Just us- SBI adoption story (Just me and him book 2)

Chapter 23: school shopping

TW- mentions of injury, abuse, suicide and not very nice things

Tubbo's POV:

Friday had been busy. Kristin was at the hospital with Kelly again and a small part of me had begun to realise that visiting someone in hospital can weirdly be considered a privilege. Visiting someone in prison might be too. At least you can visit them. Or maybe the fact their still alive is the bad thing.

Lovejoy had a band practice session and Wilbur let me sit in on it to show them the music program I'd been working on and that this was their best chance of getting their music online without a label. With their gig coming up in a few weeks, Wilbur is desperate to have all the social media pages, at least one youtube video and music streaming services set up before then. He keeps talking about it being their big break. I'm not sure the others are as convinced. Everyone is willing to give it a try though.

We looked at some microphones yesterday evening, with Techno, who also needs a microphone to record his youtube videos with. If they paid for half each, they would be able to afford a nice one and it would be beneficial for both of them. They needed to ask Phil and Kristin about it first though.

Techno had a busy day too. He had his appointment for his autism diagnosis and came home quite upset. I went up to check on him, my dyslexia diagnosis appointment was difficult too and I thought it might give me an insight. We talked briefly but I left him to it after a while because he was busy building the model of the house for Kelly.

I spent time doing my physio exercises, playing minecraft, watching movies with Tommy and all around recovering from the mini golf. It was fun, but tiering and quite painful in the end. Having physio on the same day wasn't the best of decisions. Still, spending time as the 'older ones' was nice. Wilbur agreed with me on that. Tommy is amazing but there is denying that Tommy has a different life experience to us. We made Phil promise we could do mini golf as a family soon, on some other day this summer, because otherwise we felt like he was missing out. But being able to make jokes and talk about things we wouldn't do with Tommy in the room was nice. Being older in the respect your reckless decisions are based around things with higher stakes was different than being older in the respect that you have to be an adult and take care of your younger sibling: and I liked it.

But today, we were going 'back to school' shopping. I don't know why we'd decided to do this on a Saturday when the shops would be busy, but I realised the set up for helping Tommy was way better now and there wouldn't be as much difficulty as there may have been in the past. If I'm honest, I was dreading school. I know Phil and Kristin say it will be different this time, but how do they know that? How do they know I'll make any friends or won't be bullied? I realised that everyone at my old school would have forgotten all about me. They'd realise one day I didn't go there anymore and move on quickly. I didn't mean anything. And now I was starting my GCSE's and I could barely speak and I knew I was dyslexic. Maybe the diagnosis would bring something good though. At least that would be better. Jack, sorry, Mr Manifold seems really nice and I think he'll listen to me, even though he's the SENCO.

Tommy seems so excited for school. Wilbur is excited to be a year away from college and Techno is excited to be a year away from being out of there. At least we can kind of bond on that. I just wished I was normal. What am I supposed to do when people ask why I'm on crutches? I can't say 'oh yea my dad tried to kill me and then he killed himself'. Maybe I should just lie. Bad sporting injury. Shark attack. Anything but a neglectful, abusive and, in the end, murderous dad. 

"Okay, let's stop in here first. Tubbo here's your list. I've gone through your subjects on the website, picked out everything you'll need and then put it on here. If you can't find something, don't worry, we can get it somewhere else, or online. Oh and ignore the uniform and backpack and stuff, that's in a different shop."