WisteriaWolverine

Deceptive Cadence...If there were a girl named Cadence I am quite sure that she would be deceptive, all females are deceptive, even ones named Cadence. I mean 'Cadence' who calls their kid Cadence? And if Cadence were a place, then I am sure that it would be filled with deceptive women, in fact any place really. Actually I have never met a woman by the name of Cadence and nor have I ever been to a place named Cadence...I am not even sure that a place by that name exists, but it must do...somewhere! Why would the name Cadence be left out? I mean there's even a place called Intercourse, in Pensylv...somewhere in the U.S.A, so why not Cadence?
Deceptive Cadence...chord progression that seems to lead to resolving itself on the final chord; but does not. Yeah, that about sums her life up. It was not an easy life and no one's life is easy, not even the richest people in the world have an easy life...all that money and having to wonder what to do with it all the time. What I wouldn't give for THAT kind of hard life!
Appearances can be deceptive. What you think you see in any given individual can be totally different to what actually lurks inside them and we all have the propensity to be of bad intent. But for some people, they exude goodness when their natural proclivity rests well within the deceptive zone of their nature. But they have been fooling people for so long that they become professionals at it and can fool even the most perceptive person. They can trick even those whose job it is to spot a liar and that is a scary contemplation...especially if you end up at the mercy of one such person. And let's face it; at one stage or another, it can happen to the best of us.
It happened to me yes sir indeed it happened to me and what a ride it was, what a ride. I was very young at the time and I did not see her coming, but by goodness, when she was done with me, I vowed it would never happen again. Never would I ever cry, beg or plead again...never would I lay awake wondering where she was...my heart beating a little faster every time I heard a black taxi pull up outside in the street. I would never again allow myself to plummet to the depths that I fell to when I discovered that the black taxi was dropping off the neighbour who had just finished his four until midnight shift. Wondering where she was, who she was with and what she was doing when she was not with me in the wee hours of the morning. The anger I used to feel, I never wanted to feel that again...I would have ripped out his throat if I had ever discovered who he was. Finally there was the shock of coming home from the pub and finding everything gone. No note, no, "bye bye I'm leaving kiss my sorry butt," nothing. Just emptiness. All the furniture gone, all the pictures off the wall, even the damn knives and forks for crying out loud! Well, I was never going to go through that again, not for anything and not for anyone.
So I hopped a boat and came all the way around the world to this place. It seemed, from where I started out anyway, that this was the land of milk and honey. It seemed a place of myth and legend, where a man could dream dreams and they would actually come true. And when I arrived I had dreams, just like anyone else. Yes sir, I had the most fantastic visions of what life would be once I settled here and I had many aspirations. I was going to do this that and the other thing, but dreams and aspirations can be funny things sometimes. You see, there is a gulf between where you are and your dreams and that gulf is called reality. If you can cross the gulf without being swallowed up then more power to you, but it is never as easy as you thought it would be. Yes siree, the grass is definitely greener on the other side, only problem is; it still has to be mowed.
Mowing of grass aside, I always knew that I would be a good parent. Everyone parents differently. I mean, kids don't come with a manual and a lot of things we do as parents can be trial and error. Often our first child is the experiment. We try out our theories and screw it up time and time again. The second child is the one we avoid all the mistakes of the first with and for whom the word 'routine' actually means something. The third is the one we know for sure won't break if we tickle him too hard, won't turn all juvenile if we allow him to watch too much TV, won't be psychologically damaged by the word 'no' and who will not lose all of his teeth by age ten if we let him have fizzy.
Yes I was a good parent and I always knew that I would be, I was born to it; I was a natural. My parents did not have the same faith in me that I did in myself, but do our parents ever believe that we parent as effectively as them? Of course they don't, but I did. I was strict but fair, fun yet balanced and I knew what mattered and what didn't. I was such a good parent that the State trusted me with their kids, now how many people can boast that? Hmm? No, not many. Not many at all.
Someone else's kid...can you even begin to understand the nature of the trouble that comes with a situation like that? No, I don't suppose you can. It was not my job to love the kid, everyone knows that it is virtually impossible to love a kid that's not your own. Wasn't my job to teach it right from wrong either, the darn kid should know all of that by the time it turns thirteen. So what was my job, you might well ask.
Well my job was to give it a roof over its head, food in its belly and a bed to sleep in. Not necessarily a non leaking roof, good food or a warm bed, but I did do those things just the same. But what was the real purpose of the kid's presence in my life? I thought it was to teach her about the things one normally learns on their own. The kid knew everything else by then and so there wasn't much left for me to teach her anyway, but what was left for me to teach the kid, I taught it well.
If there were ever a song that could describe her life, a song that’s truly hers, a song that’s an honest reflection of her heart, it’d be False Faces by Dan Fogelberg…with a bullet! People in the world seemed so cold and unfriendly, to her anyway and she didn’t really understand why that was.
Last night the moon was big in the sky, and she reckoned if she’d reached out she could’ve grabbed it. Maybe if she’d jumped high enough she could’ve even gotten onto it. She was such a dreamer and it seemed her mind had no real place inside the world of 'normal' people. While she sat there listening to Dream Weaver by Gary Wright and staring up at the moon, she wished she wasn’t her, and yet she didn’t know who she'd rather be.
Everything had been falling apart for a while by the time she came here. Well it wasn’t so much falling apart, as it had fallen apart ages ago; it just took everyone a while to notice I guess. But anyway, it wasn't fixable, it usually never is, and she felt quite haunted by her inability to control the situation. She also felt like a ghost that didn’t know where it was supposed to be.
Another thing, if the population of the world was an ocean, then she’d be just a small drop of rain that fell into it. That makes her life kind of not important, and I suppose in most ways it’s not. But she was never content just being that little drop of rain that fell into the ocean of life and she wanted more. She did not believe that she had to be that little drop of rain, but I soon taught her otherwise.
That grey dismal morning in May when the little drop of rain had to face the shit that was going to happen, whether she wanted it to or not. She hated May anyway and that day just gave her another reason to loathe it more. Hang it was almost on the very same day in May that she hates, I mean how cruel can life be? Well, I am here to tell you that it can be VERY cruel and it knows no mercy at all. She hated that shit, and she hated that life!
She was thinking about keeping a diary here, but she thought diaries sucked because they can get you into trouble and she was absolutely correct. There are many other reasons why diaries suck, but that was the biggest. I mean they aren’t written to anyone really, and I personally think it would be boring having to think of something to write every day to no one. What if you don’t feel like writing to no one for days or maybe even weeks? Then you end up with all those empty pages, and you can’t fill them up with boring stuff just to write something, well at least I couldn't, but I bet you she could have? One person once said to her that diaries are good because you can get your feelings out into it, but she didn't really believe that. I don't either...the world does not care for your feelings, so why in the world would an imaginary audience care? No, I think diaries are trouble with a capital T and she thought exactly the same thing. Every person I’ve ever known of who kept a diary ended up in the shit. Look at what happened to Anne Frank the Polish girl who kept one; the Nazis found her and killed her. The only other person I know of who kept a diary was a girl named Alice. She died of a drug overdose and they published her diary too and I bet she’d be highly annoyed to find that out? Alice talked about her boyfriends and all the other things that she did that she wasn’t supposed to do. Alice even described what it’s like to take drugs, the things she saw while she was taking them and I have to admit to being a little bemused by her experiences.
Jori read that book and after she was done with it her foster father asked her if she knew which one of Alice's boyfriends was the one who really cared about her? Jori chose the wrong one. Jori chose the one that babysat Alice through her first trip, and her foster father was very disappointed with her. He could not understand how Jori couldn’t even tell which one cared about Alice most. But think about that for a moment, Jori was only eleven at the time. How was she supposed to be able to tell the goodies from the baddies? Hell, I'm an adult and half the time I can’t even tell them apart! It’s not like the goodies and baddies dress up in cowboy and Indian suits, and even if they did, who’s to say it wasn’t the cowboys who were the baddies? See, children get taught such one sided points of view sometimes.
Bottom line?
The cowboys were trying to take the Indians’ land and that’s why they filled them with arrows. If I was an Indian and the cowboys were trying to steal my house and my land, I’d have played 'pin the tail on the donkey' with the old cowboys too. But here is the totally confusing part of Jori being allowed to read Go Ask Alice when she was eleven, well I find it confusing anyway. They had a fit about the movie Grease when she saw that and yet the diary of Alice was fine? Weird totally weird!
The Department has a lot to answer for, leaving Jori with that bible bashing pervert, such a hypocrite! At least I am what I say I am and do not pretend to be otherwise. Okay, so maybe I hide it from the Department, but hey, they are the experts and they are supposed to be able to 'read' people, so if they are too stupid to read what I really am, then more fool them!
