For Enza, who inspires me even when I don't want her to!

Connor Stevens knocked lightly on Ms. Adams' office door.

"Come in!" she called, and Connor pushed the door open. He stepped into the familiar office, and after shutting the door for privacy, took his usual spot across from Ms. Adams' desk.

Ms. Adams was the vice principal of Anchor Beach but she also acted as a guidance counsellor for a lot of people, Connor included. He saw her twice a week, for a lot of different reasons. He had been coming to talk to her for almost two years now; originally, he had started because his father had called Ms. Adams and requested it. Now, he just liked talking to her. She was very sweet and she made Connor feel at home. He had started seeing her right after his own mother had passed away, so he had a very deep appreciation for Ms. Adams.

"Good afternoon." Ms. Adams greeted him with a smile.

"Good afternoon," Connor echoed. "How are you?"

"Great. How was your day?"

"Fine," Connor answered, and he fidgeted in his seat. "I … We have to do volunteer hours for drama class. The teacher handed out assignments first period … But I didn't get one."

Ms. Adams waved a dark hand, dashing away his concerns. "Not to worry. I just wanted to talk to you about where you're going to be doing your volunteer hours instead of just throwing a place at you."

"Is it because of –" Connor started, but then he stopped himself. He didn't like to say it; but the nice thing about Ms. Adams was that he never had to, because she knew exactly what he was talking about.

"Partially," she admitted, and even though Connor had been expecting it, he still resented it. "I have two options for you, although if they don't work I'm sure there are other places. The first is the animal shelter."

"Not good," Connor said quickly. "I'm not supposed to be around animals right now. I had to fight Dad to let me keep Jelly."

Ms. Adams nodded and made a note of something in the folder open to her left. That was the only thing that Connor hated about his meetings with Ms. Adams – her notes. She was his counsellor and he was her student. He knew how it worked. But not a lot of people at Anchor Beach wanted to be friends with him, so Ms. Adams was really the only person he could talk to. He resented the notes because they were a reminder that this wasn't a friendship; that he didn't have a real friendship with anyone.

"We have an open slot for a tutoring job," Ms. Adams said. "Not the one at school but the one at the Youth Centre."

"Are you sure I'm smart enough to tutor kids?" Connor asked, highly doubting that he was smart enough to tutor kids.

Ms. Adams' brown eyes widened at the remark. "Connor, your grades are spectacular."

Of course. He didn't have a social life and he had to keep his father off his back. What did she expect to happen?

"But that's me knowing things," Connor protested. "Not me teaching people things."

"You're a smart kid, Connor," Ms. Adams said. "You'd be helping kids in grades three to four, so it's nothing you can't handle, being fifteen."

"If you say so."

"Do you want this placement?" Ms. Adams asked. "If you don't, we can find you somewhere else. We don't want anyone to be unhappy with their volunteer placements. It's a good opportunity, and we want you to make this most of it. It's a good experience to continue with, especially when it comes to universities."

The cynic in Connor smirked at her comment, but his ordinary self ignored it. Ms. Adams couldn't be hyper aware all the time. Not like Connor and his father were.

"I'll try it," Connor decided hesitantly. "It can't hurt, right?"

"Right." Ms. Adams nodded confidently, her brown curls bouncing about her face. She dug into her pile of papers and pulled out a green sheet. "This will be your schedule, so your first shift will be on Tuesday and the next is on Thursday. It'll be the same every week. If there's any conflicts let me know and we'll work it out."

"Thanks," Connor said. He folded the paper and slid it into his bag.

"And you'll have the same students every week. The two that you have are Michael and Mary. They're twins and they need a little bit of assistance in most areas. If you can't handle the two of them at once then we can relocate one of them to a different tutor."

"I'll try a few sessions with them both," Connor said.

Ms. Adams beamed at the remark and then she folded her hands onto her desk and leant toward him. "So. Really. How was your day?"

*Tuesday*

"Callie," Jude whined, and he scuffed his sneakers along the dirty floor. "Callie."

