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unchartedthelostlegacy · 30 days

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So maybe the meeting with Meenu's teacher hadn't been handled in the best way. Chloe was ready to accept that. A little.

Maybe the notes like "speaks out of turn" and "disturbs classmates" had touched a nerve. So she's an extrovert--admirable actually--I was so quiet and miserable at that age did not elicit a positive response from Mrs Macquarie. "Miss Fraz--Miss Frazer. If you will let me finish--" and what's this about 'she stares out the window too much'? I did that? What're windows for? "Miss Frazer if you will take the time to read the rest of the note, the problem is Meenu demonstrates limited engagement in subjects she is not interested in."

Bursting out laughing in her seat at this certainly hadn't endeared Chloe to the educator.

The bespectacled woman took in a sharp breath and pinched between her eyes. "You mentioned not having documentation of any of her previous education."

"In her circumstanc--"

"I bring this up only because attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is often diagnosed under the age of five."

"Bugger!" Chloe's temper had flipped. She shot to her feet from the cheap sweat-smelling chair. "She's a kid! They get bored at school!"

"Charming," the woman said icily. "Meenu's 'boredom' affects her classmates. She threw a sausage roll at a boy in her class."

"He asked for it."

"Excuse me?"

"Really," Chloe said. "He literally asked for it. He said was hungry and she chucked him a snack and he caught it."

"It was still not appropriate behaviour during lecture. Do you happen to throw things at each other at home?"

Chloe couldn't answer. Yes, she was forgetting her keys and having the ten-year-old toss them out a window to her in the parking lot multiple times a week. Yes, remotes, bananas, laundry, sunnies were often airborne in their household. Meenu had thrown a 12-pack of loo roll into her hands from eight supermarket aisles away.

"She grew up in a shop in a loud, crowded market," Chloe muttered.

"And what does this--"

"Sitting in one quiet and boring place for hours just doesn't work for every kid. She's doing better than I ever did. It's an adjustment for her."

Meenu wasn't at the top of her class, okay. But she excelled in some of the things that Chloe thought mattered most. And she was the youngest on the debate team despite still having a low reading level for her age.

"I am recommending an ADHD evaluation for Meenu," Mrs Macquarie said, like she hadn't heard her. "Regardless of your excuses, both you and her would benefit from taking this more seriously."

"Right," Chloe snapped as the snitch papers were scooped off the desk. "What's another drug to a kid?"

"It's a well-documented treatment that can change a child's future for the better," Mrs Macquarie had stood up and walked out from behind the desk and now waited by the door. "If it comes to that. There are treatment options beyond 'another drug'."

"Yeah?" Chloe said as she turned on a Chelsea boot heel. "You'd have stuffed me with pills thirty years ago with the way I wasn't paying attention, mate."

"And you may well have benefited, Miss Frazer. Good day."

Now, sitting in the car looking into the middle distance (meaning a Macca's and a concerningly phallic owl statue) Chloe wanted to bite something harder than her lip.

She shouldn't have said all that, yes.

But what was she supposed to say?

Her mum had never attended anything like this on her behalf. Leah Frazer could barely walk in a straight line most of Chloe's childhood after losing Mahit, how would she keep an eye on her daughter's grades or lack thereof? Would she even have cared? Had she?

"You were stuffing yourself with pills," Chloe muttered into the steering wheel. "Maybe you'd have liked them drugging me too. Give us something in common."

No, that wasn't a spiral she needed to go down now.

This was about the childhood Meenu was currently experiencing. There was only one thing to do right now.

Chloe pulled her phone out and hit Nadine's name in the frequent called list. The ex-Shoreline leader hardly got a single syllable of the word "Hello" out before being subjected to ten minutes of play-by-play color commentary of the parent teacher conference.

"...can you believe that, china?!"

Chloe only noticed the fact there was dead silence on the line moments after, and checked the powersave-darkened screen sheepishly to make sure Nadine hadn't just hung up on her.

"Nadine? Er. How was your week? How was the--"

"Boring," Nadine said flatly.

"Which--"

"Both."

"But you were looking forward to--"

"I went at the wrong time of year."

"Well," Chloe said, "you can hardly blame Iceland for your poor ability to research--"

"Say that again," Nadine said with a voice like a knife. "My researching ability is unparalleled."

"You thought it was winter at the top of the globe too," a smile was creeping onto Chloe's face. "Got a faceful of sunlight the whole time, did you. Rookie mistake."

"I haven't had a vacation before."

The words hung in the air so solemnly that Chloe couldn't even quip anything back.

Nadine had wanted some time to process losing Shoreline and how much of her identity and personal power it held for her. A quiet trip alone sounded perfect.

But had she actually spent the whole time tossing and turning, jet lagged to hell, circadian rhythm haywire, thinking about how she'd failed and how different her life was now?