But that aside, it was because of what happened to Anne and Alice that Jori was put off diaries for good; she didn’t want someone reading hers. So Jori decided to make it like a letter, thinking people would feel worse about snooping into it, I think. But again, she couldn't have been more wrong because snoops are snoops and it doesn't matter if it is a diary or a letter. And I'm a snoop and that is how I am able to tell the story in far more depth than I ever could have otherwise. Every single word she ever wrote, I knew about and for every word that she wrote, she paid the piper. And who is the Piper in this story? I am the piper. So sit back and get comfy, we could be here for a while.

As soon as I opened the door and saw Jori standing on the steps with her social worker, I saw her for what she was. There was this look in her eyes; all kids like her have it. It's a kind of lost puppy hopeful look, you know? It kind of stands there staring up at you, shaking under the surface of its skin just a little. It stares at you with those big eyes, begging you to feed it, hoping you might pet it and fearing you might actually kick it. Well, I am no respecter of lost puppies, I loathe them. I kick 'em and I kick 'em hard, but I hide that facet of my nature well.
So Jori was looking up at me like this lost little puppy and for a moment I thought something about her seemed very familiar. I wasn't sure what it was and so in the end I shrugged it off as some kind of weird de ja vue and I set her at ease with a smile. She smiled back at me, well she half smiled and then she looked down at the steps and that indicated to me that she may have perhaps read me in those few flickering glances. But even if she had, there's something about kids like Jori that I know, that the average person doesn't.
Kids like Jori are doubters from way back. Although they can read a person, they don't trust it. More than that, they hope against hope, well beyond the point of fatigue, that this time it will be different. I don't know why they hope that or why they even believe that things should be any better than last time. I just know that they do and knowing that fact is what made Jori perfect for me. Jori was ripe for the picking and pick her I would.
The stupid department, the officers and the Head of Department. I sat in front of him and I told him exactly what he wanted to hear and he thought my motives were as pure as the driven snow. And it is not that he doesn't know his job, nor that he doesn't know how to read people. It is that I know that he knows how to read people and so I have perfected my story to the point of being able to tell it in my sleep. I knew what words to say and what words not to say. I knew what attributes to highlight about myself and what ones to stay well away from. So when it came time for him to interview myself and my wife, I was well rehearsed and he simply did not see me coming. Neither did Jori, for that matter.
I was able to read Jori very easily, as she stood there staring down at the steps. I could tell just by the way that she was dressed, all tomboyish, that her femininity scared her. Well why else would she want to hide the things that prove beyond all doubt that she is female? By hiding her femininity, I knew that she was well used to being someone’s ‘plaything’ and I felt rather relieved. Why did I feel relief?
Grooming a kid to become your ‘plaything’ takes much time and much patience on the part of the groomer. You go through this thing where you have to test the boundaries just to see how far she’ll let you go, you know? Kind of like when you were sixteen and trying to get laid for the first time, inching your way carefully around the girl doing your best to get her to open her legs for you, promising the moon and the stars if that’s what it took. Grooming is like that, but far more tricky and time consuming and the setbacks can takes days to overcome!
You know, you gently touch her face and she looks away from you and tilts her head out of your reach? You casually put your arm around her and she slinks away? And then you make the big move for her knee and that’s when they usually freak out! Then you gotta make up some excuse as to why you did it, because she could still tell on you at that point, that’s why grooming is risky, time consuming and a right pain in the neck. It is so much easier when they have already been prepared for the intrigues of their foster daddy!
Hey, don’t be so damned judgemental! You think you know me? You don’t know me! And anyway, when I was at that interview, the Head of Department wasn’t exactly eagerly thrusting his hand up in the air to be the one to take Jori. He didn’t want to be the one to give her a home. He just wanted a quick solution to his latest headache. You think he really thought about Jori at all? You think he cared for her? He didn’t care for her; she was just another one in a pile of many. I merely resolved his latest crisis, so that he could go home that evening and, once he got his own kids settled for the night, bang his wife in their bed or on the kitchen table. (Who knows where a Head of Department bangs his wife?) And he could do it without having his mind otherwise engaged with other thoughts. At five o’clock he switched Jori off and he never gave her another thought. So before you judge me, maybe you want to judge him for behaving so incompetently in his haste for resolution.
Was it incompetence that saw that man hand a thirteen-year old girl to me? Probably. Do I feel bad about it or what I did? No! Why should I?
Here’s another thing that the Head of the Department did that made my life a whole lot easier; he ‘storied’ Jori. He told me exactly what she had and hadn’t done in the past. He told me about previous accusations and all about her behaviour and by doing that, he pretty much mapped out the angle I should approach Jori from. Not only did he do that, but he debased her completely in his own mind, to the point where even if she did tell on me, he would never have believed her anyway. And the best part about it? Jori knew that he had done this and so she knew that there was no point to telling him anything at all. Brilliant!
If I was a better man, I might have actually felt sorry for Jori. Think about it, everyone in her life, even those who were meant to help her, had wittingly or unwittingly, fed her to the lions. Poor kid! Want to know something else though? I’d kill any man who did to my daughter what I did to Jori. I would kill any man who did it to their own flesh and blood; I don’t abide incest, but kids like Jori? I don’t know, it seems, to me anyway, that they really have no other vocation in life but to be what it is that Jori was. In fact I probably saved Jori from a fate worse than death letting her find out what history she was writing for herself to look back upon. Okay, well maybe my choice of words is a little unfortunate, considering the present circumstances, but Jori won't care anyway.
Yes, Jori, Jori, Jori! Come twenty-five she would have been either a prostitute, a druggie, in jail, stone dead or maybe even all of the above. In an odd kind of way, I saved her from all of that, so I am not a villain, to the contrary, I am probably an exceptional sort of hero. There you go judging me again! But you forget one very important and yet tiny little detail, if not for people like me, what would the Head of Department have done with Jori? Hmm? What other alternative could he have found for her? That's right, none!
So Jory walked into the house behind the social worker and she was as quiet as a church mouse. They had told me that she had been told pretty late in the piece that she was leaving the place that she had been previously living in. That must have come as a bit of a shock to her. Think about it, she had been living there for almost four years. They were born again Christians and chewing gum on a Sunday morning is an unforgivable sin, so I knew right away that there would be much confusion for Jori in getting used to me.
Confusion was good in some ways, and I knew it, as I stood there in the kitchen watching my wife and the social worker speaking quietly. Jori was standing there looking a little lost and uncertain, which again, is just another name for confusion. I knew she'd do one of two things in her confusion. She'd either absolutely reject every single move I made toward her because she had been taught that it was wrong. Or, in her new found sense of rebellion, she'd lap it up. I wasn't sure which way she'd go, as I made a cup of tea and yet watched her from the corner of my eye. And that is where 'cunning' comes into play.
By cunning I mean that you have to find a way to get the child to see you as the 'good guy' or the 'cool hip guy', and in order to achieve that, you gotta work out which tools are best suited to the job at hand. I mean, you wouldn't change a car tyre with a knife and fork, right? Well, kids are the same; you need to have the correct tools in order to garner the appropriate response. My tools? Dope, booze and music. But more than even having the right tools, you have to know what order to present them in. No point in pulling out a joint if the kid's never seen one before. No point in dragging a kid down to the lounge and getting them to choose a record to listen to if you haven't yet established that they like music. The drink, the booze, that's the easiest one of them all. The trick? Make it tempting and yet forbidden. That's what I did with Jori and it worked like a charm.
But before you even get to this point with a kid, you have to have first laid the groundwork out. I am not talking about days in advance, not even weeks; I'm talking months and even years.
Years earlier I ensured that I based my life around being able to easily gain access to everything that I might need or want in the future. In order to ensure that you can take whatever you want, you need a job that allows access to that which you desire, so I went to teaching. You also need to be able to garner trust, and teachers are trusted more than most because if you were inclined to doing anything untoward, it would soon be picked up upon. So self control is also another asset because your track record needs to be as clean as it can be, if not clean, then it needs to be convoluted. I ensured that mine was a bit of both. That was the year’s part of the preparation and yes it takes time, but patience usually wins the day.
Now for the months part.
For months I talked my wife into this idea of caring for someone else's kids. I was careful to make sure that the interest was only in female children. Male children? Well, I'm not a sicko, so I'm not that way inclined! How did I ensure that my wife would agree to take only females? Easy, peasy Japaneasy! I put her safety as my first concern in all of this. A teenaged boy with rampaging hormones? Who knows what might happen to her and she readily agreed that boys were a very bad idea.
Secondly and almost as important when laying down the groundwork? Time! What's the point of having another female around to play with if your wife is always in your face and never leaves the house? Yes, that is something that definitely requires careful consideration. How did I convince my wife to be away from the house? I bought one, simple! In buying a house we were then lumbered with an insane mortgage and my wages didn't cover it too well.
Result? My wife needed to get a job too and this is where you need to be exceptionally cunning, manipulative and smart. I had to get her to get a night job, why? In what way is my wife going to work all day and coming home at five going to allow me time alone with the child? The child would be at school all day and we'd all come together as one happy family at night and I just couldn't have that. So, I talked her into getting a night job.
