Done Adulting Vol. 1 Ch. 65

The next day at daycare, Jamie found Ella had beat him there and was already sitting with her sketch pad.

“Hey, Mr. International Incident,” she whispered.

It freaked Jamie out that she knew. “How could you tell?”

“I recognized your shoes.”

“Well, please keep it to yourself.”

“Don’t worry. I keep bigger secrets than this.” I know, Jamie thought.

He leaned over to look at her drawing. “You’re drawing that again?”

“Yeah.”

“The one before looked perfect.”

“They’re perfect. Want me to teach you?” Ella spent the next few hours teaching Jamie the basics of drawing, starting with basic shapes, lines, and how to create the illusion of depth. After three hours, Jamie had managed to draw a sphere. Just the one.

“I wish I had learned to do this as a kid. I never could do anything creative,” he complained.

“Everybody can do something.”

“Well, that’s not true. But point taken. I guess I mean visual art. Or performing art. A talent you can show people and be proud of.”

“Back there I’d probably be a graphic designer or technical illustrator,” Ella mused.

“That wasn’t your goal?”

“Hell, no! I wanted to be an artist, the kind that actually makes a living doing it. I’d probably have ended up the kind of artist who makes a living as a designer and who maybe has a booth at local fairs.”

“So what did you do, before you came here?”

“I was a student.”

“You came here as a student, still in college?”

“Yep. Want to work on the next step of learning to draw?”

“Sure.”

“Draw another four hundred spheres.”

“What if I want to be a cubist?” That got a laugh out of Ella, a good one. She liked that Jamie was clever and could make her laugh. She didn’t seem the type to casually laugh.

“You know art styles?”

“A little. I’ve read books. Ya know, typical art history survey books. Hardly anything about any artist still alive.”

“Probably read the same books.”

“You ever get to see any of the things you read about,” he asked. “I never did. Never got to travel really.”

Ella’s face took on a contemplative visage, and she looked away, remembering. “Once. ‘Travel makes men wiser, but less happy.’”

“What?”

“Thomas Jefferson said that.”

Jamie wasn’t sure what she meant or why she’d quote that. “So … where did you go, the once?”

She slid her sketchbook toward him in response. “There.”

“Just there, or like, the whole city.”

“The city.”

“So …”

She cut him off. “Saw all of the big museums there. Antiquity to the 21st century. Mostly classical period, renaissance, and baroque … funny, in that city nothing really took hold after that. Sort of frozen, like it just ended at baroque.”

Jamie was getting a little tired of her being cryptic. He wasn’t sure she didn’t mean to be, but she was. He tried an almost direct approach. “I’m surprised an agency accepted you when you were still in college.”

She understood what he meant and sighed. She set her pencil down. “Why are youhere, Jamie?”

“I told you already.”

“No, you told me why you go to therapy.”

“Same difference,” Jamie tried to beg off. Why don’t you just say ‘no,’Jamie wondered. But he didn’t say it.

“No, they’re not.”

“Lunchtime!” Jordan announced.

“We’ll talk about it after nap time,” Ella decided.

______________________________________________

They went outside afterward and walked to the back of the field where they’d have some privacy. Ella led the way, walking faster than she usually did.

“Why do you want to know,” he asked.

“Because you do. You’ve been almost asking me since the day after we met.”

“I’m just … curious. You’ve been kinda dangling it there, hinting at plenty of stuff yourself.”

“Well, I’m not a mystery to be solved. If you want to ask, ask and I’ll decided whether to answer.”

“Same.” Jamie wasn’t sure why she was suddenly so short tempered. So she hadn’t been doing it deliberately, but she was still leaving clues in every third sentence. Why would she unless on some level she wanted to talk about it?

“So, I’m asking,” she said.

Jamie sat down on the grass and Ella sat next to him. He told her his whole story, birth through the day he left. All of it. The hurt he suffered, the abuse, the anger, the grief, the hate he couldn’t not feel toward the people who hurt his kids, his inability to be a part of it anymore or worse, a bystander.

“Well,” he asked when he was finished. “Will you tell me now?”

Ella opened her sketchbook and thumbed through it to a random page, setting it in front of Jamie. Same drawing, again. Jamie picked it up.

“I don’t …” he started to say.

“That’s the last thing I remember. Me and a friend went to go see it together. That’s the last thing I remember from home.” She waited for him to say something, and she saw he didn’t understand. “I’m a rescue, Jamie.”