"China...you'll get to see it next time. You'll have a clearer head to enjoy it, too."

She heard the other woman sigh. Then: "Do you want me to be honest? I'm with her teacher."

"Oh, shut the fuck up, whore."

"Whore yourself," Nadine fired back.

"Double whore."

"What did you expect? Her teacher just wants her to be a student."

Chloe didn't have an answer.

Nadine said, an edge creeping into her voice again, "I do, too. You let her play Dead by Daylight at age ten--"

"I knew you would bring that up!" Chloe quiet-shouted. "She's been through serious shit, that game's not gonna--"

"--my parents had me doing extra homework on top of my homework from school--

"--and you still go to Iceland on a month there's no Northern Lights--"

"--you can tell her you'll love her no matter what her grades are, but that doesn't mean you don't care about her grades," Nadine said. "It's the opposite."

Chloe swallowed. The shadow of a truck in the distance flickered over the dashboard. It reminded her how bright the sunset was getting, and she put down the visor.

"I do care," Chloe mumbled, looking down at the keys she was fidgeting with. And then, quietly, "she says reading's really hard for her."

"You didn't tell the teacher that," Nadine sounded accusatory.

"Because she wouldn't have fucking believed me," Chloe bit into her lip. "The asshole didn't listen, china. Meenu says when she's staring at the book and trying really hard and listening to everyone else turning their pages faster it feels like she's the stupidest person on earth. And when they make her stay later during break to finish it. I remember them doing that to me. Fat lot of good it did, too."

Nadine said, softly, "And you reminded her that she's above-average in maths?"

Of course Meenu was above-average in maths. Any manipulative shopkeeper latchkey kid worth their salt would be. Meenu had the eerie power of guessing the sum of a coin purse's contents by weight.

"Not the word problems."

Nadine snorted. "You're lying. They don't still do those."

"I wish. Sorry for taking up so much of your time, love. Bet you've got better people to get called names by."

As she said it, Chloe looked at the screen again, and was thrown for a loop that it had been almost an hour.

"Stop letting her watch TV so much," Nadine said.

As if on cue, Chloe unlocked her flat to:

-a child cross-legged on the rug in front of the television

-an AusPol channel blaring, and

-popcorn everywhere, including an almost-empty bag in Meenu's lap. As if they didn't own bowls.

"Meenu."

The girl didn't show any sign of having heard her. Maybe watching Aussie politicians scream at one another was Meenu's homework for the debate club, but she loved it. Chloe bit her lip, hands on her hips, squeezed her eyes shut, and made a 180-degree turn.

The fridge, a vault of solace, opened too easily to reveal a treasure trove of her beloved ice-cold Lager flanked by the yogurt and pasta sauce.

Just one. Just one to make a difficult conversation easier.

Chloe let the fridge close and picked the bottle opener magnet off the door, or was about to. But it had been propping up their calendar. It had been a gift from a Chinese buffet nearby, each month a different painting, this one of a lake with shadows of distant birds and mountains in the background that reminded Chloe of the Western Ghats. Today's date was circled in red marker with meeting with Mrs Macquarie, DON'T BE LATE in her handwriting.

But she had been late.

She'd walked into that room fifteen minutes late blaming the traffic and still had the nerve to speak like that to Meenu's teacher.

How would that reflect on Meenu?

No wonder Nadine had sided with the opponent.

"Meenu!" Chloe said, louder.

Thus summoned, the girl shook herself, pushed off the floor, and waddled over, shoveling the remaining kernels into her mouth like a zombie.

"Turn the TV off," Chloe said tersely.

Meenu's eyes were suddenly sharply awake. She screwed her face up.

"Macquarie is an idiot," she said.

"This isn't about her."

"Yes it is," Meenu's fists were clenched. Chloe could see her little jaw tightening. "Macquarie's out to get me. She hates my accent."

"You don't have an accent, love--"

"Everyone has an accent."

"Look," Chloe folded her arms, "Miss Youngest-In-The-Debate-Club, there's a time and a place."

"She grabbed my shirt and said I smell bad."

"Meenu, you are lying."

Like a little mirror, Meenu folded her arms. "Why would I lie about that?"

"Because they didn't even do that to me," Chloe said, crouching down to her level. She pushed Meenu's flyaway strands behind her ears. "Thirty years ago. If they really think you're dirty, they don't touch you except to beat you."

"Well," Meenu said, "She thinks I smell bad. She makes that face whenever she looks at me."

"And you should have said that. Don't lie to me."

If Nadine was here. Oh, if Nadine was here. She would have either been laughing her gorgeous butt off or fuming.

Chloe straightened up. "She got mad that you talk a lot in her class and she thinks you aren't trying hard enough. Look. Meenu. Honey...she doesn't see what's going on in your head. She thinks you're just not paying attention. Meenu. Meenu..."