You see, a night job would see her absent all evening and asleep for most of the day, even on the weekends. The majority of the care for a child would fall on my shoulders, and as you well know, I was not at all concerned by this. No, I preferred it. How did I convince my wife? Easy, the pay for working nights is twice what it is for working during the day. To boot, she went and got a job at an elderly folk’s home and admittedly she did this to help our chances of getting children to care for because she knew it would look good on our list of attributes. And the truth of the matter is that, given half a chance, she would have cared for Jori. My wife is nice like that and it is for that very same reason that I needed her out of the way.
Preparation is important and you can never be too sloppy or pedantic for that matter, when it comes to children like Jori.

Did I feel bad for what I did? I hear that question being asked all the time and the short answer is no, no I did not. "But you should," I hear you cry. "You deceived the Department of Social Welfare. You pulled the wool over the Head of Department's eyes. You cheated on your wife and lied to her on many, many occasions and you had your way with a child."
But define child?
Really, is a thirteen year old female who has breasts, hips and bleeds once a month truly a child? If Jori was in Africa she would have been married at nine to some 60 year old witch doctor and have popped out four of his black babies by thirteen. No, she wasn't a child. There was nothing child like about her. Sometimes the way she stared at me, I knew she knew nothing of innocence at all!
Jori's face was young, very beautiful and very youthful, but her eyes betrayed her. Her eyes were the oldest looking eyes that I have ever seen in my entire life. I didn't know what half the things were that Jori had seen in her life up to that point, but her eyes? Staring into them, it was like they bore a hole through my soul. Mostly I tried not to stare at her eyes in quiet moments.
There were two sides to Jori.
There was the side of her where she would clam up and literally be unable to speak. She would shake and I could sense her fear and I liked that side of her. Then there was the dangerous side of her, the side of her that might convince her that it might be proficient to stab me in my sleep. Well no, she wasn't violent; she had this point of no return. What I mean by this is that she could take a lot, way more than anyone else her age, but once she was full, look out. She would explode!
She'd scream, swear and become so ugly that, in those moments, she was nothing but a cheap, nasty, trampish whore. The language she'd use and the things she'd say, I'm a tough man, but sometimes even I was shocked! The dangerous part of her always kicked in at around the same time as she had got me so mad that I was prepared to do just about anything to her, consequences be damned! She'd threaten to go to the Head of Department and tell him everything and she meant everything.
Inside those crazy moments she would push me to the edge of insanity and I even had split seconds where I could stare at her and quite calmly plan her murder and rationalise that I could produce a perfectly good scenario to the Head of Department to explain away her 'accidental' death. Those thoughts terrified me, they truly did. What if I had not been able to explain away her 'accidental' death? Where would that have left me? But I am getting way ahead of myself here, so backtrack I must.
The social worker stayed for a cup of tea, but it was a very rushed affair. She needed to get back to the Department to report to her boss how dropping Jori off to us had gone. Why he was concerned with that, I do not know. My wife also had to be at work by four and so everyone cleared out not long after Jori arrived.
Predictably, Jori crept away to her new bedroom and busied herself with unpacking and generally making herself at home. And it is at this stage that I must point out that she was very adept at making herself at home. My wife had told her that she could hang some of her pop star posters on her walls and within half an hour, she had covered two entire walls with posters. Upon seeing them, I really questioned her choice of role models; some of those men looked very unsavoury to me!
But for the first half hour I left Jori alone. Sure, I thought about going into the room and talking to her, you know, get the grooming process started because there's no time like the present. I thought about it a lot, but something sort of held me back and I am not entirely sure what it was. I knew that she was afraid of me coming in there while we were in the house alone. I am not sure how I knew, I just did and you should have seen the look on her face when I finally did go in there.
She became the little puppy again, but I could tell that she felt cornered and I could easily have made a move at that point, but I didn't. You know, you can't rush these things; you gotta bide your time otherwise you could blow it. Imagine if I had made my move too soon? She might have run off or anything and I would not, for the life of me, have been able to find an excuse to reason that away to the Head of Department. Mr. Daniels, that was his name. He would have known that something must have happened to make Jori run and, at that point, she would have told him. No, he may not have believed her, but of what benefit would it have been to me to have that happen? Again, patience usually wins the day.
I wandered into the room and gazed at her posters, while at the same time ever aware of her backing away from me as far as she could get. She kept her eye on me the whole time I stood there. Even when I wasn't looking at her and she was not staring directly at me, I knew that she was acutely aware of exactly where I was. Sensing her nervousness, I thought that the 'good guy' role was the more appropriate one to take on at that point, and so I told her I was going out to get some tea and did she want to come?
Truth of the matter is that she didn't have a choice, she was coming with me whether she wanted to or not. But it is proficient to first try the tactic of allowing the child to think that they have some element of control over their current predicament. This also encourages a false sense of security within them. She would have been thinking, 'Well, if he's not bothered about whether I go with him or not, then maybe he's an okay guy and he isn't going to do anything to me? I mean, I will be in a car with him alone and in a place I don't know and if he wanted to hurt me, then there would be the perfect place. Seeing as how it is a perfect opportunity for him to hurt me and he's happy for me not to be in that place with him, then maybe he doesn't plan to do anything to me at all? Maybe he's a nice guy?"
Oh the drama!
I wish I could take full credit for knowing how she was thinking, but I can't. It would never have entered my head to think that going for a simple car ride with a man could dredge up that amount of deep internal dialogue. No, those are her thoughts in her own words. Go figure!
Interestingly enough and much to my surprise, she agreed to come with me and I didn't have to resort to my 'bad guy' role. I told her to wear a jacket because it was cold outside, but that's not really why I told her to wear it. I thought she'd feel safer with even more of her femininity covered up.
There's something very sublime about a female who likes to hide what it is that she possesses. It all goes into that thing about men being very visual creatures, I think, and I am not ashamed to say that I am a visual man. Jori knew how to peak the curiosity in me, when it came to hiding herself. Sometimes I think she did it on purpose and that she knew exactly what she was doing. See what I mean about her never knowing innocence? I think she was a very sophisticated sexual human being, and again, I do not feel any guilt whatsoever for what I did. There is no need for guilt when the other party is participating in full agreement. Even if they are feigning surprise and anguish, it's all just part of the little game that girls like Jori play, truly it is and no man at all should be prosecuted or jailed for playing that game with them. Thirteen or not, Jori asked for it, she caused it, she encouraged it, she participated in it and then she wanted to cry victim! But again, I have gotten way ahead of myself.
While in the car with me, she was extremely quiet and she was fidgeting a lot. I found that quite amusing and I sat there wondering what it was that she thought I was going to do to her? I was driving for crying out loud, you need two hands to drive so I could hardly be touching her and keeping the car on the road. But I do know what it was that she was thinking.
"Is he really driving to the fish and chip shop? What if he heads out of town and down some strange road somewhere? What if he does that and then stops the car and tries to do anything to me? What will I do then? How can I stop him? Who can I tell? Where can I run? I haven't even got Mr. Daniel's phone number!"
Hello!
We were only going for fish and chips! If she even had an inkling of how difficult it is to have sex in a car she wouldn't have even bothered herself with those silly notions. Stupid girl! Why would I try it in the car when I have a perfectly good house? No, that never even occurred to her!
When I went into the shop to get the food she wouldn't even come in with me and I actually found that offensive. I thought she was quite the rude little madam for staying in the car like that. She would have been in a public place with me and perfectly safe! That was the first moment that I suspected that she just plain didn't like me. I did contemplate foregoing all of the grooming and just cutting straight to the chase. But I decided against it when she smiled at me when I got back into the car. I realised then that her reluctance might simply have been a case of not knowing what it was that she should do in that situation. So I excused her rudeness and went back to plan A.
When we got home I told her to sit down at the table opposite me and boy that kid did NOT like sitting there facing me. It made her real uncomfortable! I tried to relax her by starting conversation, you know? I jazzed her about her name because it sounds like a boy's name. Jori wasn't particularly impressed with that observation of mine and I felt that things were going downhill a little. Out of desperation really, I decided that it was time to introduce the forbidden and yet somehow tempting fruit. I pulled from the fridge a bottle of wine and I poured two glasses, plonked one right in front of her and I sat there drinking the other. The look on her face was priceless, I'm telling you, it was absolutely priceless and she didn't know what to make of it.
She stared at me for a few moments and then she looked at the glass. Much to my surprise, she did not reach out to take it, so I baited the hook with the tempting forbidden aspect of the wine. I looked straight at her and said, "You better not tell Annie that I gave you wine. She'll have my ass in a sling if she finds out."
That was when she reached out and took the glass and put it to her mouth. Clearly she did not like the taste of the wine at all, but I think she was too scared not to drink it. She didn't want to offend me, but at the same time she also wanted me to think her more than just a child. See? What did I say earlier? Jori knew how the game was played!
