This girl!!!!! Evelyn is already so attached. ...God is good and paradise need not wait for dying. That's - well, it's some kind of spirit, anyway, even if it's not not a concerning thing to say in context. At least her fundamentalist parents didn't convince her that technology is the work of the Devil, though Evelyn still wonders if it was because they thought it was simpler not to introduce the subject at all.  

"Washing machines are great," she agrees. "Hopefully someday everyone who wants to have one will be able to have one. In America even people who are a lot poorer than I am can still use them in a special laundry shop, you just have to pay with coins and it's, like, two dollars to wash a load. - Ooh, and after this we can go up and you can help me load the dishwasher, you're going to love that too." 

She hesitates for a moment, watching the laundry start to spin. "- Iomedae, is it okay if I give you a hug? You - sometimes you say things and I want to hug you, but I never want to make you uncomfortable." 

"...am a holy warrior, no a kid. Holy warriors still can hugs, but - from the people they protect, and for the people they protect."

There are rules about hugs??? ...On further thought that's not the weirdest thing here, don't lots of Christian sects have weird rules about modesty and who you can touch, she just wouldn't have expected it to cover her. This is not exactly relieving Evelyn's faint background sense that Iomedae is relating to God like a controlling boyfriend. 

"That's okay." Sometimes she hugs people who aren't kids but saying that might sound pressure-y. "Dishwasher?" 

"Dishwasher wash dishes? That is so good! This place is so rich!"

Evelyn is so happy that Iomedae is happy, and will show her how to load the dishwasher - she stops to clarify that this isn't because the dishwasher and laundry are going to be Iomedae's job, this is Evelyn's house and the chores are Evelyn's responsibility though she may sometimes ask Iomedae for help - and internally remind herself several times that feeling rejected about the lack of hugs is Making This About Herself. She has no grounds for complaint, really, Iomedae is polite and lovely and very cooperative once she understands the reasons behind why she should do something. 

It's nearly ten at this point and Evelyn has a lot of log notes to catch up on while it's still fresh in her mind; she wants to make sure that she remembers Iomedae's exact wording as much as possible, so she can make it clear what Iomedae actually said versus what Evelyn is guessing but could be wrong about when there's so much they still don't know. 

Now that Iomedae has hopefully been reassured that Evelyn is rich enough that lending her spare pajamas is trivial, can she be convinced to come dig through the ottoman of spares to find pajamas that fit her, and then wash her face and hands upstairs before changing?

...Does Iomedae know how to use a toothbrush to clean her teeth. She should do that. Evelyn can give her one from her stash, and a tube of toothpaste for her en-suite bathroom. 

Sure, she will do that! 

This is a really astounding amount of fabric. They must have weaving-spells for it. She feels as if someone explained that it is conventional to wipe one's face with bars of gold rather than soap. 

- the clothes are mostly brightly dyed. Iomedae would wear heraldry, of course, were she riding into battle, but she did not plan particularly to wear brightly dyed clothes the rest of the time. They look very garish. She will pick the least garish sufficiently-modest sufficiently-large option.

Iomedae can find a cream-colored short-sleeved nightgown (knee-length on her, not overly lacy) that fits, though it's meant for a plus size teenager and thus fits reasonably at the shoulders and leave vastly too much fabric around her midsection.

She's already had the tour of her room, or at least the Lily version, so Evelyn skips that, and once she's explained toothbrushing if this seems necessary to explain, Iomedae can get ready for bed in private. If Evelyn were in Iomedae's position right now, dragged around from church to hospital to a stranger's house after (and it's easy to forget this happened earlier the same day) nearly being raped, she would be so desperate to be left alone at this point. 

Evelyn can knock on Iomedae's door when it's been an hour and a half since she said she wanted to wait that long before eating?

(Is the shepherd's pie okay, it's been sitting out and you're not supposed to reheat meat dishes repeatedly like that...though probably it's fine, and Iomedae would be so upset about the food waste if Evelyn threw it out and got her a new portion, and she probably wouldn't notice if Evelyn did it and didn't mention, but while Evelyn is not above that kind of sneakiness if it's to avert a tantrum with a toddler, she feels icky about it in this situation.) 

It'll be fine, an hour and a half isn't very long and Iomedae has a competent stomach. Once it's been time she will eat the pie politely but very very very quickly. 

"The pie was so good, thank you. I am very grateful."

"You're very welcome!" Evelyn has to remind herself that NO HUGS. "I think it's a reasonable time to go to bed, now. You must be tired." Evelyn is ALSO tired but she has log notes to write and she's not going to do it with Iomedae hovering, even if it might theoretically be fine because she can't read English. For one, maybe Iomedae actually can read some English and it's one of the things she's choosing not to mention yet. 

