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Leo knew what it was like to be hungry. He knew what it was like to have that damp, biting chill seep through his flesh and make its home in his bones. He knew what it was like to wake up sore and bruised and aching on a cement floor, and he knew what it was like to force a smile the next day and pretend like everything was fine. Leo Valdez knew suffering, and he knew it came most often at the hands of people who were supposed to take care of him.
Not all of Leo’s foster families were bad, of course. Some of them just didn’t work. He was a lot to deal with, more than even the best placements could handle, and they had to let him go. They always said it was for his own good, and they sounded like they truly believed it every time. He tried not to hold that against them when he wound up in a bad placement next.
Of all of his bad placements, Teresa was, by far, the worst. She had one of those pre fabricated houses that was designed to look old-fashioned, dolled up nice and pretty, but the walls were cheap plaster, and Leo knew instinctively that the foundation would crumble within the decade. The walls were all painted soft pastel colors that her husband hated, and every room had at least half a dozen decorative crosses scattered around. Looking back, that should have been the first red flag. Leo had learned from an early age that the more someone wanted you to think she was a good christian lady, the less likely she was to actually be one. Teresa wore that lesson like a badge of honor and wielded it like she was the righteous hand of god.
She never, ever hit him, though; she was too clever for that. She’d gotten her talons into Leo’s flesh, and she wasn’t going to let him go just because her cruelty was sloppy. As far as anyone was concerned, she was a fantastic foster mom. Leo had his own room, filled with everything a twelve-year-old boy could want, and a pantry stuffed to the bursting with every snack imaginable. The story she told to all the neighbors was that Leo just “preferred” to sleep alone in the unfinished basement in the pitch dark and kneel on rice while he counted every grain before he allowed himself dinner. Kids were just kooky like that sometimes.
The most important thing aboutTeresa was that she loved rules. She loved structure and routines and painfully precise time sheets. She loved homogeny. Everything always, always had to fit exactly into the little mental box she’d prepared for it, and if it didn’t, she wasn’t shy about using force to make it fit. Leo was all jagged, broken pieces that didn’t fit into anything, and Teresa hated him for it. She’d watch him and her lip would curl in disgust and she’d swear to her god that she’d sand down all his rough edges into nothing.
“You’re in Texas, darlin’,” she said in a tone like honey laced with rattle snake venom. “Good American boys don’t speak Spanish, now do they?”
“N-No, ma’am,” Leo wheezed. His eyes burned, and his knees had somehow gone past numbness and all the way back into pain. This was one of Teresa’s favorite chores for him to do. She always kept a wire cooling rack in the deep freezer, and she’d have Leo kneel on it while he scrubbed the bathroom floor with the harshest chemicals she could find. She’d always stand there and watch him, making sure he bleached every inch of the floor and his soul spotless.
“Leonard, speak clearly when you’re addressing me. Mumbling is rude.”
Leo wanted to scream. His name was Leo. Not Leonard, not Leon, not Leonel or whatever foul name Teresa had decided to label him with that day. His mamá had always told him that she’d deliberately named him after her favorite uncle. He’d never gotten to meet Uncle Emilio, but he had always carried that name with pride. Now that pride buckled under the weight of industrial-strength bleach and acrylic nails. He sucked in as deep a breath as his lungs would allow and spoke as carefully as possible. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”
Teresa reached down and combed her long, sharp nails through his hair. When he flinched she smiled. “There’s a good boy, Leonard. We’ll get all those bad habits trained out of you before too long, just you wait. We just have to keep working, don’t we?”
Leo turned his attention to the floor, and when his eyes stung, it had nothing to do with the cleaner.
Leo sat straight up in bed with a harsh, ragged gasp. He could feel the ghost of chemicals burning his throat, and the affectionate yank of claws in his curls. He forced his eyes to focus on the scratchy bedspread beneath his clenched fists. He started counting in Spanish, shoving the terrified sounds past clenched teeth, just so he wouldn’t forget the shape of them on his tongue. He wasn’t twelve anymore, he was fifteen. He wasn’t with Teresa, hadn’t seen her in years, he was at Wilderness school. And yet, even now with all his desperate self assurances, his eyes still stung, and he forced the tears to stay back.