His sister whipped around, pinning him with her dark eyes. She looked a lot more terrifying than any seventeen-year-old should be able to look, so Jude felt a lot more scared of her than any fifteen-year-old ought to be of their sister. "Quiet. I told you – like I tell you every damn day – that you are going because I'm not having you hang around here all day and getting caught up in –"

"What you're going to do right now?" Jude interrupted. Sometimes he failed to stay scared of Callie and found himself mouthing off to her instead. "Hypocrite."

"Jude Jacob, on the bus," Callie hissed. "Now."

"You're not my mother."

Callie lifted her arm out of reflex, her palm prepared to move at any moment. "Do you remember the last 'mother' we had? The last 'father'?! Do you want to go back there?"

Jude ducked her swing at the last possible moment. Although he knew that he should be stronger by now, tougher, there was still a tear in his bright eyes as he looked at his sister. He watched her face rearrange and become apologetic, like it always did. He shook his head at her – her outbursts had become too plentiful recently. He didn't have to take it. He turned his back on her, slumping toward the door.

"Jude …" He heard her whisper.

"I'm getting on the bus," he mewled. "Isn't that what you wanted?"

He was almost fifteen years old. It was probably time he grew up.

(-.-)

Connor doodled another spiral in the corner of his notebook. He still had a few minutes left on today's hours. His students – tutees? – had already gone home. One of them seemed really sweet and had hung onto his every word. In contrast, the other one hadn't paid him a bit of attention, like Connor hadn't been speaking at all. He'd expected the reaction the latter had given him, and he was finding that he preferred it to the rapt attention. If someone was actually paying attention to him, it was just pressure to get things right.

Connor felt out of place at the Centre. He and his father weren't wealthy – in fact, sometimes they dipped toward the poor end of the scale, depending on what was going on – but the Youth Centre was located in one of the most underprivileged parts of town. Connor felt horrible thinking it, but he felt rich compared to most of the people who walked through the doors. It made him feel guilty and awkward, like he shouldn't be here at all.

He had just glanced up at the clock over the door when a new kid walked into the Centre. At first glance, Connor would have pinned him at thirteen. He was short and terrifyingly skinny, but the thing that caught Connor's attention was the kid's shockingly blue hair.

Norma, the woman at the front desk shouted hello to the boy, and he responded with the slightest flick of his fingers; it would be a stretch to call the gesture a wave. The boy then stomped inside the multi-purpose room that tutoring was hosted in. He dropped onto the tie-dye bean bag just inside the room. He didn't so much as glance at Connor, but Connor could tell the boy was likely closer to his own age than thirteen. The boy crossed his skinny legs and pulled a pack of cards out of his hoodie pocket. After shaking the cards out of their box and quickly shuffling them, the boy began laying the cards over his thighs and lower legs. Connor watched the boy go through two and a half rounds of solitaire – none victorious – before he realized that it was time for him to catch his bus.

He slid his notebook and his novel into his messenger beg and slung it over his shoulder. He padded out the door, the blue-haired boy never moving.

*Thursday*

The boy was back, Jude grumbled in his head. He was at the Youth Centre, like he was every afternoon as per Callie's insistence. He usually sat in his bean bag chair, playing cards until he could justify going home – or the place that he slept at, anyway. He would never consider it his home. Callie thought he was taking advantage of the rec activities or the tutors that came from Anchor Beach, one of the smarter high schools in the area.

Jude played cards and his sister never knew the difference, not that it would have mattered to him if Callie had known that he sat there and played the same mind-numbing game over and over again. He didn't like the kids and they didn't like him. While everyone here fell into the 'poor' and 'disadvantaged' categories, Jude still felt like an outsider. And they didn't jump at the chance to get to know him either. He made sure of that. Jude didn't care that he had no one. Solitude was both comfortable and preferable for him. But now that tutoring had started up again, Jude had to share the multi-purpose room in the afternoons. He could move, but he wouldn't be able to take the bean bag chair with him (he'd tried and Front Desk Norma had thwarted him every time). So, now, he had to sit here with the tutors while they did their teaching and then emptied out, going back to their perfect lives. The older ones – high school seniors, usually – often mistook him for their student. The younger ones looked through him, because they weren't him. They had a nice bed and parents, and he was an ugly picture; too foreign for them to consider.