"Yes, ma'am. Good night. God show you good and law and paradise."

God according to Iomedae seems to have excessive opinions about Rules, but it's still a sweet thing to say. "Thank you. Sleep well." 

...She'll make herself a cup of tea and sit at the table until she's sure Iomedae isn't about to come right back down again. 

Nope. She has attempted the bed, rejected it for being ridiculously soft, really, what, why would you want to sleep on a surface that soft, you'd roll right off, this isn't an objection to lavish displays of wealth it's just a pragmatic objection to softness, taken some blankets off the bed and made a mat on the floor for herself, and gone to sleep on it, after her pre-bedtime prayers.

And Evelyn takes her tea to the study, sits down at her desktop, wakes it up and opens a new email and...stares at it blankly for a few seconds. Fragments from the last couple of hours are bouncing off one another in her head. 

There's a stage in every placement where she's just getting to know a child, trying to absorb and understand what she was told of their background and history, and the things they disclose to her (and how they say them), and their behavior whether good or bad, and all the little habits they bring with them from home, and the faces they make in response to Evelyn's parenting (whether it's Evelyn laying down the law or Evelyn offering them affection - trying to take all of that and put it together into, not just sympathy for them - sympathy is usually easy, compassion is easy, patience can be hard but she's practiced at it - but what it must be like in their shoes, because in Evelyn's mind you can't really love a child until they make sense to you. 

There's a period where she feels like that saying about the blind men and the elephant, except it's sort of the wrong metaphor because it's all her, touching different corners of a child's life and not knowing yet how they fit together. (Her colleague Gina used to tease her about thinking she was some sort of Sherlock Holmes child trauma detective.) And then, at some point, something clicks, and all of a sudden it feels like she gets them. Usually she's still missing a lot, of course, because often a child won't open up and reveal their darker secrets for months if not years, but suddenly she's no longer walking on eggshells around them, and it feels like she loves a specific person and not just the abstract idea of a child in need. 

It takes varying amounts of times. Lily's was about a week in, during a room-trashing, obscenities-screaming tantrum over bedtime, and Evelyn anticipated a long, long night of resettling her over and over. Eventually Evelyn, exhausted after a week of broken sleep and a fruitless half-hour of trying to calm her down, decided that enough was enough and tackled her with the duvet cover and sat on the floor with the kicking screaming bundle in her arms for ten minutes, collecting various bruises, replaying snippets of the pre-placement meeting. She's a very angry child, the social worker had said. Her impulse control is nonexistent. She struggles to communicate what she wants and gets very frustrated. She's in fight-or-flight mode 24/7. But I'm sure she'll settle with you, and Evelyn thought at the time - and thought, again, a week later, sitting on the floor with Lily's heels drumming on her shins - that somewhere inside there was a girl who had been rejected by three foster carers in a row, who surely thought she was unloveable, and who desperately needed to be loved. And eventually Lily's sobs quieted and she went limp, and let Evelyn put her to bed with no protest until Evelyn tried to actually leave, at which point a plaintive voice called out to her, more words and articulated more clearly than Lily had ever managed up until that point with Evelyn: "no! s'weep here!" And the thought that went through her mind - which doesn't make a lot of sense put in words, it never does - is that it wasn't that Lily was angry, it was that she was scared. It's hard to describe how that even helped, but after that she stopped worrying constantly that she was doing things wrong every time Lily had a tantrum, and it felt very simple. She didn't need to try to give Lily a - how would Jeremy put it - a "speedrun" of the perfect childhood. She just needed to be safe. 

(It really does sound kind of dumb, when she actually thinks about it, instead of just doing it.) 

Where is she with Iomedae? 

Iomedae is a very easy-to-read kid, in a way; when she's confused or disagrees with something Evelyn said, she just says so, unselfconscious. The things she wants are - big, but in a way so simple. And something clicked, when she shifted from thinking of the main challenge here as dealing with Iomedae's deprived and probably traumatic upbringing and helping her unlearn all the unhealthy beliefs and patterns she had absorbed when it was all around her and all she knew, to - thinking of her as someone who wants to be Joan of Arc, except of course it's awfully complicated to be Joan of Arc in modern America and Iomedae is abruptly under the Social Services microscope, facing all of that messy complexity at once and dealing with the fact that everyone thinks she's a child. 

It does feel less like she's walking on eggshells around Iomedae. Because - she's apparently more or less already decided that she isn't going to work on slowly convincing her that the way she relates to God and God's work is unhealthy and she should expect less of herself. (Evelyn is still pretty sure it's unhealthy as a general principle, but Iomedae isn't the general principle of a kid, she's a specific kid, and this is so important to her.) Evelyn is still going to have to set a lot of boundaries, but it feels like deciding not to pick that especially uphill battle takes out a lot of the tension between what she wants for Iomedae and what Iomedae clearly wants for herself. 