“Leo?”
Leo froze for a split second before he whipped his head up and silently cursed himself for being so, so stupid. Of course he’d forgotten about Piper. He’d gone and made a commotion and now she was sitting in her little bunk across the room, staring at him like he was a science fair project. She was all sleep-rumpled and her Hello Kitty PJ shirt was hanging off her shoulder but she made no move to fix it, she was too busy observing. “Sorry,” he managed to cough out, trying to stabilize his breathing through sheer force of will.
Piper just kept watching him. She didn’t come any closer, which he was grateful for. His skin felt like it was stretched paper-thin over his bones, and if she touched him, even gently, he was sure to shatter. Her gaze was already heavy enough. “What are you sorry for?”
“Can we not do this?” he gritted out. “I woke you up. Sorry. It won’t happen again.” Even as he said the words, he knew it was an empty promise. He would wake her up again, assuming he ever let himself sleep around her again, and they both knew it.
Piper didn’t call him out on it, though, she just hummed softly. “Do you wanna talk about it?”
The words hung in the empty space between them, filling the room until Leo couldn’t breathe. Surprisingly, the answer to her question was yes. He wanted to tell her so bad. He wanted to finally, finally get the words out, to carve the ugly, disgusting experience out of his chest and force someone else to look at it. But he couldn’t. How could he possibly ever get all of the nasty, insidious things that Teresa did to him to sit tidy in a series of words? Even if it was possible, how could he stomach it, knowing that’s exactly what she’d want him to do? To categorize, sanitize, and put each and every feeling right where it belonged. But even still, he couldn’t force himself to refuse. Instead, he just screwed his eyes shut and bowed his head.
Piper didn’t ask him to speak. Instead, she just made a soft noise and got out of her bed. She paused at the edge of his and looked at him, face open and unexpectant. “You mind if I sit? You can say no, if you want.”
Leo’s throat threatened to swell up as he replayed the words in his head like a lullaby. You can say no, if you want. You can say no. Say no. If you want. He felt a full-body shudder roll through him, and silently scooted over. She stayed just as quiet and climbed into the bed without a word. She sat there, right next to him, pressed together from shoulder to hip, without complaint, without demanding or even asking anything of him. She just stayed until he remembered how to breathe.
When Leo felt a bit more like a human person and less like a powder keg, he managed to force his eyes open. Piper had her hand on her own thigh, palm up and waiting for him. She didn’t try to touch him, other than where they were leaning against one another, but she was offering. Just willing to give him whatever he needed without wanting anything in return. The sight made Leo’s breath hiccup again.
With shaking, trembling fingers, he reached out for her. He hovered, just out of reach, watching for the twitch of a trap ready to spring shut on him, but it never happened. If anything, Piper’s hand just relaxed even more, practically melting into a puddle on her lap. Leo sucked in a terrified breath and closed the distance. He ran the pads of his finger tips over the lines of her palm, noting how they trembled from the ticklish pressure, but never clenched. He lined their fingers up, and huffed out a quiet laugh when he noticed how short hers were compared to his. “You’ve got, like, comically stubby fingers. You know that?” he asked, and his voice was thick and ragged, but it still sounded like his.
Piper blew a raspberry at him, but she let him keep playing with her hand. “I’ve got totally normal fingers. You’ve got, like, weird spindly spider fingers.”
“My mamá used to call them pianist’s fingers,” he told her, and he was surprised to find that the mention of his mother didn’t leave him feeling hollow. “I mostly just use them for tinkering, though.”
“And origami,” Piper reminded him. “The peacock you made in history was really cool.”
