#redthreadwrites

Okay, so, Brent is in the habit of picking up strays–that’s why the Morland-Daugherty-Porter house is full of cats. But the first time he comes home trailing an underfed fifteen-year-old, Vic and Belle are understandably concerned. “Hear me out,” Brent says, “Her parents kicked her out and I found her hiding behind a stall at the farmer’s market and I couldn’t just leave her there.”

She’s not officially a foster child, and even though Vic was sure from the start that he wanted to help as many foster kids as possible, she really seals the deal for all three of them. She fights to be legally emancipated, wins, and that’s how they pseudo-adopt a baby lesbian who swears like a sailor, lies like the devil, and loves to cook.

Name: Holly Anders, but when she and Brent first meet she’s reading The Catcher in the Rye and won’t tell him her name, so he just calls her Holden and it sticks.

Likes: Video games, waffles, Vic’s turtles, the ocean, driving. 

Dislikes: Cleaning, loud noises, grape jelly, bubblegum, socks.

First word: “What the shit, man?!”

Appearance: Messy, but endearing. Brent teaches her a lot of intricate braids, so she’s usually wearing one that’s been slept in for a day or two. Lots of flannel, and oversized sweaters stolen from Belle.

Which parent they look more like: She takes after her dad, which she doesn’t like to think about. (See below.)

Which parent they like more: Listen. She imprints on Brent like a baby duck. Belle and Vic are (again) understandably concerned, because Brent is a bastion of Bad Choices and Poor Coping Mechanisms, but they have a lot of talks about family and responsibility and the things that scare them and also he braids her hair and teaches her Important Things like punching people and how to pick out produce and the best way to make puppy eyes at the others.

Height once fully grown: Probably 5′9″. Wendy’s really excited to have someone shorter than her, but then she grows and Wendy pouts because she’s always going to be smol.

Job ambition:She discovers that she really loves to cook, and then she discovers that she LOVES science, so she convinces Vic to help her do a bunch of really cool, bizarre stuff and she’s probably going to end up one of those people with a weird dessert shop making cool, bizarre sweets.

dani how dare you disrespect this family

(Kiss Kiss Fall in Love ~♪)

First, there is a man: one who looked at the one-hat town in which he was born and raised his sister on the road, until she could flash her big, pretty eyes and get whatever she wanted and grew outside of him; there is a man, and he takes all the stories he ever learned studying the stars and telegraphs them down to earth, because if his parents taught him anything, it’s that people will always do what you expect and nothing is new.

Then there is another, somewhere between brother and lover and friend, who never quite follows his written roles as intended, but is always just so earnest there’s never any room for doubt; he’s an engineer or a scientist or a mathematician, and he’s so kind and soft and slow-moving that you’ll never expect or detect his sleight-of-hand.

In some ways, this is a story about a girl–a girl who loves stories, who can recite any number word-perfect at the drop of a hat, but can’t see through the dust to pull the threads of her relatively uncomplicated life into place; her mother used to tell her that adventure is a genie that cannot be folded back into its bottle, but she only ever heard that to mean that magic is real.

Today these three are coming together.

Instagram Aesthetics; Drew de Luca