The wine was an excellent way to get Jori 'onside', it was brilliant actually on a whole lot of levels. You see, Mr Daniels made some crucial errors in judgement when deciding upon what he would tell me about Jori. One of the things he told me was that Jori hated adult women and that she fought tooth and nail her old foster mother at every step. I then knew that if I could make Jori feel like she had 'gotten one' on Annie and that I was in on it, that she would begin to side with me a little. If I helped her get one over on Annie, then she would see me as a co-conspirator, maybe even a friend and that would make my goals a lot more realistically attainable. Yes, I began to create a bond with Jori and I based it upon an intense dislike of Annie, which Jori thought I shared with her. You gotta know your subject. You have to know your subject well and I knew Jori almost better than she knew herself within two hours of her stepping foot into my house.
I confined the wine to three glasses and by the time Jori had consumed the third one, she was a little bit tipsy. By that time I had also managed to make her relax quite a bit, which opened the door to phase two. I managed to get her to come down to the lounge and I told her to choose a record to listen to and so she did. By this stage I had her feeling as though she was on equal footing with me and that was the precise time to let her know that she was not.
How did I do this? I went and got a couple of joints from my stash. I had thought about dropping some acid in her wine, but I decided against it. It was too risky. Too much can go wrong. Last thing I needed was a drunk thirteen year old girl trippin’ out on acid! So as tempting as it was to do, I decided to stick to the soft stuff and so, as I stated, I got two joints.
I walked back into the lounge and sat down beside her. I got close enough that some of my body was touching hers, but far enough away that Jori did not feel like she was being pursued. I held the joints up in front of her face and I asked her if she knew what they were. She looked at me, and she seemed kind of vague.
"They're dope?"
She stared at the joints and then at me and so I nodded to let her know that yes, it was dope. I asked her if she's ever smoked it before and she made no reply. I think she was retreating into her phase where she cannot speak, so I did all the speaking for her. Once I was done with the talking, including telling her that she's never to take dope from anyone else and why, I lit one of the joints.
Okay, so I told her never to take dope from someone else because it might be laced and she won't know and she could end up getting something she didn't bargain into the equation. It's not a lie, but fact of the matter was that, once I was done with her, she could do what she liked. But while she was with me, living with me, I didn't want her taking dope from anyone else or else there would go my leverage! If Jori discovered that she could get dope from anyone any time, then of what use would I be to her? See what I mean? So I scared the crap out of her with horror stories and then topped it with the threat of what I would do to her if I ever discovered that she had smoked someone else's dope. I even extended it to cigarettes because I needed her to be completely dependent upon me!
So she watched the way I took a toke and then I handed it to her. Blow me down if she didn't mimic, to a T, what I had just done. I quickly stopped her; I didn't want her on the floor out cold! We had not long finished smoking the first joint when it hit her and let me tell you, she swung straight into paranoia! I couldn't believe it! And let me tell you something else too, in her paranoia, she had my number. Jori had my number all right and she knew exactly what was going on. Sure, I didn't confirm it for her, it was too soon. No, I had to play the shocked, sickened and disbelieving foster father. How could she think that of me? I yelled at her and I left the room.
Actually, I didn't go far from the room at all. I stood just outside the lounge where I could still see her but she could not see me. I stayed there long enough for her to come to terms with my shock and for her paranoia to appear to be very stupid to her. I watched her, as she got to her feet, ever so wobbly, I might add, and she leaned against the wall unit and slid down to the floor. By the time she reached the floor, she was giggling, the paranoia having worn off. It was at that point that I went back into the room.
When I got back in there with her, I took on the role of concerned father and I talked to her in a way that, I guessed at the time, a father would. I comforted her and said that I understood her fear, but that I had a wife, so why would I want a little girl? Man I'm good! She fell for it hook line and sinker. She even agreed to dance with me and by that time, she was so relaxed around me it was almost criminal.
When I smoked the second joint she asked to have a toke, but I said no. I said no for two reasons. First, she was no longer paranoid and I didn't have what it took to be loving father twice in one evening if she freaked out again. Second reason I said no? I wanted her to clearly see that I controlled things; that I was in charge, not her.
Our first evening together went really well, I thought, and I gained a lot of ground on that first night. As for Jori, she saw me as the good guy, the cool, hip guy who was in cahoots with her in deceiving my wife, adult women, whom she would never trust anyway. It was a good evening's work, if I must say so myself. But one thing did occur to me and that was, what was Mr. Daniels doing, as I was busy grooming his ward? Poor Jori, the man probably never even gave her a second thought!

Let's get something very straight here, I didn't abuse the girl. I fed her, I made sure she had a warm bed to sleep in and I never denied her a roof over her head. The basic necessities of life that she needed, I gave to her and sometimes I gave her more than that too. Sometimes I did those things that she craved so much. In front of people, I called her my daughter, or I referred to her as 'mine'. In those moments, she smiled and she actually looked content. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I have never seen someone beam more than what Jori did when I placed ownership upon her, as a parent. I even went so far as to treating her real special in front of her friends. They saw me as a cool guy and she was the envy of them all and she was the most popular girl in school. But then, well, yes, I have to admit that I cheated a little when it came to that.
I read her 'letter' and I knew that she wanted to be loved, that she wanted to be wanted and that she wanted her father. That was her weak point, her Achilles’ heel, her father. Except that he was not her father at all, he was simply her stepfather, but she never knew this. I knew that if I could exploit the craving in her that I would be home free, and so I did. Did I feel bad about doing that to her? No.
Why?
Jori needed to wake up! Jori needed to let go of the schmuck! The guy beat her and goodness only knows what else. Mr Daniels mentioned knowing her father when he was at school and he said the guy was a bully. He also mentioned how Jori had kind of set her father up in her mind as some kind of idol who could do no wrong. She had conveniently forgotten all of the things he did to her and was just waiting for him to come and claim her. That was never going to happen and so she needed to be encouraged let go of him. By claiming her, I killed two birds with one stone. I garnered her loyalty and I made her forget about him.
After the first few weeks of Jori living with us, her social worker did express a concern in regard to how fast she had bonded with me. She made some comment like, "Jori just doesn't seem to have any concept of stranger danger or wariness."
"Jori understands perfectly the message of stranger danger," said I, while looking incredulously at the woman who had made an absolutely ridiculous observation about Jori. "No, you don't talk to strangers; you move into their house, eat at their table and share their bathroom with them." I continued to stare at the silly woman.
She shook her head. "I still..."
I cut her off and I have absolutely no idea what she was going to say next. But I think she was about to present an illogical argument in regard to my contention that the Department has actively encouraged Jori's trust of strangers. Mr. Daniels himself told me that this house is her fourteenth home. I honestly do not know what else they thought Jori would learn through being pushed from one set of strangers to the next. But I am not one to complain, through having done that to Jori, Mr. Daniels and his Department buddies have made achieving my goals so much easier. They have done such a good job in fact that Jori is naked in the world, vulnerable and without protection. Sure they blame the ones who take advantage of her situation, but they never stop to think about the way that they put her in this position in the first place.
Yes, we have already established that I hoodwinked the Department, so yes; I guess I am somewhat to blame to a point. Not that I feel guilty about it at all, I don't. And while we are on the subject of the Department, let me add a lesson of caution here.
Once a week the Department rang up just to check on Jori's settling in process and then after that they rang us from time to time. Thing is, that you have play these phone calls very smart. You cannot complain too much about the child, or else they might come and remove her from your care simply because you have put them under the impression that it isn't working out. But you cannot be too nice about the kid and make out that it is all sunshine and light either. Why? Well there's going to come a day where the kid reaches her 'used by' date and you are going to want to be shot of her. You can't all of a sudden go from giving reports of sunshine and light straight to giving reports of doom and gloom. No, that would raise suspicions.
My favourite report went something like this. "Yes Jori is settling, but we're having a few little teething problems. Oh no, it is nothing that we can't handle."
As the months progress and you can see that the end might be nearer to coming into sight the report will go something like this. "Well, Jori is doing okay, but we are having a few hurdles with her. A few white lies, some petty thieving, some scraps with a few kids and a bit of backchat. But I am confident that we can work through it." Why did I mention the scraps with other kids? At some point you're going to clout the kid, it is just an inevitable fact of life with kids like Jori. You gotta set up your cover story for the bruises early on, so even if you haven't hit the kid yet, still begin to incorporate that into your verbals.
Nearer to the end the report will go something like, "Well, I just don't know if we're going to get there with Jori. She's a hell of a nice kid and we really do adore her, but it just doesn't seem to matter what we do with her, the behaviour doesn't seem to be improving. I am really thinking now that we're on a timeframe here. If there hasn't been an improvement within a month, then I think we're going to have to call it a day." Do not forget to make this report about six weeks out from the next set of school holidays.