Leo let out a soft hum and thumped his head down on her shoulder, and in response she rubbed her cheek on his curls. She still didn’t grab him, though, she kept her hands to herself. He chewed his bottom lip for a minute before he spoke. “I, uh, I’m sorry I bailed on you with bathroom cleaning. It was my stupid idea that got us in trouble, and when it came time to face the music, I ditched you.”
“I was a little peeved,” Piper admitted, and Leo felt his shoulders slacken. He’d been worried she would pretend she wasn’t mad, which would have been so much worse. “But I’m kinda starting to get the feeling there might be a tragic backstory.”
“I’m an orphan, Pipes, there’s a tragic backstory for the way I tie my sneakers,” he drawled, and his chest felt a bit lighter when she giggled, but it only lasted a moment. He cleared his throat and swallowed bile to keep talking. “I, uh, had this one foster mom named Teresa. She was…”
“The worst?” Piper supplied, and Leo coughed out a harsh laugh at the understatement.
“That doesn’t even begin to cover it,” he said darkly. “Anyway, she, um, she made me clean the bathroom a lot, and it’s just a thing now, I guess.”
As soon as the words left his lips, Leo wanted to curl into a ball of shame over how pathetic they were. He sounded like such a baby. Oh, poor little Leo Valdez who had to do chores and has nightmares about it years later. His mind filled with the thought of Ms. Stanton, his caseworker, frowning at him when he’d tried to tell her about Teresa. Words had failed him then, stumbling over his tongue and unable to express what was really happening, and he’d been sent back to Teresa’s pastel nightmare with a warning that some kids would think themselves lucky to be in his shoes.
Miraculously, Piper didn’t ask questions. She just nodded like that made all the sense in the world. “Fair enough. I can’t stand lavender scented anything because that was one of my dad’s assistant’s favorite candle scents. I hated her.”
Leo let out a little wheezing laugh. “Yeah? I’ll avoid it next time I’m shopping for Febreeze.”
“I appreciate that.”
They were silent for a bit longer while Leo sifted through his thoughts, desperately trying to squish them into solid little balls and string them into a sentence, something that made even a little sense. But then Piper’s hand moved, and she curled her fingers around Leo’s, not tight enough to hold him in place, just close enough to feel. “You don’t have to explain yourself, you know?” she told him softly. “I don’t have to know the details, if you’re not ready to share them. You can have nightmares and hangups on chores, and I won’t ask questions.”
Leo swallowed thickly, and he pressed their hands closer together. “Yeah?”
She nodded. “You don’t need permission to feel stuff, and react however your brain needs you to. You can just… be.”
“Just be?”
“Yeah, just be the guy who wakes up in the middle of the night. Be the guy who folds weird origami birds and bails on me when we have bathroom duty. Just take up space and be Leo.” She knocked their heads together, and Leo could hear the smile in her voice when she said, “I am gonna demand that you still be my best friend, though.”
Leo laughed and squeezed her hand so tight it must have hurt, but she said not a word. “I think I can manage that.” Then he paused and cleared his throat. “Um, but what if I wanna be the guy who talks about it? One day, I mean.”
“Then I’ll be the girl who listens to it,” Piper said, like it really was that easy. “And we’ll both be the people who are best friends in this awful place.”
Leo hummed softly in thought. “I think I’d be alright with that. One day.” Then he cleared his throat. “But for tonight, we maybe should go back to sleep.”
She hummed at him. “Do you want company?”
He thought about that. Her words from before echoed in his mind. You can say no. He shook his head. “Maybe one day.”
“One day,” Piper confirmed with one last nod. She kissed him on the cheek, and got up to return to her bunk. “Good night, Leo.”
“Good night, Pipes.”
The room went quiet, then filled with Piper’s soft snores while Leo stared up at the ceiling. One day, he’d told her. One day, he’d figure out how to make sense of himself, and he’d give it to her, and she’d take it without hesitation. His chest tightened for a split second before relaxing, and as he shut his eyes, his mouth curved up into a smile.
He was looking forward to one day.