The Scars She Hides

Part 21 - Promises

HOLDEN

She wasnt going to stay.

I could see it the moment Gene and Bronson closed their door for the night. She was going to run.

After dinner Tiffy had forced Charlotte to take the Harry Potter sorting quiz, and then proceeded to herd everyone into the living room to watch her favourite Harry Potter movie. Tiffy had dragged Charlotte to the couch, and planted herself between us.

Any and all scepticism about Charlotte from Tiffy had disappeared the moment talk of books started at the dinner table. I could see it now, the new attachment forming in the young girls eyes.

Charlotte was "cool".

Not cool like me, her "scary privileges" older brother, but cool like an older person like what she liked, and now she had someone to idolise.

Thit did not, however, stop Tiffy from tucking her left hand under her legs at every opportunity.

Tiffy was born with a deformity of her hand, one that affected the nerves and muscles controlling the function of her fingers. At a resting state, her fingers were curled and unfeeling. When Gene and Bronson had taken in Tiffy as a foster she had still been just a toddler. She wasn't old enough to know her hands were supposed to be any different. Like any other kid, she was soon informed by her classmates when she got older that she was- in fact different, and not in a good way. Tiffy soon developed the habit of hiding her hand with whatever she could find. A pocket, a stretched sleeve, behind her back, tucked under her legs... Once Gene and Bronson decided to adopt Tiffy, they moved her school districts, somewhere closer to Gene, and things got better.

When I was still in high school, Gene had been struggling to find a way to motivate me to put any kind of effort into my studies. In the early days under Gene's care, I was just a bad kid with a bad attitude. Still scarred and reeling from my mothers unexpected death, I had predictably gone through a rough stage of acting out.

It wasn't until Tiffy came to stay with the family that I had found any motivation to act like a decent human being. Seeing such a small timid child avoid me out of fear or mistrust had rubbed something in me the wrong way. I was an angry and aggressive teenager ... but the need to be soft was an unexpected wake up call. Every time Tiffy avoided me in those early days, all I could think about were the horrible men who dealt and used drugs with my mother. How was I any better than them, angry and aggressive, scaring anything decent away with one look?

Slowly I had coaxed Tiffy into a begrudging friendship. It had taken weeks of bribes and mind numbing cartoons... But I had formed a soft and tentative relationship with the kid. A single, shining thing that I held close to my aching angry heart.

It was a coincidence that I had attended one of Tiffy's doctor appointments with Gene. I had been suspended for fighting in school, and Gene had to pick me up on her way into town for the appointment. Hearing the doctor's diagnosis and prediction that Tiffy would never be able to use her hand was hard, but expected. Gene and Bronson had known that before fostering her.

Hearing that there were little to no reasonable options for prosthetic assistance was a kick to my chest.

I stewed over that information for weeks. Doing my own research into prosthetics and animatronic assistance. It was Gene who first took notice that something was up. Between the home computers search history, and my sudden interest in robotics class, she figured it out pretty quickly.

She was the one to help my pick up my grades for the remainder of high school, and apply for the engineering scholarship at Atteberry.

The rest is.... Not quite history, but something close to it.