Two weeks out from the school holidays, this is the report you make. "We've really reached the crossroads with Jori. My wife and I feel that we have done all that we can for Jori, but she just doesn't seem to want to reciprocate. We do not want to let her go, but we feel we really have no other choice. I know it will take you some time to find her a new placement, so we will keep her until the holidays. We feel like we have failed her, failed the department and most of all we have failed ourselves because we really thought we could make it work with Jori." This is the part where the Department will console you and completely blame the kid. You will even try to defend the child using her past and other things to try and place the blame on yourself more than her. The more that you do this, the more that the Department will insist on the fault being the child's. To top it off, they will think you to be even nicer people than they first perceived you to be. Generally they will ask if you want to stay on their books, at which point you meekly respond, "If you'll have us, we'd love to." And wala, before you know it, as one kid's leaving your house, the new one will arrive. It's all very straightforward.
Present circumstances aside, this would have worked brilliantly with Jori. Why? Because, as I stated earlier, Mr. Daniels had already storied her with everything that he had told to us. He had specifically spelled out what went wrong at her last placement and even in placements before that. So rather than me having to find a story to hand them, Mr. Daniels handed me an 'out' on a silver tray. I have to say though, that I was most disappointed that I did not get to use it.
Again, I have gotten way ahead of myself here.
The morning after the night before, Jori, my wife and I sat down at the table to have breakfast and Annie happened to ask Jori how her first night with me went? Jori stared at me, smiled and then looked at Annie and said, "I had fun. I had heaps of fun." Jori then looked at me and I realised that she was already too familiar with me. Being a kid, she wasn't well versed in keeping things to herself and judging by the way Annie stared at me and then stared at Jori, she was a bit perplexed. Annie asked Jori what she meant and that was when I shot Jori a look that I hoped she would well recognise. Being that she has been in similar situations with men before, I pretty much figured she would adequately 'read' the look.
What is the look? It's the look that tells your woman to shut her mouth. Not only does it tell her to shut her mouth, but it accurately spells out what's going to happen to her if she doesn't. And just as I suspected, Jori recognised the look and responded appropriately. She looked at Annie, shrugged her shoulders and said, "Oh, we just played some records."
Jori glanced at me and I gave her that 'other' look that says, "Just as well you fixed it or else you would have been in a world of strife, but we're still going to have a wee chat about this later."
Annie glanced away from Jori at me and I gave her a smile and that assuaged her desire to pursue the matter any further. But it was close, so don't ever let the kid get too familiar with you or that familiarity could be your undoing.
Later that day, Annie decided that she would take Jori out shopping for some clothing and so I knew I had to get some 'alone time' with Jori before she did. I decided to go out to Boofa's place, Boofa's a friend. Oddly enough, Boofa works at a boy's home, and no he's not that way inclined. Boofa's a bit of a bully though and those boys give him a bit of an outlet for all that pent up aggression. But there are staff members there who are that way inclined, Boofa tells me about them from time to time. Makes me sick actually, a man doing that kind of thing with a boy, but oh well, each to his own, I guess.
So anyway, I told Annie I might take a ride out to Boofa's place and I asked Jori if she wanted to come along for the ride. Blow me down if she didn't decline the offer. I knew I had to think fast, so I said that maybe Annie might like to catch 40 winks before she has to go to work tonight. I also gave Jori that, 'don't mess with me' look. Jori was a little mystified at first but when I glared at her, she got the message. Annie almost ballsed it up for me by insisting that Jori didn't have to go with me to Boofa's if she didn't want to and that just confused the issue a little more. But Jori had by then realised that she was not really being presented with a choice, as such. She knew that she had to come with me or else!
So we got into the car and I drove straight to Boofa's place and didn't really say too much to Jori on the way. Once we got to Boofa's and he met Jori, he was quite taken with her. That wasn't such a good thing. You see, the kid can't be allowed to gather any allies, especially not from amongst your friends. I realised that, yet again, I was going to have to form a different kind of relationship with Jori for when we were around Boofa, so I immediately switched into my 'joking around buddy' mode with Jori around him.
Was she confused? Of course she was! Not half an hour before I had been giving her those looks and there I was playing with the kid, hell I think even I was confused for a few moments there. But Boofa? He was completely in the dark and rather than speaking to me, he spent most of his time speaking with Jori. Boofa prefers girls to boys and it isn't anything sexual, he simply likes girls and is not that fond of boys. Don't know why, but it may have something to do with having had the ever loving crap kicked out of him by his seven brothers, or maybe he was simply dropped on his head as a child?
But that I had to be especially vigilant around Boofa, when it came to Jori, was evident right from the first moment he met her. If he had ever found out what I was up to, he would have gone to Daniels and told him exactly what was what, because Boofa's attitude toward a man messing around with a girl is the same as mine about a man messing with his own flesh and blood. Knowing this, I had to come up with a solution and I had to come up with one fast. So what did I do? I basically scared the living daylights out of Jori, in regard to Boofa. I won't tell you what I said because that would be telling and, as far as I am concerned, I am not here to provide you with solutions to everything. But let me just say that, by the time I was finished telling Jori a few stories about Boofa, she was not keen to see him again.
On the way home I stopped the car so that I could have my 'wee chat' to her regarding keeping her mouth shut around Annie. And let me tell you something, you want to ensure a kid is going to keep her mouth shut; you make the lesson short, sharp and straight to the point. I reached over and grabbed her by the hair and I mean I grabbed her by the hair. I held it so tight that she thought that her skull and her scalp might just part company. I got right in her face and I told her, in no uncertain terms, that what happens between her and me, when Annie's not around, is between her and me and no one else. I also told her that what goes on in my house stays in my house. Once I was done with the talking, I looked her square in the eyes, while maintaining my hold on her hair, and I asked her, "Do you understand what I just said to you?"
She was absolutely terrified. I kid you not, and she nodded that head of hers as much as she was able to, considering my grasp on her hair didn't really afford her much room to move. I tell ya, there was no way she was ever going to tell tales out of school once I established my dominance over her. See, you gotta let them know that, if they don't play by the rules, you can make life very miserable for them. You gotta let them know that their entire future depends upon them listening very carefully to everything that you say to them. Once you have established that with them, the rest comes pretty easy, at least it should. If you find yourself ever having to have that conversation with the kid again, then your ship is already sunk! At that point you might as well cut your losses and get out while the going's still good. And let's face it, if you find yourself at this point then you have no one to blame for it but yourself, 'cause you should have got it right the first time!

Being that the situation with Jori ended as it did, I guess one could ask if I have any regrets. Oddly enough, I don't have any because it couldn't really have ended any other way. The way it ended, all of us got what we wanted, right up to and including Jori. But yet again, I have gotten way ahead of myself.
I spent a few more evenings, before school started back, familiarising myself with Jori. Of course there was the odd night where I just wanted to drop some Acid and completely forget all about her, and so I did. I sent her to her room with strict instructions to stay there and not to come out for anything. I mean you don't want to be going near a temptation like Jori while you have Lysergic Acid Diethylamide messing with your cerebral cortex and locus ceruleus! Oh yes, did you pick up on that then? That I am not an uneducated man?
It never fails to amaze me how people assume that men like me must be uneducated. I mean, think about it! In order to be able to pull off what I did, undetected, you have to be able to plan, to strategise and you have to have an amazing level of intuitiveness and an ability to improvise. You have to be able to fool even the smartest of them and I'm telling you, Daniels was a very smart and educated man also. Fooling him was no cheap trick, let me tell you. Uneducated people are not sophisticated enough to get away with this! Back to the story.
Anyone who does Acid knows that you're up there for anything from five to twelve hours, depending on the quality of the Acid. I knew that if I dropped some around four thirty, that by the time Annie got home, I'd be well and truly down again. But it was the in between times that concerned me. I didn't need Jori walking into me or me walking into Jori during those flights!
Did Jori know I did Acid? Yeah, she worked it out eventually. I had a particularly nasty trip one evening and she babysat me through it, can you believe that? She didn't really know what was up to begin with, but I told her. I babbled on for hours, probably incoherently, spelling out to her all the evils of doing anything but dope. But that that particular trip scared me senseless is a fact and I have steered well clear of Acid since. It's funny because I had been doing Acid on and off for years and never have I ever experienced anything like what I felt that night. Fortunately, being that it was a nasty trip; the last thing on my mind was sex, so Jori was quite safe with me. I was always in control!
By the time school started back, I had already kissed Jori a couple of times. She wasn't happy about it at all, but she also knew that there was nothing that she could do. I read her diary and she did all the things that kids like her do, but most of all, the best outcome was that she blamed herself. She asked herself what she had done to cause me to think that she was like that. Hats off to her former foster father for making her take responsibility for his indiscretions. Actually, I have to say, hats off to them all. Her foster father, their church, some of the members of their church and her old social worker. What happened to her there? Well let me just say that two or three of them gave her some 'higher education' and she was led to believe that she had been the sole sinner amongst them all. When she did finally get up the balls to tell all, her social worker, being a member of the church and all, went straight to her foster father. He spilled his guts to the foster father like some poor dying man in a Catholic confessional! Her foster father was an elder of the church, so there was nothing really wrong with the social worker telling him what Jori was saying about him. I'd like to think that someone would have the decency to warn me if Jori was putting me and mine at risk. I mean, these kids have no right to come into your life and tip it all upside down over something so petty!
