Love Child

41- What We Own

I remember how quiet you sometimes were, and I asked about it, and you said it's a feeling you
get, you don't know how to talk about it, and I'd like to think

we own that feeling—how we bested the myths. We didn't become murderer
and victim. We didn't cheat on the other's birthright.
-Phillip Therman, What We Own

After a few months, things start to fall into a steady path. It's like I can finally start to breathe again after everything that has happened lately. Silas has stayed away from me, which I strongly appreciate. Although I do see Jay around, I've adjusted to that and he's actually started to grow on me. He doesn't talk about his family, we only talk about things that involve Micah.

As far as Bonnie goes, she only showed up for a few days to get her side of the story out there and then she disappeared again. I haven't heard from her again, and that's completely okay with me. That's how I would prefer it, really.

Josie's dad has started allowing me to see Josie again, which took a lot of convincing on my part after getting arrested while she was under my care. He's a good dad though, and protective of Josie, so I didn't blame him for that but I'm allowed to see her now about every few weeks and we're still in contact via text a lot too. She still hasn't told her father about what happened with Davis, so when she wants to talk about it, she comes to me.

Her dad even let me bring her with me to Casey's science fair to support him. He's been so excited and working so hard on this thing that he still hasn't told me about. So walking into the school gymnasium with Micah and Josie is pretty exciting, so that we can all finally figure out what Casey has been working on all this time.

The gym is full of tables set up with experiments. I see an air hockey table, a ton of poster boards, and the nervous students standing at their booths as they explain their project to the people walking around.

"Do you see Casey?" I ask as I'm scanning the gym for my brother but it's pretty crowded and he's relatively short.

"There," Josie finds him first, pointing to a booth to the left of the room. I don't see him at first, so I just follow Josie's direction until I finally see my blond brother standing by a poster with two other boys that I've met when I have come to visit Casey before. Joel and Kenneth are their names and they've been working with Casey on this project.

"Ellie," Casey smiles when he sees me and quickly ushers me closer to his booth. "Okay. This is it. What do you think?"

I read the title of the poster that says "Going Green by Growing Green" and then under that, there's a whole lot of charts, words, and pictures of grass. I see a paragraph for the abstract, some materials listed, and a conclusion but before I can read any of it, Josie speaks up.

"I don't understand any of this, Casey," She admits to him, looking at the pictures of grass too. "Which probably means that it's really cool. You're totally going to win."

"The objective is to create an entire house that is self-sufficient in every way," Casey begins to explain. "And this is just one step of that. Did you know that you can extract energy from grass? That's what we did. It's called biomass energy, and we planted three different types of seeds to see which type of grass produces the most biomass, to see which type would be the most beneficial to use as an energy source."

"This is really great, Case," I assure him.

"Yeah," Micah agrees with me. "I think Josie was right. You're definitely going to win."

"There are a ton of great projects," His friend, Kenneth, warns us in a very pessimistic voice.

"Shut up, they're just trying to be supportive," Casey scolds him and then looks back at us and says, "Thank you for coming. We've been growing grass and analyzing their biomass patterns for months now. I'm glad that you can finally see it."