Chapter 5 - JunieI did not become Junie's guardian overnight, and I want to be honest that I did not do it purely, entirely, out of some clean and generous instinct. Some days, in that first year, looking at her felt like grief wearing a costume, and I hated myself for the thought every single time it arrived, uninvited, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.
But Delphine, in the end, could not provide Junie with stable housing, and would not — despite three separate opportunities offered by the court — commit to stopping the pattern of encouraging Junie to blur the line between herself and a dead girl she'd never met. Callum's access was reduced to supervised visits, contingent on a psychiatric evaluation he has, as of this writing, still not completed.
I petitioned for kinship guardianship eight months after that Thursday in the principal's office. It was granted eleven weeks later.
Junie is twelve now. She goes to a different school, one with no display about the water cycle that's been up since 2019, one with no hallway that makes my chest tighten every time I collect her from the front office instead of walking straight past it.
She still has my husband's — my ex-husband's — chin. She still has, from certain angles, in certain light, a resemblance to a girl I buried two years and four months ago, and I have stopped pretending that doesn't occasionally still knock the breath out of me on ordinary Tuesday afternoons.
But she has her own name now, full-time, unconditionally, in every room she walks into. Junie. Not Elsie. Not "the lady's" understudy. Junie, who likes seeded rolls from the bakery on the corner, who has begun, slowly, to ask me real questions instead of the careful, performed ones she used to ask in that first year — questions like whether it's all right to miss her mother even though her mother did something wrong, questions like whether it's all right to like living with me even though it means her father isn't around much anymore.
I tell her the truth every time, the same truth I told her sitting on that office floor eleven months before any of the rest of it made sense to either of us.
May you like
I am not angry at her. None of this was anything she did.
And she believes me a little more, I think, every single time I say it.