Admittedly though, I would not have dealt with it the way her foster father did. He took a huge risk doing what he did. He stuck a knife to her throat and pretty much made her very life flash past her eyes. As if that wasn't enough, a few weeks later he held her under water just to make sure that she hadn't forgotten their little agreement. Jori didn't dare speak out of turn again and, after I read that, I was pretty convinced she would never do it again.
The sorry part of this whole saga is that the only one who knows the absolute full story of what happened to Jori there is me. Daniels doesn't know because the Social Worker never told him the whole story. Sure he told him a little, but nothing to incriminate the foster father. Mostly he made Jori look like a manipulating, fantasising, storyteller and, from what I gathered from what we were told; Daniels is of the same opinion, regarding her. That made my job a heck of a lot easier!
So by the time that her first day of school came around, Jori pretty much knew what was coming. She pretty much knew what I expected of her and she knew that it was only a matter of time. Her first day of school offered me the perfect opportunity to strike, I mean, honestly, when you hear what happened, you will clearly see that the kid brought it on herself!
I am a teacher and some of my friends are teachers. But just like doctors, lawyers and social workers, my circles are filled with people who share my profession, and inside those circles, there is always someone, who knows someone else, who knows of you. If a kid who is living in my house gets into grief at school, I'm going to hear about it sooner or later and this is something that Jori did not even consider. For some reason she got it into her head that her life at school was hers and completely outside the realm of my control. She could not have been more wrong!
Long story short? She punched out a kid on her first day.
Now I could have been a little more compassionate about what Jori had done if she had not first gone to school with the mindset that she was going to punch someone out on her first day. And secondly, I could have been more compassionate about it had she not, in fact, lied to me about it. I won't abide lies, I just won't and I do not suffer liars lightly!
Jory was picked on at her last school, a lot. It was mostly girls who picked on her and her social worker was aware of it. What he wasn't aware of, and neither was Mr. Daniels, is why she was picked on. Her foster father broke the rules of engagement and did not confine his curiosity to Jori. He allowed other girls knowledge of his curiosity and penchant for the 'socially forbidden', and that was a mistake on many levels. Suddenly the girls began to pick on Jori mercilessly and they did that for more than one reason also. I mean that foster father of hers took so many calculated risks that he almost deserved to get sprung and the fact that he didn't, I can only attribute to the miraculous!
So anyway, after having been 'smacked over' many times, Jori went to her new school with the mindset of letting them know, in no uncertain terms, not to mess with her. The first girl who stepped out of line, Jori gave her a harsh left hook to her chin, and by all accounts, the girl went air born! Pretty impressive really and to be completely honest with you, I was impressed with Jori. Had she not lied to me, I might well have retained the pride that I felt in her when I heard what she had done. I mean the kid she decked was some silver spooner from the 'good side of the tracks' anyway and all kids from that side of town should be decked at least once before their sixteenth birthday. Keeping it real is important.
But did Jori just come out and tell me herself? Of course she didn't. When I asked her about her day, did she fess up then? No! I gave her opportunity after opportunity to come clean but the kid's as stubborn as the day is long and she wasn't telling me anything. When I finally came out with it, the look on her face was priceless and I could tell what the one thought was that was consuming her mind in those moments. How did he find out?
How did I find out, indeed? Happens the teacher of that particular class of hers is a friend of mine. Okay, so he's not so much a friend as he is a client, but whatever. Point is that he told me what happened when he ran into me after school at the dairy on the corner up the road. He laughed about it because the girl Jori hit is a little stuck up, his words, not mine. By the time Jori got home and saw me sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper, I had her number all ways around.
I yelled and screamed at her a bit and then I dared her to try and hit me. Why did I do that? I just wanted to see if she would, and I wanted her to know that I would not abide her becoming a bully. Then I took her to her room and, well, cut to the chase, so to speak.
You'd think that, after having been made completely powerless, the girl would grow a brain, but she didn't. When I went back in to see her, after she had showered and all that, she threatened to kill me. Can you believe that? There I was trying to be nice to her and she goes and gets all nasty! And anyway, get that, a kid her size and age threatening to kill a man like me? Thing was that I wasn't entirely convinced that she wouldn't try to do just that, so I stopped her in her tracks. I slammed the little hellcat up against the wall and I made sure I had a good firm hold on her throat. I explained to her, explicitly, what I would do to her if she ever got it into her head to have a go at me. Needless to say she was quite willing to forget that idea of hers and so I left her to it. She was a little quiet for the rest of the evening and kind of on a downer, so I dropped some Acid and ignored her.
The next morning was a bit dicey though because when she got up I noticed that she was walking a bit funny. Not good, not good at all. Even worse, Annie noticed and she asked Jori what was wrong with her? Jori didn't know what to say to Annie and so she looked to me. It was pathetic really because she was looking to me to save her from her predicament. So anyway, I babbled off this explanation about Jori and I play fighting, which I do sometimes, and me accidentally knocking her down the steps. I explained to Annie that Jori had hurt her hip, as she had fallen and when Annie looked to Jori, Jori confirmed the story flawlessly.
That is another part of the preparation that I neglected to tell you about earlier. Play fighting is a great avenue for explaining away injuries also, but you can't use it too often because no man, no matter how uneducated, is that clumsy!
I don't mind admitting to the fact that this first incident, especially the day after, was one that I did break into a cold sweat over. Several times that day in fact. I broke one of the golden rules; I was a little too rough with the girl. It is not a bad thing to be a little rough with them, but choose your timing wisely. The first evening of her first day at a new school during the second week of a new foster placement is not exceptionally brilliant timing. I mean Jori could have marched straight up to the Department and spilled her guts to Daniels. Heck, she walked past his office twice every day. A quick physical examination, on the part of a doctor, would very quickly have confirmed her story. But, and again this goes to preparation, I had an explanation for that too, should the need arise, but it is better to steer well away from the scenario if you can possibly avoid it.
Even if Jori had kept her mouth shut and stayed well away from Daniels, there was always the chance of interference from, ironically, another teacher. Even if Jori had insisted that she was fine and it was only her hip that was injured, a more astute teacher might have insisted on taking the matter further. So yes, I screwed up, but, at the end of the day, I was never in danger of Jori telling on me. Why, aside from all the other stated reasons why she would never tell? Simply because she knew that Daniels would move her quicker than lightning if he knew what had happened to her. Thing was, she knew that, even as a temporary measure, they might put her into a social welfare family home and she feared that more than she feared me. Got to admit it folks, the Department sure knows how to screw them up!
To top off a really bad day for Jori, that second day at school, some of the tough kids got her number and beat the living peanuts out of her. I mean those kids really beat her silly and to be honest, I was a little upset by what they did. Why? I'm not sure. I still do not know why I was upset, just that I was. When she walked in after school with bruises on her face, I felt myself flying to rage pretty quickly. When I asked her what happened, she lied to me, but I didn't take her up on it. Instead, I gave her a hug, told I was sorry it had happened to her and then we got horribly stoned together. She smoked a whole joint all by herself, I was pretty proud of her, and she never even went anywhere near paranoia but she did cry a little. I told her it was just the dope bringing her emotions out, as it tends to do from time to time. Once we were done with that, I gave her some wine. She got rotten drunk and staggered off to bed by around nine or something.
The next morning, oh my was she a mess! She was hung over and her face had swelled up a bit where the baboons from the day before had belted her. Annie was really upset, but she had no idea that the kid was hung over. I packed her off to school and I found out, about a week later, that she had fallen asleep at her desk and spent the rest of the day in the sick room. They never called home 'cause Jori asked them not to. She explained that I was a teacher and Annie worked nights and that she didn't want to bother either of us, so the teacher, whoever it was, just let it lay.
The third day at school, the same kids who had beaten her senseless befriended her. Didn't see that coming, but at the same time I wasn't too worried by it. You see, having friends like that was going to fit into the 'scrapping' with her friends' line when I needed a new excuse to cover my tracks and/or get rid of her. Besides, I really was not bothered one way or the other whether she had friends or not. But if she did I was okay with it, so long as they weren't friends who were the children of educated folks.
So, Jori started running with the rough crowd and let me tell you, they were about as tough as any other kids I have seen in my life. A lot of them came from homes where their parents were in gangs or in the least, where their parents had gang affiliations. Most of them had been drinking booze like it was cordial since they were ten and had had their first joint at age eleven. Compared to those kids, Jori joined the game real late in the piece.
