Enough

(One day she’ll learn the value is in choosing to be good, sometimes, and that’s why this will make sense, but in this moment she’s a kid who can’t see past years of bubbling anger.)

“I try,” she says softly, hates this. Her eyes must be that color like the ice is cracking and she doesn’t feel right anymore when her muscles aren’t tight.

“I want to do what I want to do because I figure if I’ve got this backwards thought process I might as well use it to help people, right…?”

This way her head tilts to one side.  “I simply meant that I hope others have treated you that way more, not that you have necessarily acted one way or the other.  People tend to mark you one way or the other, regardless of how you act.  But people are just...people.”

The cloth is removed and it isn’t stained with blood, just dripped with it.  “I think it’s stopped bleeding.”  She gazes at the child, tries to take everything in. “There’s nothing else hurting, is there?  No cuts or bruises or sprains or...broken bones?”

She hesitates over that last phrase.

Jennifer Honey knows how to deal with broken bones, knows how to live with them when they are refused to be tended after, knows how to protect and still somehow use it to her advantage.

She winces– a sharp sound, one that is more helpless than she would like. (She’s walked a mile on a severely sprained ankle. Why does this make her flinch like a child? –Because you feel like one. And you hate it.)

“You really don’t– have to–” what? Care about me? There’s no reason for it. Alana’s difficult. Insistent. Monstrous about being looked after.

But she’s subsided, at least, baby blues fixed on those much warmer eyes than her own (she always wanted hers to be that color. Not this burdensome, harsh blue).

She notes the wince as she presses the damp cloth there a second time; she doesn’t have much here - bandaids, a little cleaning alcohol, this cloth, a little gauze that gets washed and reused because she can’t afford to get more - but this, at least, she can help with.

Jennifer pauses with her hand against Alana’s cheek, blinks once - twice, then continues.  “People do not always know how to deal well with differences.  They can make monsters out of what they don’t understand and angels out of what they most desire.  Sometimes a person can end up an odd combination of both.”

     Some of us don’t bring up our differences.

But she’s tugged closer and there’s this way her nose twitches, like she’s scented something, but mostly it’s just that– Alana has no idea how to take comfort. Her mama has always been that brand of gentle with her, and she would understand if she ever allowed it. Which she does not, stubborn Alana Bloom. This wild, vicious kid with this intellect and these weary hands. She feels the way her spine relaxes, her shoulders drop, how she leans in, how that fraction of discomfort exits like a balloon letting out air.

“I disagree,” she says softly, but the fight’s out of her. Her eyes are downcast, pale cheeks flushed a shade of darker pink, “I disagree because I’ve done just fine, and I’ll– I never needed anyone. And that isn’t to say I don’t love the people who are my family, I just–”

Miss Honey has known too many people marked with that term who carried it like a burden - different means set apart means not like anyone else means alone - and then used that as a distinguishing feature - I’m different than you and that makes me better, worse, superior, inferior, something you - no one - can handle, and I will always be that way, so it is better to separate myself now before I get hurt.  I’m different.  You won’t understand.

But what she has found is that, at their core, all people are fundamentally the same.  They love and they crave to be loved, they need someone to tell them that they are enough as they are, they want someone to be there when things get rough - not to protect or to fix things but simply to be there - a support---

Different and fine are just defenses for desires long thrown away and buried.  Different means alone and fine means I learned to do without.

♀ badass book ladies ♀ eight female dynamics [1/8] matilda wormwood & miss honey { matilda by roald dahl }

“I hold myself to a greater set of standards than I would a patient. I shape myself according to the best way I feel I can manage, and it’s how I’ve always managed. It works, so I do it. Someone says something that isn’t– particularly polite or is completely rude to someone else? No. I don’t believe that’s something that should be tolerated. So if I’m going to hit the guy? I’m going to hit the guy.”

She isn’t sure that Alana will either.

“Of course it’s an adventure,” Alana says, and she holds the door open for the other on the way out. Smiling, pushes a hand through dark hair, catches those mildly ravaged knuckles with a touch of pain, but it’s ignored and unnoticed, “Every solitary, confined moment in life is one. Minute to minute is an adventure. Therefore, and since I don’t know you until right now, every minute getting to know you? Adventure.”

She stopped just in front of her teacher, a bright smile on her face. “I’m well, thank you very much! How are you?” She could hardly keep herself quiet long enough to hear the answer before she had to share her news.

Miss Honey was doing well.  She was doing very well.  Or, at least, she was doing as well as she normally was, which is to say that she was doing well enough to get by.  She found herself mimicking Matilda’s smile when she replied, “I’m quite well,” but also knew to hold herself back, to listen.

Sometimes, the young future-Doctor-Bloom thinks about why she has such a contempt for that kind of kindness, that kind of innocence. Because she’s never naturally been that kind. (Her hands weren’t meant for hurting, but she’s going to have to grow into that.)

Her fingers curl into the fabric of her light pink dress - old and perhaps over-sized, something her aunt bought, wore once, and despised, threw out - she’d claimed it, then, as she always did with the possibility of new clothes, and taken great care to hand stitch the modified pieces together.  It is still too big, but she has grown used to such sizes.  She has not had anything that truly fit her in such a long time.

“There is never a void moment in the process of healing,” Jenny says, and perhaps her voice is softer there.  “No matter how much you are beaten down, there is always something worth getting back on your feet.”

(She can tell the cashier, for example, whose name is Diane, that she’s in love with the dimple at the corner of her mouth. She can tell Richard in aisle two that she’s in love with how his hands move when he speaks. Facts of life. Rolls off her shoulders.)