✏️ Under One Roof

2. One New Home

It seemed like hours just to drive from the station to the new house. Maybe they hadn't taken the best route, because Mr Spanner didn't know the area. Or maybe he was getting used to a new car that was almost as old as Tegan. But from the point of view of the morose girl in the passenger seat, it was an eternity without explanation. In between her dad's stressed fragments of conversation, she couldn't think of anything to say. She didn't even have anything to think about, save how her new stepbrother would treat her.

She was sure he would start with some show of dominance. Would he want to show that he was strong, or would he try to make her feel weak first? She tried to guess which would take priority, but she really didn't know. Perhaps more important was whether he would go first for physical or mental superiority. If he tried flexing to show off strength, she might be able to undercut his confidence by showing that she didn't care. If he tried to put her in her place with immediate acts of violence – what her mother had always called 'playing rough' – that wouldn't be an option. And if he could see one of her emotional weak points, that would be a real problem. She'd heard that he had been offered some kind of scholarship, but had been forced to turn it down due to his temperament. Maybe that meant he was an angry jock; or maybe he was actually smart but had gotten in more trouble even than her brothers. That was possibly the worst case scenario for Tegan, because she knew it would be hard to ignore someone insulting her intelligence or looking down on her.

Tegan had no idea what she would be facing; she'd seen so many different kinds of bullying from the boys she'd known at school, always trying to ensure they were in control, even if she hadn't been a real target for most of them, and she didn't know whether the new brother would be remotely similar to the three she was trying to avoid. And she didn't have a clue how much support she could expect from her father, when it was his boyfriend's son causing the problems. He'd said that they needed to 'help' Ness, which in Tegan's experience probably meant giving him everything he wanted in the hope he would somehow decide he didn't need to hurt anyone else. All she could plan for was her own defence. And by the time thee car pulled into a residential neighbourhood, she had thought of a dozen elaborate plans with no possible hope of working.

The closest she had to a usable plan was just watching what he said, and what he didn't say. If she could deduce his insecurities, she would have something she could use to keep it in check. And if she spotted them soon enough, she could make sure that she started out at the top of the pecking order. She just needed to be observant, and hope that he wouldn't start trying to break her down right away.

The house was unimpressive. The door was a white-painted slab with a tiny panel of frosted glass. There was a window either side, and another two upstairs. There was a garage on one side, probably too small for about half the cars on the street, and beyond that a space of just an inch or two separated the house from its neighbours. The identical house on the other side was just as close, and Tegan guessed that access to the backyard would only be possible through the house. It looked like someone had poured out a solid cube of despair and painted windows on the front; a street of dozens of units that varied only in the level of disrepair, or the height of the weeds around tiny threadbare lawns.

"Want to go inside?" her dad said, and Tegan quickly realised that he had already stopped the car in the driveway, and was waiting for her to disembark. It was so easy to get lost worrying, and not to realise what was going on around her. That was another thing that she needed to avoid when she met the enigmatic Ness.

Tegan nodded, and opened the car door. She didn't take her bag with her, not yet. She didn't know what to expect, and some instinct needed to be ready to run at a moment's notice, not loaded down. So she stood and walked over to the front door of their new home. They had already received a set of keys, and the first thing her dad had done was getting a second set made for Tegan. He wanted to make it clear to her that this was a home, even if she hoped to move away to a different college when their financial situation improved a little. So she fumbled the key into the lock, tried to turn it, and nothing moved. With a brief complaint under her breath she tried the other one, and this time it worked as she had hoped.