Jamie hadn’t heard the term, but by context he could guess. “You …”

“Were kidnapped. A few hours after being there. And when I woke up …” She turned away and moved her hair aside, revealing the scar. She let hair fall and turned both arms upward, revealing faint scars on the inside of her elbows. She pulled her long dress up, showing the same on the backs of her ankles. She pulled her dress up further, showing her scars on her knees.

“I can’t show you the others dressed … They didn’t want a little who could walk or sit up or move much. The rest they did with drugs.”

“Bigs in …”

“Humans. Kidnap and smuggle littles to the dimension, into countries agencies don’t work with and other countries won’t send littles to … I’ve been gone almost 12 years.” Jamie couldn’t guess what she was feeling. Her body language, her voice, her expression, all like she wasn’t on that field with him. He didn’t say anything.

“Best I can guess, I went out to get a drink after, and someone dosed it. I don’t know if my friend was with me or what happened to her … I just remember standing outside the place, and I started to draw it while we were waiting in line … and then we went in. That’s it. That’s where it stops…

“Then I woke up in this dimension. I only found out later I was in Aidu … Woke up, complete agony … No pills. And I couldn’t move, not for a year at least. And then just my arms. Not enough to hold anything heavy or pull myself up … They pumped me full of drugs that kept me from speaking, and when they wore off and I tried to say something they’d just hit me. Eventually they didn’t need the drugs anymore.”

“How did you escape,” Jamie asked just above a whisper.

“I didn’t. A rescue group rescued me.”

“And you’re afraid if they find you they’ll try to take you back?”

She let out a single laugh with no humor in it. “No. We’re disposable to them. Probably cried for an hour that their ‘baby’ was gone and went to go find some other victim. If they find me, though, they have a clue about the rescue group.”

“It’s not governments?”

“Rumor is that it’s funded by governments and they receive training from governments, but it’s militant abolitionists basically … Terrorists and thieves, they call them in those other countries … ‘Thieves.’ Not even ‘kidnappers’ … They won’t tell me how they did it. I don’t even remember much of it, I was so doped up.”

“They fixed you though? The doctors in Itali?”

“What they could. Even they can’t fix everything.”

“Can you leave? Go home?”

“I … Yes.”

“Why don’t you?” Ella didn’t respond for several minutes.

“Medicine, at first. They can fix me better here.”

“What now? ‘At first?’”

She shrugged. “I’m safer here. No one kidnaps us from Itali … And … I’m not from there anymore,” she said, closing her eyes just longer than a blink as she shook her head. “I can’t … I can’t just go back and live a normal life … I’m happy here; happy enough. I can’t just … What? What would I be back there now? How could I just go back and live like a person again? … It’s not in me anymore … She’s just a memory.”

Jamie looked at the ground between his knees. “Your family?”

“I don’t know. They must think I’m dead … They must’ve made peace with it by now … I did. This place … This is as good as starting over is gonna get … Like resurrection … Difference between you and me Jamie, you forgave the people who hurt you. I wish to god I had the chance to cut their fucking throats.”

It would be justice, Jamie thought. And it would make sure they could never do it to anyone else. Jamie thought back on that Ros couple. He didn’t know what they deserved, what would happen because they were back home where they were the wronged party. What about the littles there? Would the propaganda make their lives even worse?

Ella was right. This world wasn’t better than the one he left; it wasn’t worse, either. It was just a world, and Jamie lived in his piece of it, and for him it was good. For Ella, even, it was good, or least as good as she expected it could be and was willing to accept.

“Is ‘Ellafaire’ your original name,” he asked.

“No … ‘Ellafaire Jenkins.’ That’s me now.”

“How’d you pick it?”

“How’d you pick ‘Jamie.’

“Amanda did.”

“’Ellafaire Jenkins’ is a name I saw on a tombstone in this park we’d go to when I was a kid … This little 19thcentury family cemetery on what used to be a farm, and now it’s inside the park, back in the woods on this trail … She was 22 when she died … I told my mom and dad I wished they’d named me ‘Ellafaire’ … I always thought it was a very pretty name … Now it’s mine.”

“ELLA! STACY’S HERE!” Carrie called from the door.

Jamie shook his head, indicting himself for thoughtlessness. “I’m sorry. I … didn’t mean to pressure you into …”

“You didn’t. Been a long time since someone could make me do something I didn’t want to do,” she said. “So I guess I wanted to. You can tell yours bigs if you want. Just tell them not to spread it any further.” She started to stand, and Jamie jumped up and helped her. She looked at him without any readable expression, none at all. But Jamie recognized it. He’d seen it a handful of times, watched it come and go like a wave against a seawall.

“You ever help me up again without me asking, and I will put you on your fucking ass.”