Despite the fact that these kids came from real tough family situations and that they had learned to live rough, the girls, most of them anyway, were exceptionally pretty wee things. Before long, I too was faced with exactly the same scenario as Jori's previous foster father. Oh my goodness, being surrounded by all Jori's little girlfriends was like being a kid set loose inside a lolly shop and being told not to touch any of the sweets. Now anyone with half a brain is going to know that, sooner or later, the kid is going to find the lollies way too much of a temptation to resist, and I was no different.
It was actually less dicey messing with her friends than it was messing with Jori. The worst her friends could do was accusing me, but chances were that their parents would never believe them anyway. Why? Because most of their parents were my friends, and some of them were clients. Why would I, an upstanding man, ever touch one of their children, knowing what they could do to me? Huh? These were gang people and they were no respecters of the laws of the land. No, they believed in natural justice...the kind that is served up naturally at the end of a fist, a baseball bat, broken beer bottle or maybe, if they are exceptionally peeved at you, a sawn off shot gun. Who in their right mind would ever risk that kind of retribution being visited upon them? Not me, that's for sure...or so they thought. Again, it all comes down to your ability to be cunning and manipulate people, and not to be too big of a boaster, I was pretty good at what I did.
But admittedly Jori's friends got a little wise to me a lot faster than Jori ever did. They started getting Jori to go away from the house with them, as opposed to them hanging out at my house. That was bothersome and I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do about it. But there was one little friend that Jori had whom I was exceptionally fond of and her parents were church-going folks. If I had been caught messing with her, they would have gone straight to the cops, and quite frankly, cops are the least of the troubles for a man such as myself. Cops are almost easier to con than the Department because they deal with kids like Jori's little friend all the time and the charges slide off a man's back like egg off a Teflon coated frying pan!
But it got to the point where I had to pressure Jori to bring her friends back to the house and so pressure her I did. She knew why I wanted her to bring them to the house and I was hoping that she would resort to the 'sacrificing others to save herself' scenario. But Jori wasn't much like that. Jori still cared about other people and would not knowingly lead anyone into a situation where they might get hurt and I found that incredibly odd. But upon reading her diary, I found out that she was more scared of her friends turning on her, like they had at her old foster home, and her life becoming an unending hell at school than she was of disappointing me by arriving home empty-handed. I had to find a way around the scenario, and being that I am a resourceful man, I did.

Are men like me born or are they created? If they are born, then why are not all the males from his family the same? And if they are created is it through necessity or design? Can men like me be recreated? My answer? Who cares?
Being ditched by my girlfriend all those years ago, in the way that she did it, did not create the man I am today. I was already this man well before she ever met me, and why did she leave me? Because I got sloppy when babysitting the young girls who lived three up from us. Sure the allegations were never really quite believed by the police and charges were never laid, but my girlfriend? She knew. She knew that I was as guilty as the day was long. How did she know? Her father was of, shall we say, a similar ilk? Anyway, enough of that, she was just a cheap tramp anyway and the best thing that she ever did for me was leave!
Right, so I was faced with how to entice Jori's friends back to the house and at the same time ensure that they kept coming back and yet did not take their frustrations out on her. What did I do? It was Jori's birthday, her fourteenth and so I decided to throw her a party, birthday cake, party hats and presents not included. No, this was a drink all the booze you can handle and smoke all the dope you want affair. Best part? Her friends knew it.
By this stage of the game, Jori was pretty much hooked on the dope. So hooked in fact that she sneaked into my stash and helped herself many times. I knew she was doing it, but I did not pull her up on it because the time was not yet right at that time. Being that her friends were pretty much of the ilk of their parents, free booze and dope were way too much of a good thing to turn down, so back they all came, like bees to honey. I also took the liberty of inviting a couple of friends of mine, one was Boofa and the other was this guy Jonesy. Now Jonesy wasn't exactly what I would call a close friend. Jonesy wasn't even what I would call a drinking buddy, in fact; I didn't really like Jonesy at all. So why did I invite him? Jonesy is a known 'creep'. No matter the occasion, if Jonesy and booze are in the room together at the same time, it is a giver that Jonesy will do something totally inappropriate with any poor female who crosses paths with him. Another thing about Jonesy? He only liked white girls and Jori was the only white girl there, so odds were that the game was going to play out just the way I planned it.
Boofa was a little bit surprised to see Jonesy there, but I told him that Annie had stipulated that there had to be at least three adults present if the kids were going to be drinking. Yes, she knew that they were going to be given alcohol, but she didn't think that fourteen was too young to be having a first drink either. Poor Annie, she had such a protected upbringing that I don't think she believed that men like me even existed, let alone the fact that she was married to one!
So anyway, I explained to Boofa that I had been unable to secure another adult, being that it was Friday night and all, so Jonesy was it. Boofa seemed to accept this explanation, as much as he didn't like the idea of Jonesy being around all those young girls. Anyway so the party got going and most of the kids were pretty drunk and stoned fairly early on. Of course I did not give them the dope in front of Boofa, he would have gone mad! I gave the dope to Jori to give out to whomever she wanted to give it to, the only stipulation I put upon it was that they had to smoke it outside away from Boofa.
Sometime during the evening Boofa did make the comment that some of the kids seemed a bit 'smashed', but I kind of laughed it off saying something like, "Well what do you expect? Look at their parents!"
Boofa kind of laughed but he was still a bit uncomfortable with the idea of kids smoking dope. It was sometime around then that Jonesy disappeared and I just knew that he was probably making a b-line for Jori. Sure enough, within about five minutes of Jonesy disappearing, one of Jori's friends came into the lounge and told me that she thought Jonesy was bothering Jori down near the bathroom. Well, Boofa got to his feet faster than I did and I had to grab him and tell him that it was my house and that I would deal with the situation. He still followed me down to the bathroom where, sure enough, I found Jori sobbing because Jonesy had 'hit' on her.
Well, that was where I made a huge scene. I grabbed Jonesy by the hair and I yelled at him, calling him a pervert and some other distasteful names, as I dragged him through the house. Each doorway I walked through, I bashed his head against. Then when we got to the back door, I threw him down the steps and by then, all the kids, including Jori, had gathered to watch what was going on. Boofa was comforting Jori a little, but I knew that he would soon have his attention averted to the saving of Jonesy's life.
Once Jonesy came to a stop at the bottom of the steps, I walked over to him and grabbed him by his hair again and I started smashing his face down onto the concrete. That was about the time that Boofa realised Jonesy was in trouble. But I'm a bit bigger than Boofa, so he had his job cut out for him trying to stop me laying into Jonesy. I had pretty much beat the guy to a pulp before Boofa managed to get me away from him. Even once Boofa got me to stop, I did go back and deliver a good solid kick to Jonesy's balls because imagine if Jori had been my daughter?
Once Boofa was busy with Jonesy I turned around and walked back toward the house and up the steps to where Jori was standing. She was clearly in shock, as were some of her little friends. I slipped my arms around her and held her close and while I did that, I quite loudly announced that the hiding would teach Jonesy to keep his hands to himself. Then I looked at the ringleader of the group who had been the main aggressor against Jori on her second day at school. I stared that kid straight in the eyes and I said to her, "Take a good look at that sad sack of rubbish on my driveway 'cause that'll be you if you ever touch so much as a hair on Jori's head again."
Having heard what I had said and witnessed what I had just done to Jonesy, it was pretty evident to me that there would be no comeback on Jori for anything that might happen between me and some of her little friends. It also taught them that if Jori asked them to visit, then they would, without question, turn up. It worked like a charm.
But there was just one little problem with it working like a charm. Now that I had girls who were actually to my true liking, unlike Jori, Jori was no longer of much use to me. She was still living in my house, eating my food and sleeping in a perfectly good bedroom that realistically could have been housing a child more to my liking. Problem was that I had not yet created enough bad reports about Jori to the Department, so I was kind of stuck with her. Problem number two was that Annie quite liked her and that was never supposed to happen.
Suddenly I had to think of a way for Jori to earn her keep and it did not take me long to find a reason for her presence in my house. It was also around this same time that the knowledge of her stealing from my stash came in handy. I had a lot of clients all over town and for some reason, everyone stayed so tight lipped about where they were getting their 'gear' from that I never got raided. This was also, in part, due to the fact that I kept my customers very happy. Boofa and I were kind of in on it together.
Boofa and I not only grew good dope and produced top of the shelf Acid, but we were also pretty darn good cattle rustlers and we did the odd burg. Every couple of months we'd go out, do a mass kill and then distribute the meat around to our client base at no charge. Boofa worked for years at the Freezing Works before he turned his talent to straightening out wayward boys.
Our clients were always accepting of the odd free new stereo or a few days worth of meat. It might sound like a lot of hard work going out and having to kill animals, then hang, cut up, bag and then distribute the bits here there and everywhere else. But loyalty garners loyalty. You want to run a business like Boofa's and mine; you gotta know how to keep everyone happy and thus coming back for more. And talk about everyone living on tick, I had clients with tick lists longer than my arm. Every week they paid some off it, but they almost always booked up more than they could ever pay for, but that was okay because that ensured my safety, in regard to their kids, even more. It was a free-for-all and I was right in the middle of it, but I still had the problem of Jori.