Jude hated the kids his own age the most, like the boy. The boy with brown hair and soft eyes who was the paragon of annoying, preppy tutor. He was never doing anything when Jude walked in, leading Jude to believe the boy was useless … which most of them were. They used the Youth Centre to boost their grades and to look good for universities. They never considered the lives of the people who were at the Centre and why some kids hung out there all day instead of going to school. The tutors never cared if they made a difference or not. The Youth Centre was just an end to a means for them. That's why Jude never used them … or so he told himself.

A couple of the younger kids rushed in the multi-purpose room, playing a game of tag. When they blasted in they scattered Jude's cards across the floor, stepping on a few of them and dispersing them further. Jude made a face as the dirty pair ran back out, but they paid him no mind. They never did. Even at a young age, the other kids knew to avoid him. Jude leant forward, gathering up the cards within arm's length. Before he could unravel his legs to get the rest, there was a hand already holding them out. Jude's eyes flicked forward to see the boy, his messenger bag packed and on his shoulder. Wordlessly, Jude snatched the cards out of the boy's grip.

"You're welcome," the boy muttered, stepping around Jude.

"I wasn't going to thank you," Jude ground out.

"I see," the boy drawled, and then he casually strolled out of the room.

He left a sour taste in Jude's mouth. He was clearly as snobbish as Jude had initially pegged him as being. In a childish action, Jude stuck his tongue out at the boy's retreating back, before beginning to shuffle his cards.

There was dirt on them.

(-.-)

Exhausted, Connor rested his head against the back of his bus seat. Michael, the sweeter one, and Mary, his evil sister, had been sniffling and coughing like crazy throughout the duration of their lesson. It had taken all of his self-control to not overreact to their sickness, although both children had paid more attention to how much hand sanitizer Connor was using than to what an adjective was.

Connor poured another layer of sanitizer on his hands at the thought. He noticed a thin film of dirt along his fingers, from the cards that he'd picked up for the blue-haired boy, who had been cold to him. Connor had just been trying to be nice by picking up the boy's cards. He couldn't see how the gesture could be take offensively, but judging by how the boy had looked at him, it was the worst thing that he could have done. Connor shrugged to himself. Everyone had issues. Maybe the boy was currently working through his.

Connor got off the bus, slugging his way to his front door. Feeling weighted down by every limb, Connor let himself in, Jellybean immediately curling around his legs. She followed him as he walked down the hallway to his bedroom, dialling his father's cell phone number. He had just dropped his bag down by his desk when the voicemail picked up.

"Adam Stevens cannot be reached at this time. Please leave your message at the tone."

In the ten seconds before the beep, Connor was grateful that it was the voicemail and not his actual father. Talking directly to his father was, at best, awkward. At worst … Connor shuddered thinking about it.

"It's me. I'm home from tutoring, just checking in. I … I guess I'll see you later."

Connor hung up his phone. It made him feel like a child to have to call every time he got home. When his mother was alive, he'd never had to call. But Dad was more overprotective of him than Mom would ever think of being, and Adam had all the right reasons to act the way he did, Connor supposed. Just because he understood why his father did the things he did, it didn't mean that he liked it.

He wondered what it would be like to not have parents. Then he decided it would be kind of terrible.

This is actually an old story that I went back and looked at decided to continue on so bonus points to anyone who can figure out when I left off and picked back up again! Updates will continue every Monday, around the usual time.

So, on tumblr I'm: we are all of legend now (with dashes between every word). If you want to find my replies to anon reviews, add backslash tagged backslash anon dash replies. If you want to see anything I post about The Island Of Misfit Toys, go to my tumblr URL and add backslash tagged backslash the dash island dash of dash misfit dash toys. Punctuation is spelled out due to Fanfiction's restrictions. If you're having any trouble accessing the tumblr content please send me a pm and I can format it for you in a different way.

~TLL~