Foster Forest (15): Mistakes They Made

Lizzie glared at the two girls who stood next to their social worker in the front room. Ms Becky seemed to be talking comfortably with the young woman with the black hair, and the smaller of the two girls was looking around the room, her blue eyes wide as she took in everything that the Foster Forest home had to offer. They were pretty, and both girls had the same dark, dark brown hair and blue eyes. The older girl was quite tall; in fact, she was taller than Ms. Becky, and very slender as well. She might be mistaken for a grown women if she had the curves that came with adulthood. The younger girl was petite, not much taller than Lizzie was herself. Her hair was shorter, cropped close to her head in a very grown up style that the ten year old didn't particularly like. The older one's hair fell close to her waist in twin braids.

At once Lizzie didn't like them. For one thing, she didn't like the way that the older girl was dressed. Her skirt was too short and she was wearing a blouse with a neckline that showed off the little swell of her budding breasts. The younger one wouldn't have been so bad except that she kept staring at everything as though she was in awe. Worse, Becky was smiling at both of them from ear to ear and spending time talking to the social worker.

The founder of The Forest had been so irritable lately that Lizzie had just been avoiding her, though that was nothing new. The home without books, however, caused the ten year-old to branch out more and seek other things to do. There was nothing to read since the fire that had consumed all of the books from the library, so she'd been forced to play outside with Jackson on the new playground equipment and even to spend time with Peter cleaning up the kitchen and scrubbing down windowsills and baseboards. It was boring and it was tedious and there were things she would much rather be doing.

It was bad enough that nearly the past week had been spent with Cody in a bad mood because of nightly punishments. Lizzie wasn't supposed to know about that, but she heard the grown ups talking often enough, and she'd caught on. Cody was in big trouble for the book burning, and before that for the stuff that he'd had on his computer, before that got taken away too.

Lizzie hated Cody. She would have been indifferent if he hadn't risked taking his laptop into the library that day while she was reading. The images on the screen were so disgusting, and they reminded her of how much it had hurt. At first Cody scared her, and she'd thought that maybe he would be just like the one guy, the guy who had called her Beth. To make matters worse, Cody was insistent on calling her Betsy, which not only rubbed her the wrong way but it also reminded her of being called Bethy, which was a name reserved for those special occasions when he...

Blinking several times rapidly, Elizabeth brought herself back to the present. She stood up from where she had been sitting at the bottom of the stairs watching and eavesdropping and went into the kitchen. Peter had been through earlier, scrubbing everything in a mad fury, and the usual lock was on the fridge to keep Jackson out. She sighed, bored out of her mind. She couldn't even eat when she was in one of these moods! Lizzie glanced at the clock and saw that it was nearly four o'clock. Dinner would be ready in an hour anyway. In the meantime, there wasn't much to do. Cody was in the Great Room and she was pretty sure she'd seen Jackson follow him in there. She didn't want to be near the two of them, and she wasn't in the mood to go wandering around outside. She only hoped that perhaps Peter was at the bookstore buying the things on her list so that she'd have something new and different to do. One more day of cleaning and she thought she might crack.

"Liz!" Becky called, and Elizabeth felt a flood of relief rush through her as she trotted out into the entrance to see what her guardian wanted. The social worker, she noticed, was gone, leaving only Becky and the two girls, with Cody and Jackson off in the other part of the room. She put on her best smile, beaming up at the older girl and then the younger, the one she thought might be a year or so older than her.

"Hi," she said, turning her attention up to Becky.

"Lizzie, this is Felicity," Becky said, gesturing toward the older girl. Felicity just gave Lizzie a "look" and rolled her eyes away, crossing her arms over her chest. It was obvious that she wasn't in a position to be particularly friendly to the ten year old, and Lizzie just gave her a snotty look right back. "And this is Carly," Becky went on, acting as though nothing had happened.