your house because I don't think it's fair to ask the poor thing to fly all that way, plus I'm not sure how long you'll be gone. I hope your housekeepers are used to owls and won't be nosy.

That sounds great about the PR stuff. My mom will be really pleased. But don't feel like you have to.

I'll be crafting lots, I hope :)

Sadie.

There were some important things it didn't say, like 'thanks for believing in me' or 'sorry this happened - I hate it all' but it was hard to know how to put those things on paper. Hopefully it was good enough...

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