A Marvellous Christmas | mcu actors

December 17ᵗʰ

After that meeting at the stage door, it was useless to say that Jo went back to see Billy Elliot a couple of times (or more like thirty times because Tom invited her and she never paid her ticket anymore). She would stay with his parents, that her own parents had met beforehand and they agreed that Jo would be safe enough with them. They would pick her up at the same time as Tom if he went to school that day (sometimes, he was too busy with rehearsals to even go to school) and they would drive directly to the theatre. If Tom didn't go to school that day, his parents would pick her up with Tom's little brothers and they would drop her at the theatre with his mom. She would always get his homework and the lessons he had missed from his best friend Harrison and they would go over them together, Jo patiently explaining math, science or anything that was close to grammar, spelling or anything like that. She quickly understood that Tom wasn't like her when it came to letters, to words, to reading. He would mix some letters up, he would have trouble to read, he would get stuck on certain words and get frustrated when the text was printed too small. Once, she asked Tom's mom when they were walking to the theatre, why he was in such trouble with words and she explained him that Tom wasn't like others, that he had something a bit wrong in his head, like two wires that wouldn't properly connect, and that the fact that they didn't connect right was called dyslexia. Nothing to worry about, he just needed more time and it demanded him more efforts to get to the same point as her. So because she realised how frustrated Tom would get when it'd come to spelling and reading, she stopped talking about it completely. They would sit on stage to do their homework and she would use marbles to do math with him. When they started coming up to equations, soon enough, Tom became the one helping her with math because she was more into words and he was more into numbers, by default. When they were old enough, Tom would tutor Jo in math and physics and Jo would tutor Tom in English and French. By the time they were 14, both of them were good at school and had found a balance between school, their afternoons at the theatre and their time at each other's place or at the park. Jo met Tom's best friend, Harrison, and soon enough, the three of them were inseparable. Where there was Harrison, there was Tom and where there was Tom, there was Jo. The only time they wouldn't be together would be at school as they attended different schools.

Jo was there when Tom filmed the documentary of the fifth anniversary of Billy Elliot the Musical. She was there also for the night they celebrated that said anniversary with Sir Elton John (that Tom introduced her and Harrison to, even though he was quite sure he wasn't supposed to and that Sir Elton John would forget about the three of them the day after). It made Jo's night and it was all he could hope for, for that she'd been so helpful with school matters and for the fact that she quickly became one of his closest friends. When Tom got his first cellphone, the first people he told about was Harrison and Jo. So when Jo got hers a few months later, on her birthday, the first number she texted was Tom's. They'd spend a lot of their phone credits on texting each other, to the point of sometimes, their parents would be pissed at the phone bills. They'd hang in the backstage of the theatre, they'd run on stage and play hide and seek like five year olds and they'd pretend to be superstars whenever no one would be looking. Tom had tried getting Jo to sing for real but she would have rather died than to sing on stage next to him, when he sang that well. Eventually, he started teaching her how to dance and he would make her do backflips by holding her and flipping her between his arms. There was a definite and genuine bond that appeared between them, at the surprise of their parents. Tom was sweet and he definitely had a rough time at school. Jo would sometimes get him back in the park with bruises on his cheeks and she'd ball her fists so hard she'd hurt the palms of her hands with her nails. She would have punched some assholes if she was big enough, but between the two of them, Tom and Jo weren't the tallest kids of the block. Harrison was a bit taller but he had no idea how to fight and last time he threw a punch, he broke his pinky so he had learned to take the blows and moan afterwards.