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❛ 𝐅𝐋𝐀𝐓𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐄 . . . ❜ 016. he's not the sun / i didn't change my number by billie eilish ━━━━━━━━━━━
SEATTLE . . . ❜
Look.
In theory, Beth had been a good kid.
She'd been a good kid in the tradition that the consequences of being anything else would have been devastating. Lines had been drawn before she even knew how to talk: a Montgomery did not cause trouble and a Montgomery did not step out of line.
Bizzy Forbes had taught them better, or, at least instilled the fear of family embarrassment in their hearts.
If either of Beth's parents were called to the principal's office, there would be hell to pay. It was a passive-aggressive hell, the sort that had been threatened with a soft voice and pointed eyes.
Bizzy had been an expert at that: A gentle hand on the back of a young Beth's shoulder, and a strained smile.
(We don't have time for misbehaviour so do not waste our time.)
She'd blinked at them, both her parents, five years and desperately trying to figure out how to weather the universe, a dent in the space between her eyebrows and wondered whether that was her first threat–– It was.
It had come, once, after Beth had found herself telling a girl to go fuck themselves after they'd barricaded her in a restroom cubicle. She had been eight years old. A gasp caught at the back of teachers' throats and a wail in the back of the bully's.
Eyebrows had raised and Bizzy's number had been dialled and that had been it–– the sound of Bizzy's voice down a phone line as she, very strictly, told Elizabeth that she'd been taught better. She didn't ask where Beth had learnt that language or whether she was even okay; No, she taught Beth about the precariousness of embarrassment, of being the nuisance.
A Montgomery had to be perfectly pacified until they had something useful to offer.
Do not waste our time.
It was hard to place it, but sitting in Richard Webber's office felt like that.
It felt like being called to the principal's office, a young kid in a boarding school a State away from home with her heart in her throat.
Beth crossed her ankles as she trailed her eyes along all of the accolades, monuments to a very successful surgical career that had amalgamated into running one of the leading surgical teaching hospitals in North America. She'd gotten bored that morning and had Googled it as George made anxious conversation at a stoplight–– this whole hospital?