As she'd been talking, disbelief, embarrassment, disgust crossed over Meenu's features like shadows on a wall. She almost immediately covered them with a mask of defiance, but it was too late. Chloe saw a tear run from the corner of her right eye as she blinked, a shiny line on her cheek.

It reminded her too much of Nadine. Maybe every little girl destined to be a leader had the same hurt buried.

"Macquarie's an idiot," Meenu repeated.

"Here's what we're gonna do," Chloe said. "I don't want to meet with her again. At least not about this. You've got three hours after you get home, no TV--"

"Three hours?!"

"--I'll check up on you three times and you gotta have everything done by six. if you want to watch anything. Or play any games. Got it?"

"I'm going to talk at class five times more," Meenu said angrily. "I'm going to start a fire."

"Oh, aren't you adorable. I tried to burn the place down when I was your age, too," Chloe finally snapped the top off the slightly-less-cold beer and returned the tool to the calendar. "They make schools hard to light up 'coz of the bushfires here."

She'd had a lightbulb moment. Meenu didn't have to feel rushed with her reading if she read ahead at home. Which...if what she told Chloe had some truth to it, Macquarie would claim her better work away from class was due to Chloe's help.

And three hours of reading at home was still a form of torture for Meenu, but at least it came with the company of her parrot and whatever Kpop band she was into this week, right?

#chloe frazer #meenu #uncharted #the lost legacy #adoptivemom!Chloe #kidfic #fanfic #Meenu does eventually fall in love with reading don't worry!#chlodine #but in the background tbh #nadine ross #there is an overabundance of places bearing the name Macquarie in Australia and it's dumb #Meenu the debate club champion tbh #public speaking would come naturally to her #Chloe: I'm not good at the people thing #Meenu: I am *only* good at the people thing

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unchartedthelostlegacy · 6 months

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Meenu sat straight up in bed. She was dreaming. No, she wasn't. She had a sensation of being adrift in a boat. She had been carried, half-asleep, from the sofa she'd slid down into. Papa had lifted her and put her head gently on his shoulder and brought her to her room.

No, he hadn't.

She pushed off the woven blankets and put her feet on the floor. It shocked her with cold. The memories were lying.

She wasn't in India anymore. And her father could no longer hold her in his arms.

The hurt shouldn't have sickened her. The loneliness before finding out had been bad enough. There should be a natural high-water mark to the pain a child should feel, and Meenu had learned this wasn't the case.

She couldn't see the comic books stacked on the floor by her bed anymore, or the hand-me-down Lord of the Rings posters. Meenu pulled her feet back up and curled into her pillow, fighting the sobs.

There was a sound in the flat of something, maybe a frying pan, or a mug, being set down, and then Meenu heard the door open. She curled deeper into the pillow and dragged the blanket-scarf over her damp face.

"Oh ace hiding job," chided the lady in her thick accent.

Meenu rolled over and pressed her face into the bed, not breathing, to hide her sobs. She struggled when Chloe pulled back the covers and pushed her back on her side.

"Back off!"

"Don't start," Chloe said.

"Leave me alone!"

"C'mon, kid. It's okay."

Meenu inchwormed until she pressed her forehead into her mattress, teeth gritted. "You're so lonely," she snapped at Chloe.

"What?"

"You're always lonely. You're just pretending. You're always looking at your stupid photo of miss Ross."

"Maybe," a grin snapped Chloe's moonlit face in two. "I like photography."

Meenu couldn't push down the laugh fast enough and coughed, flopping onto her bed.

"You have millions of stupid pictures everywhere!" she said, pointing an accusing finger. "You only look at hers."

"Maybe they're the good ones."

"You're such a bad liar."

Chloe sighed, and her big warm hand grasped Meenu's. "Everyone misses someone, love."

"You don't even know where she is."

"South Africa, likely. In her house," the woman rose from Meenu's bedside, half-turned to the door. "Go back to sleep. School night."

"What if she's dead."

"Oh, she'd hate that."

Another laugh tumbled from Meenu's stomach, unbidden, and Chloe patted her stocking feet before retreating from the room.

Meenu exhaled a sigh and pushed herself back on the mattress, looking at the sad blue of the moonlit square on the wall.

Someone had carried her from the sofa. Her head had rested on someone's not broad, but thin shoulder. To Chloe, Meenu weighed nothing, and Papa's old picture sat in their dining room, watching her continue in his stead.

#meenu #adoptivemom!Chloe #chloe frazer #ficlet #kidfic #chloe is more like a father as a role tbh #and i wanted to explore that #Nadine will come back though #and be shocked honestly that Chloe adopted an entire kid without telling her #Meenu will be overjoyed

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