✅1️⃣ Trusting the Babysitter

Chapter 10 - Being a Good Girl

Adam didn't really know his way around the laundry room, but he guessed that one washing machine was pretty much like another. There was a big basket of clothes here, which the smaller one from the landing would presumably be emptied into. There were probably enough clothes in there to be worth doing a load, but he didn't know what the family's normal routine was. He didn't know where to find laundry detergent either. But that was just logistics, he would find it if he looked all around the room.

"Okay, Claudia. Do you think you can help me like a good girl?"

She glared back and stuck her tongue out, but there was a momentary smile that told him she was amused as much as offended. He was being forced into a role, playing the cruel babysitter, while she was technically free to do whatever she wanted. For all that he was talking down to her, they both knew that she was only playing along because it felt like a good idea to her; and that she could have ordered him to stop talking like that if she really wanted to.

"Right. Then I'm going to start sorting out these clothes. If something got spilled and you need to wash clothes in a hurry, would you normally do a batch of other stuff as well?"

"Yeah," she nodded. "I don't want Mum hearing about this, but those towels need washing now, and she'll notice if they're not in there. So let's do a full wash, one load of whites and one colours. There should be enough time."

"Clever girl. Now, while I do this you need to mop up the puddle on the kitchen floor. Just push the towels over it a few times, until it's all gone. Can you do that by yourself?"

"It's gross," she protested, and made no move back to the kitchen. "I had to do all that for her enough times. Can't you do it?"

"That's why we don't make tinkles on the floor, isn't it?" Adam answered. And he knew that wasn't a fair thing to say, but it was how he'd been told to behave. He had to keep on teasing her, and treating her like a little baby who couldn't help herself, even though he knew it was Lorelei who really needed the punishment. "Now, go and clean up your puddle. Once it's done you can have a little break."

She turned away and went to do it. Maybe to avoid trouble, but more likely because he'd been pretty harsh with the last comment and it could have been taken as a command. He felt guilty about that, and he was sure that it would be only fair for him to experience some kind of punishment later. He could only hope that Claudia would still be willing to talk to him after all of this.

He pushed the worries to the back of his mind for now. He had a job to do, and he knew that it would be quicker if they both did something. He threw Claudia's pee-soaked jeans into the machine, and then started string through everything else in the basket. Finding things that would go in the wash together, to guard against colours running. He wouldn't have worried about it at home, knowing that all of his own laundry went into the same wash anyway. But at someone else's house he didn't want to make some mistake, and he had no way of knowing if there was anything that might need to be washed at a low temperature or something. So he checked the care labels on every garment, while Claudia focused scowling on cleaning the kitchen floor.

"Adam!" Lorelei's yell came from the lounge, and he found himself straightening up immediately. She only shrieked his name, but it still felt like an order and demanded his immediate attention. He was starting to recognise the feeling now. Before he reached the lounge door, he knew that he wouldn't normally have come running right away, and that some people would have ignored the cry completely. But he still didn't quite see how that was possible. The thought of not following an order just didn't seem to make sense. It was like solving quadratic equations, he knew that it had to be possible because some people had mastered it, but it took a lot of mental effort, twisting and turning the question around to get it to fit into his head.

Lorelei was sitting on the couch, glaring at the television.

"I want to watch Thunder Present Rebus!" Lorelei declared. "Make it play."

Adam set about the task right away. He knew that there was a single shelf of DVDs in the corner, mostly taken up by kids' movies for Lorelei. He quickly scanned the stack, and didn't see that name anywhere. It didn't surprise him, because she was old enough now that she was probably able to put a disc in the player herself if she wanted to. So he turned on the television and tried to work his way around the menus on the screen. If it had been the same model as the one his own parents had at home, he would have had no difficulty finding Thunder Presence, whatever that might be. But at the moment it seemed that every model of smart TV had the same options arranged in a completely different way to underline their differences, and this was one he had never used before.

Still, he managed to search. After the first few letters, the system suggested a whole range of TV shows and movies whose titles started with Sparkling Thunder Presence, which Adam thought he had heard of before. A superhero show for little kids, anyway, with new movies to go along with it seemingly every few months. He asked Lorelei if that was what she wanted, and she repeated herself again, expecting him to know exactly what she wanted to watch. She was probably no more demanding than any other little kid, but she was clearly getting used to having her own way. And Adam found that he couldn't object. In the end it turned out that Sparkling Thunder Presence: Redux was a spin-off series aimed at an older demographic. The cute dinosaurs were replaced by scary ones, and there was a warning on the description page that said this version was certainly not suitable for children.

"Yes!" Lorelei squealed. "Put it on now!"

Adam growled as the TV asked him for a PIN number to override the parietal controls. He didn't know what it was, so he had to login to the app as a guest and buy the movie on his own card. It wasn't cheap, but he thought that if it kept the kid occupied while he tried to interact with Claudia, it must be worth the price.