It really doesn't feel like she understands Iomedae yet. She's - confused about different things, at least? 

Anyway, it's coming up to 11 pm and Lily will be awake at six, and she needs to screw her head on and write things down, starting at the beginning so she doesn't miss anything that might turn out to be important. 

Iomedae is a lovely girl. She is polite and very honest and she communicates much better in English than I expected, though she's still missing a lot of vocabulary when I try to answer her questions. She was wonderful with Lily, and does seem to have experience with young children.

I did note some concerns about the bedtime stories she picked (told from memory and presumably translated, since she can't yet read English.) Nothing too horrifying, but there was some emphasis on Hell being very bad. I think she worries about Hell a lot. She's separately mentioned devils at least one other time, and her religion seems to believe that they do things like spreading lies (in this case, that God doesn't approve of technology.) 

Speaking of that. Her background is clearly very poor, though she doesn't think of herself that way, and claimed they always had food and she's only gone hungry in the last six months. She seems to have had pretty much no contact with the rest of society or exposure to modern life. She was amazed by running water, and even moreso by the washing machine. I was worried she would be unwilling to use appliances, if her family's religion was against it, but she found it all delightful. I'm not sure if it's just that she missed that part of their tenets, because she sang a hymn and when I asked her what it was about, she said "how we start with nothing, and if we work hard we will have everything, every house will have water in it and light at night", which is very nice but I can't square it with what her upbringing was clearly like. She also has a lot of weird expectations about society and I'm not sure where she got them, maybe from Bible stories? She thought it would be her responsibility to feed the man she injured in self-defense, and was distressed when I said it would be weeks at least before his trial. Her sect also definitely believes in faith healing, or something like that, she claimed that God can bless people and make them immune to disease. She also claimed that God can miraculously provide water. 

Her expectations are still very out of sync. She seemed to assume at first that she was being given room and board in exchange for watching Lily and doing chores, and I'm not entirely sure I've convinced her otherwise. I think some of it is parentification, and being used to being treated as an adult who should be self-sufficient, but some of it is definitely coming from her understanding of her religion. I don't know how much of it is generic religious tenets from her family's sect, and how much she thinks is different for her as a "holy warrior". She's very intense about it, and she seems to think it means she needs to follow strict rules for her conduct. I don't get the sense it's something she made up, or her own interpretation of Bible passages or something. She expects us to know what it means and to hold her to those standards, and she wants to join a "holy order" and I think expected me to point her at one. As described it doesn't sound especially like a nunnery, but it could be her understanding of a church that does missions overseas. She claims that her uncle, who was a mentor to her, was a "holy warrior" who fought "Tarbafon" (maybe Satan, and my best guess is that this just means missionary work, though Iomedae may be thinking of it as a more literal kind of fighting). Her uncle is dead, though she didn't seem especially upset when she mentioned this and said he's in Heaven. Her faith seems to affect how she sees death in general; one of her bedtime stories ended with a murder, but I think it was supposed to be a happy ending because the dead character was righteous and went to Heaven. 

She also can get very anxious about having nice things when she knows children are going hungry. I think she has specific children in mind, there were minors in the migrant camp who she shared her food with. I don't know if that's even under the Social Services remit but I think it would bring her a lot of peace of mind and help her settle if we can get some kind of help to them; I was only able to calm her down by promising I would look into church-run food banks, which she of course thinks are more trustworthy than secular charities. I think her compassion and generosity are lovely, and something of an inspiration, and she has a lot of potential, but I'm worried about how much of her motivation comes from believing that God will abandon her, and presumably she would end up in Hell, if she fails to meet the bar for a "holy warrior." She tried to refuse to eat dinner, at least without paying me for it, and then insisted on praying about it and then still waiting 90 minutes to avoid being "weak." She got anxious again about being given more clothes; I think she only has the one pair, and reluctantly conceded that maybe three pairs would be justifiable. 

Speaking of money, she has several hundred dollars on her, which she's apparently been carrying around in her shirt. It eventually came out that undocumented work like what she was doing is illegal, even leaving aside her age, and she freaked out about it, and wants to return the money because God would abandon her for breaking the law. She also wants to apologize to the police for accidentally lying to them about whether she had broken any laws, I suppose because "holy warriors" aren't allowed to lie, and she doesn't want to give other holy warriors a bad reputation with the police. I said I would ask your advice on that. 