I decided that she needed to start working to earn her keep and besides, it is never too soon for kids like Jori to learn that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The way I introduced the concept to her was simply this. "You been stealing my stash, Jori, now you gotta pay it all back."
Of course I gave her a couple of backhanders to get the message across to her that I was deadly serious, but all in all, she got the message. So on the way to school every day she dropped off packages and on the way home she collected the payments. Sometimes she had to go some distance to do this work for me, but she never dared to say no. In the evenings, being that I had new amusements, I needed her out of the way and so she started hanging with this small little group of kids that were just downright losers. She disappeared most evenings early on and I didn't see her until well after Annie had arrived home from work.
It was about this time that I started giving slightly negative reports to the Department about Jori's behaviour. At school, being that she was hanging around with absolute losers, she began getting into fist fights with boys and actually knocked one boy's tooth out. She was also covering herself in these ghastly homemade tattoos. She was sniffing glue and drinking booze and sometimes, if she surfaced before Annie, she and I got into some terrible arguments. I would slap her around a bit and she'd start screaming back at me, next thing I'd know I was leaving marks on her I was hitting her so hard. This was around the time that I started to see Jori's dangerous side.
Things were spiralling downhill extremely fast and I was really seeing the need to get her out of the house and smartly. You see, her behaviour was starting to attract the attention of people that I didn't want snooping around, up to and including Mr. Daniels. This necessitated me having to go from giving slightly negative reports about her to giving downright terrible ones. I told her social worker that she was stealing, lying, sneaking out her windows at night and that I highly suspected that she was doing drugs. I know, even I had to smile at that one.
Then something came to my attention that I was sure was going to spell the end for me. Jori was seriously entertaining the idea of going to Daniels and spilling her guts, consequences be damned!

It was in her diary that I read of her intentions, of course she'd never tell me something like that and when I first read it, I freaked out. But as I read on a little further, I saw what she had planned, and to be honest, like I said earlier, it was plan that would see everyone getting what they wanted up to and including Jori.
She tried to back out of the plan one night with me. I only know that she was trying to find a way out of the plan because I knew about it in the first place. Had I have not known about her little scheme, then I may well have been completely mystified and been none the wiser to my impending downfall.
Jori came into the lounge and asked if we could smoke a joint together. I refused her, as I usually did by then. She looked at me, she looked me straight in the eye and she asked me, "Was there ever a time, even in the smallest way, that you ever loved me?"
I looked her straight in the eyes, "No, Jori, there wasn't."
She cried then and nodded her head. She asked me if it was anything that she had done. I told her that it wasn't anything that she had done that made her impossible to love, but that it was what she was that made her unlovable. Yeah, it was cruel I know, but it was my neck on the line. My wife was pregnant with my fourth child, her first and there was no way that I was going to let Jori wreck my life.
Jori then looked at me and asked me if I was going to send her away and I told her that, yes I was going to send her away. I told her that I had planned for her to be leaving in the first weekend of the holidays. She asked where it was that she might be going and I told her that she would probably go to the local Social Welfare family home. Jori asked if I would take any more foster kids in and that was when I told her that there was a new girl arriving in the first week of the holidays.
"Will you do to her what you did to me?" she asked, as she stared deeply into my eyes.
"Yes," I told her.
She asked me how I could be so mean and I told her that it was simple. Girls like her are a dime a dozen and that when a girl has outlived her welcome, become a problem or I have simply become bored with her that I will send her away and then get another to replace her. "And another, then another and so it will go," I said to her.
I think that was when she realised her true place in the world and my true feelings about her. That was the night that she made the decision to do what she had been planning. I followed her on her way to school that morning. I saw her post something on the way to school and fortunately I managed to fish it out of the post box. Then I sat there and just watched.
It was about 8.15 and I should have already been at the school getting my classroom ready, but I had to be certain that Jori would do as she had stated she would. I figured a plan out for being there and for being late to school. If things played out the way that Jori planned, then I would not need to be at school long that day anyway. Yes, I sat in the car down the road a little way and I just watched. I heard the 8.15 train tooting its horn as it approached the level crossing to the north of our town and it was not long before I could see it.
Mr. Daniels must have been into work early that morning because he saw her there. He ran down the stairs as fast as his legs could carry him and he was followed by two or three other social workers. The four of them were running for all their lives were worth and a few people had stopped to watch what was going on. It was surreal really, it most certainly was. To watch that train hurtling toward the girl who stood in her school uniform refusing to get out of the way.
Mr. Daniels was screaming at Jori to get off the tracks and she turned to stare at him, just as she was struck by the engine. It didn't go over top of her; rather, it knocked her sideways toward Mr. Daniels and his group. I couldn't see too much by that stage because the train was still in the way. The driver slowed it down and made sure it was clear of the level crossing, but no one was moving anywhere. No, everyone was glued to the scene of Mr. Daniels crouched down on the ground holding a dead child in his arms and I admit it, in those moments I did see Jori as a child.
I picked up the brown envelope off the seat that contained Jori's 'letter'. It was addressed to Mr. Daniels, but he never got it. I watched the scene for a few more moments and then left when I heard the wailing of the ambulance sirens. I drove straight to work and placed the brown envelope in my cubby hole beside the staffroom and then I waited. My story for not having showed up to work on time? I got stuck behind a line of cars waiting to cross the railway tracks.
I went to my class and I got on with my day as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. It was about half past nine when my boss came and asked me to leave class because some people had arrived to the school to speak with me. I acted surprised and I tried, as one normally would, to find out who the people were at the school and to ascertain that my family was okay. My boss was very quiet.
I walked into the staffroom and there stood two policemen and Mr. Daniels. The policemen told me that they had some very bad news and that I best sit down for it. Mr. Daniels came and sat beside me and put his arm around my shoulders, and then he broke the news. Jori had stepped out in front of a train on her way to school. I of course also asked the obviously stupid question in regard to child verses train, "Is she okay?"
Mr. Daniels was actually crying when he said that she had been killed instantly. I think he actually might have genuinely cared for the child after all. The policemen and Mr. Daniels were just sitting there quietly when Jocie, the Office lady, came in to inform me that she had retrieved my copies of the children's school reports in the brown envelope in my cubby hole. That's when I panicked a little. "Oh, they're not finished yet." I think I stammered and sounded very nervous because one of the policemen looked at me a little funny.
Then Jocie did something that made my blood run cold, she held some papers up in her hand for me to see, "Oh they're fine, Cadence."
That was when I knew that my ship was sunk. Jori had outplayed me, in death, she had outplayed me and there was nothing that I could do because if that envelope contained my school reports, then where was the envelope that contained her 'letter'?
The cunning little devil had posted two envelopes, obviously she had, well how else could she have done it? I nearly ran for it. I nearly packed up my stuff and lit out of the country without Annie, and the baby be damned. There was no way that I was going to jail. There was no way that I was doing time for a kid like Jori.
Mr. Daniels insisted on making the funeral arrangements for her, but he was annoying enough to come around and let us know exactly what those were. I was still worrying something awful, wondering where that envelope was and on the Saturday morning the mystery was solved when someone knocked on our door. It was the Postie and in her hand she had a brown envelope. She looked at me very apologetically and said, "Your daughter must have posted this, Jori?"
"Yes," said I. I was totally unaware that our postie even knew Jori.
"Well, she posted this on Friday but unfortunately she did not have sufficient postage on it. I was instructed to return it to your house, even though it would have been less trouble just to run it up the stairs to the Department of Social Welfare. I almost did just that, except that my boss would probably have fired me. If you give me the correct postage now, I could ensure that it gets there first thing on Monday morning."
"I'll take care of it myself." I smiled awkwardly at the woman, just in case she was aware of what happened. But she apparently was not at all aware that it had been Jori who had been killed. As soon as she was gone, I went out back and I burned Jori's 'letter' and on the following Tuesday we attended Jori's funeral. The only one who stood near the front as her family was Mr. Daniels. As it turned out, Mr. Daniels had a secret all his own.
He didn't just know Jori's stepfather, he also knew her mother, very well, it would seem. As soon as I set eyes upon Jori, the day she stood on my steps staring at me like a lost puppy, I thought there had been something familiar about her but I couldn't work out what it was. When I heard Mr. Daniels speaking at her funeral I realised what it was. It was her eyes. She had her father's eyes. She had Mr. Daniels' eyes.
Deceptive Cadence..."Chord progression that seems to lead to resolving itself on the final chord; but does not."
Yeah, that about sums her life up. Anyway, enough of this chit chat. I must get going because Alia is due to arrive in about half an hour. The Department thought we needed some time to get over the loss of Jori, so the new girl is arriving around six weeks later than I had anticipated. But she is arriving, which means that it is business as usual for me.

Piczo