Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Bonnie Foster loved her kids.
It was perhaps the one thing she knew to be true in that moment. If you had asked her the day before, she could give you a plethora of things. She was a journalist — midway through a journalism degree from Sunnyvale Community College, ready to begin the hard slog up to nightly news anchor. She was a girlfriend, soon to be wife. Her and Scott had talked about how they were going to get married as soon as they were finished with school. Scott was getting his real estate license, they were going to be set. Furiously dragging themselves and their children over the poverty line.
But then one of her childhood friends had gone on a murder spree and killed twenty people, and suddenly all Bonnie knew is that she loved her children. She and Danny had never been super close, she'd never been best friends with any of them, Bonnie and Scott usually kept to themselves. But it was the idea that people she'd known since she was a baby, people that had always been there, were now dead.
The bell had been ringing, Kurt had been directing them all to the bus and Bonnie had been shoved into a wall. She was dizzy, and she saw her beloved boyfriend run straight past her.
He'd come back for her eventually, but there had been a period of time that he had clearly not been thinking about her at all. When she asked, he was adamant that he hadn't seen her, he'd been looking for her, he would never leave without her. But she wasn't quite sure if she could believe that.
Coming back to Shadyside was hard. Seeing Andrew and Maddie, her two loves. Their lives had remained unchanged. They were still so small, untouched by the grief she was feeling in her chest. The feeling of Danny grabbing for her and narrowly missing her with a blood soaked axe.
They got older, so did she.
It got too hard, living there. Her parents passed, and suddenly her house was too big for the family of four. The house across the street, once belonging to the Michaels' family, felt like a vacuum. The two girls that Bonnie had grown up across from were now gone. Her children had no babysitter.
Their wedding was small, just them, a minister and their two toddlers. And that was it, in an afternoon came the end of the Fosters.
It became too much, after a while. They sold the house and packed up, moving south. She and Scott drifted further and further apart to the point where he barely felt like a person anymore. He was merely a piece of driftwood floating down the stream beside her. She felt weightless.
They found quick fixes. Maddie was having trouble with her motor skills, they enrolled her in gymnastics. Bonnie wasn't sleeping well, she bought pills to help her. Her and Scott were on the brink of divorce, they had two more kids.
Sydney was a lot different than Maddie. She was quieter, she didn't make friends as easily. Maybe the quiet is why Bonnie thought it would be good to have a fourth. By that point her and Scott were practically done.
He'd reach for her, an innocent touch and all she could think of is the way Danny had grabbed her. The way she'd needed Scott and he hadn't been there.
She couldn't handle the feeling of his hand on her skin. One night she'd woken up to his arm draped over her stomach. Bonnie had startled up, breathing quick. She'd made it out of the room before Scott had sat up and without waking Maddie or Sydney, had slipped into her daughters' bed. Andrew got his own room, he was the oldest, their only boy. Their good boy.
He got good grades, he took care of his sister. When Bonnie started working the graveyard shift, the 2 am news, and when Scott started not come home until the early morning, Andrew and Maddie handled it.
Maddie was scrounging for pennies in the couch cushions to buy baby formula and diapers. Bonnie would leave them cash to order pizza and they'd spend it on baby clothes.
By the time Andrew was old enough to get a job, Sydney was walking and talking. Things seemed like they were getting better, Bonnie was getting better stories, they were making more money. Enough that maybe they'd be able to start saving instead of spending all they had.
And then Bonnie came home from the doctors with a positive pregnancy test to find Scott, now freshly unemployed, had reached the bottom of a bottle of budweiser.
And suddenly with Bonnie heavily pregnant, both Maddie and Andrew working, Scott not working, and Sydney starting kindergarden, their dream of saving went out the window.
Those nine months were hard. She couldn't sleep, she couldn't take her pills, she couldn't look her children in the eyes knowing what kind of life she'd given them.
So, the second Jack was born she went home, left him in her childrens' bedroom and slept for the first time in almost a year.
Maddie came home from school, stepping over her father passed out on the couch, almost twisting her ankle on a stray beer can, and found her newborn brother on her bed, screaming.
It was in that moment that Maddie realised that she'd lost her mother.
Andrew came home and found his little sister, still in her cheer uniform, covered in baby vomit and her own tears. He tried to take Jack from her, and she shook violently. She didn't let go of him for hours. Andrew kept Sydney away and put her to bed.
It took days before she let him go. Days of watching with fearful eyes as he took care of their sister before finally, one night, she decided she could trust him.
She slept, drifting off to her older brother reading her a fairytale, and when she awoke he was still there, one hand in Jack's and the other in Sydney's. The book was hers, from when she was born. Not one of Sydney's, not one of his, not one of the few they had for Jack. This book belongs to Maddie Holt.
They weren't getting by, not now that Andrew and Maddie knew they couldn't leave the kids at home without one of them there. Bonnie was on maternity leave and Scott was still doing whatever it was that he was doing.
The bills stacked up, and it took Maddie passing out in the middle of a pep rally from hunger and lack of sleep for Andrew to be able to convince his parents that something was really wrong.
Maddie didn't want to move back to Ohio. As dire as things were, she knew they'd only be worse there. She had friends in Georgia, a few guys who had thought she was pretty and had treated her nice. But they'd gotten their old house, right in front of the Michaels' house, now filled by a nice looking couple and their teenage daughter, back for a bargain courtesy of the town sherrif pulling a favour.
It was odd, being back. In a place that was so familiar yet so alien. It felt like home, the place she'd live and die in. And yet, as she looked up from the passenger seat of her brother's car, the house looked nothing like she remembered.
────────── ⋆˚✿˖° author's note so. how are we feeling. i wrote this while watching gone girl and i think i was feeling extra dramatic but this is officially the canonical end of maddie's story, as the next act is just slightly before her time. i've been working on this story for literally two years and i cannot believe i have reached this point truly. this chapter feels truly like a love letter to this entire book i loved writing it, it's my favourite out of all of them and i feel like it gave me space i needed to put things out there that i'd always known to be true about maddie but could never find the time for
act 3 will be the end of the story obviously but i might have a thing or two planned, who knows. i hope you liked this chapter. i don't know if i mentioned before that i thought act 2 would end up longer than act 1, if i did. ignore that. i literally can't count i sat there staring at the two word counts and only just realised that i got them mixed up but anywayyyyyyy
i really really hope you liked this chapter, i loved loved loved writing it. thank you for reading this far, and i will see you (hopefully, let's be real, i don't have the best track record lmaooo) in act 3 <33333