I think I've convinced her to attend school, once we have that set up. She was very reluctant at first. She said something odd about it, actually: that she isn't smart enough to be a "person like God is who can change all the rules with study", which sounds like a reference to something but I don't know where. I tried to assure her that she's more than intelligent enough to succeed in school and it would open more opportunities for her. I emphasized that most of the ways she can help people here involve knowing more complicated math, like statistics, and that she needs to understand history and civics and the legal system better. It's possible that a mainstream school isn't the right place for her; she's precocious in some ways but very far behind with others. I also want to get approval to set her up with a volunteering gig at a food bank. I know she can't do paid work there, either under fostering regulations or what with her lack of paperwork, but I think it would be a good source of stability for her, and earn more cooperation on things she's frustrated about. 

She did make some worrying statements that she was considering leaving care. In context I'm fairly sure she meant running away and not asking for a different carer, though she offered to give me two weeks' notice, which I have to say is the most considerate threat to abscond I've ever heard. I told her that we would worry about her safety and she tried to reassure me by promising she would get another weapon somehow and learn to defend herself with it. I think I've discouraged that for now, I explained that there are laws on who can carry weapons and she isn't an exception so she needs to learn them, and learn about other laws so she doesn't break them by accident. She's really very motivated not to break the law and I expect to end up leaning on that a lot. 

I think there's a lot we still don't know about her background. My focus now is providing her with a stable home environment, minimizing her anxiety, and working on her English vocabulary. I hope that by the time she can communicate it, she'll be comfortable enough with me to say more. 

Evelyn is not 100% sure that her writeup is coherent or that she hit everything, but it's nearly midnight, and she's already written way too much to put in an email body. Yawning, Evelyn copies and pastes everything into a text file and saves it as an attachment, writing out a quick polite email to Diel, and cc'ing her own supervising social worker in case Diel isn't going to be staying on as Iomedae's longer-term social worker. 

Upstairs, she nudges Iomedae's door open a crack (she keeps the hinges very well oiled) to check if she's asleep and seems okay. 

- she was asleep (on the floor, not in the bed) but now she's awake and reaching for her sword, which she doesn't have, and then looking frantically for something she can use - 

- oh, it's Evelyn.

"Ma'am," she says, and stands and bows.

This is separately INCREDIBLY awkward and also pretty concerning! Normal children do not wake up like that! Even after a really intense stressful day! Lily doesn't do that! Evelyn has years of practice at being very quiet when she checks on kids at night! 

"I'm so sorry," Evelyn says, hoping her blush doesn't show in the dimmed hallway light. "I - just wanted to make sure you were okay. You can go back to sleep." And she smiles and heads to her room. 

It takes a lot longer than that for her heart rate to come down. 

The roads aren't safe even at home, and camp was only sometimes safe since she got here. And she's to be a holy warrior. She needs to be able to defend herself.

She hates not having her sword.

She lies back down and goes back to sleep.

Lily wakes up at 5:43 am (not that she can read the time). She rolls over and yawns and then remembers that there's a !!!BIG GIRL!!! in the house. Who is so pretty and strong and nice and sings songs. Lily is not supposed to go crawl into Mummy's bed when she wakes up because it's not 'propriate but 'Meday is a BIG SISTER and not a mummy or daddy and so it has to be allowed. Right? Lily is fairly sure this is logical. 

She tiptoes VERY quietly like a mouse down the hall and then knocks on 'Meday's door all quiet like a mouse would. "I c'min?" she whispers. "P'eez?" 

Iomedae is a light sleeper. "Yes, of course. Good morning, Lily, God bless you, come on in!"

"Yay!" Lily says in a very excited whisper, and slips in. She seems the pile of floor blankets. "...Y's'eeping onda foor?" Lily didn't used to like beds either but the beds in Mummy's house are okay, nothing bad happens to you in them. She tries to figure out how to tell Iomedae this but it's so many words. 

"The bed is so soft! I kept feeling I would -" she doesn't know the word so she pushes it down demonstratively. It sinks quite a lot. "The floor is more like my bed at home. And in the fight against Tar-Baphon the soldiers must sleep on hard rocks and keep fighting."

"S'good f'bounce." If they bounce on the bed now then Mummy will wake up and tell her off for being not safe. Lily shrugs and goes and sits down on the blanket nest. Blanket nests are pretty good too. "Whossa Tabaffon?" 

"He's a bad guy. Holy warriors sometimes go and fight him, so he can't do as many bad things. I am too new a holy warrior now but when I am bigger maybe I will do that. Or maybe something else will be more important. They will tell me when I get to holy warrior school."

Lily has so many questions! She snuggles up against Iomedae and then makes a face and tries to make the questions stop going all in knots in her head so she can make words about them. 

"Howsa be 'liwarrer?" she squeezes out.