When the Cameras Aren't Rolling || Adopted by Elizabeth Olsen

It's a small world.

SATURDAY || JULY 24th || 2021

[One week before the incident, same day as ch.10]

Elsie De Angelis' POV ~

Given that Elsie usually ordered her groceries online, it wasn't surprising she'd never stepped inside a Whole Foods before. Still, the sheer scale of the place startled her. Aisles stretched on like glowing corridors, fruits were stacked higher than her head, and rows and rows of vegetables displayed names that she hadn't even known existed. Elsie thought, with a strange kind of nauseous fascination, that she had never seen so much food in her entire life.

On regular Saturdays, Mrs. Baxter picked her and Pippa up from gymnastics and then dropped Elsie off at her ballet studio on the way to the store. Today, though, the small brunette had been prohibited from going to her dance class, and although she wasn't pleased that Mrs. Baxter had made that decision, she didn't dare complain. The woman was too kind, and too generous with her time, always driving Elsie places, and looking after Violet and Winnie well beyond her usual daycare hours. Even now, Elsie's sisters were currently at the Baxters home, left in the care of Mrs. Baxter's husband and mother.

Violet's closeness with Pippa's younger sisters gave them an easy excuse to frame the extra childcare as 'playdates' whilst refusing the girl's continuous efforts to compensate them for their overtime.

They'd been doing stuff like that for years now, ever since they'd noticed six-year-old Elsie walking her baby sister to and from daycare all on her own. To them, no child should shoulder responsibilities like that. Elsie disagreed. She'd worked hard to prove she could handle everything herself, but the more she managed to juggle alone, the more determined the Baxters became to help.

The guilt of it sometimes felt as if it might swallow her whole. She hated the idea of burdening another family with problems born of her own failures.

Worse, as time went on, the Baxters began asking more and more questions that Elsie couldn't truthfully answer. She'd learned long ago how to lie convincingly; it came as naturally as breathing. Stories could be rewritten, details rearranged, truths softened. But Thomas was the smartest person she knew, and nobody could get information out of Violet like Heidi could. Together, they'd uncovered more than Elsie ever intended, scratching at the edges of walls she had spent years building.

Every instinct in her screamed to shut them out completely, to lock the doors to the shadowed, suffocating pits of her mind where the darkest truths of her life lay hidden and ensure the Baxter's would never find them. If it were only her, she would have done it long ago. She could survive on her own; she always had. But Violet and Winnie couldn't, and they deserved more than an absent sister who was stretched too thin to provide them the protection and support they so desperately needed. So, with a shame that settled heavy in her chest, Elsie found herself relying on the Baxters for help. She told herself it was only for her sisters' sake, but deep down she knew better. She had formed attachments to them as well, and those attachments had kept her going in ways she did not want to examine.

Swallowing her pride like bitter medicine, the guilt-ridden child fell quietly in step behind the two blondes ahead of her. The bright supermarket tiles seemed to spin when she looked down at them. But she kept her head stationary because any fast movements caused dark specks to float around her vision.

That was why she was here instead of her dance class.

A "tiny incident," as Elsie called it, had happened during her acro pass in gymnastics earlier. She'd been practicing a new combination for her floor routine: a front tuck, roundoff, back handspring, back layout...when suddenly she'd lost all strength in her limbs and down she went, crumpling like a puppet whose strings had been cut. It wasn't even a proper faint, just a few seconds of dizzying sickness where she'd temporarily lost vision and coordination. But a small crowd of her teammates and coaches had formed by the time she'd regained her senses, and they'd displayed far more drama than Elsie had deemed necessary.