A.N.: Please review! Billie popped up in my head one night and wouldn't go away until I'd given her a story! Also, I'm rewriting this story, and I'm doubting whether Billie's the right fit for Miller, and if she'd be better for Finn or…Evan or even Sean, maybe. With Megan joining them, it would be interesting to write a love-triangle with Billie, Finn and Megan.

Where the Wild Things Are

01

"STOP BARKING AT ME AS IF I WAS ONE OF YOUR RECRUITS!" Billie screamed, bellowing her mother's anger; she saw it in the Lieutenant Commander's eyes, fathomless near-black ones that Billie thankfully had not inherited.

"DON'T RAISE YOUR VOICE AT ME!"

"THEN STOP ISSUING ORDERS LIKE I'M ONE OF YOUR MINDLESS MARINES!"

"I TOLD YOU NOT TO SHOUT!"

"HARK WHO'S TALKING!"

"Wilhelmina—Stop it!" Lieutenant Commander Kingsley shrieked, and Billie felt her rage, white hot, just under her skin; she felt as if she were about to spontaneously combust in her passion; blood pounded past her ears and she knew her face was as red as her mother's—another trait she had inherited from her mother, the inability to hide her rage from her face; it always flooded with colour when she was angry and upset, and was completely undignified and unpleasant. She knew—her mother looked livid, her face completely red, her lips white and her nostrils flared. "You will take your Ritalin!"

"I WILL FUCKING NOT!"

"DON'T SWEAR AT ME!"

"DON'T ORDER ME ABOUT! I TOLD YOU—I DON'T LIKE TAKING IT!"

"I DON'T CARE—YOUR DOCTOR SAYS YOU NEED IT!"

"HE DOESN'T HAVE TO TAKE IT—I DON'T LIKE WHAT IT DOES TO ME! YOU WOULD KNOW THAT IF YOU EVER BOTHERED TO ASK ME ABOUT IT BEFORE YOU HAD THE DOCTORS SHOVE DRUGS DOWN MY THROAT!"

"THEY'RE FOR YOUR WELL-BEING!"

"IT'S TOO LATE FOR YOU TO START CARING ABOUT MY WELL-BEING!" Billie screamed, blood rushing past her ears. "IF YOU CARED AT ALL YOU WOULD HAVE NOTICED I HAD ADHD YEARS AGO WHEN I STARTED ACTING OUT—IT'S TAKEN YOU THIS LONG TO EVEN REALISE ANYTHING MIGHT BE WRONG BECAUSE YOU'RE SO SELFISH AND PUT THE NAVY BEFORE YOUR FAMILY. THAT'S WHY DADDY LEFT YOU; IT'S WHY I'M SUCH A SCREW UP. IF YOU'D BOTHERED TO SPEND TIME WITH ME BEFORE YOU WOULD HAVE SEEN THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG, AND YOU WOULD HAVE KNOWN, YOU COULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING ABOUT ME BEING SICK. But you can't, because you're too selfish to think about anyone but yourself and your promotions." She finished, her throat hoarse, chaffed and raw from screaming—the argument had been going on for ages and she was sure their neighbours could hear every word.

"Wilhelmina—"

"My name's BILLIE!" Billie screamed angrily. The injustice of her Christian-name always made her shiver with anger.

"You need your Ritalin, Billie," Lieutenant Commander Kingsley sneered.

"I've done fine without it the last sixteen years of my life!" Billie hissed back.

"If you were taking your medication you wouldn't get yourself into situations like this, like with that boy—"

"That boy's name is Garrett and we've been seeing each other for three months. If you ever stuck around this place long enough, you might know that, since he spends practically every night over here—because he knows you won't be home. And he hasn't been the first!"

The argument had begun, really, yesterday, when Billie had been saying goodbye to Garrett—in their way: Hard and fast and selfish, the way their entire relationship had been. Garrett loved sex and Billie knew better than to expect anything long-term while she was still hitched to her mother's career-Navy wagon; they were perfect for each other, both selfish when it came to their sexual needs, and almost insatiable in their appetite.

Lieutenant Commander Kingsley didn't know that, of course. She still probably thought Billie was a chaste-minded virgin like the good girls who never showed their tummies or cleavage at school and giggled coquettishly from a safe distance with their girlfriends.

If Billie had learned anything from being a Navy brat, it was that things that appeared set in stone were nearly always transient, and people she knew one day were replaced by another set when she moved another thousand miles away. She had learned to grab the boys by the pants, or she would just sit out on her life while her mother pursued her career.

She was going to shock her mother.

"You had that boy over here, when I wasn't at the house?" Lieutenant Commander Kingsley stood before her, in her Navy whites, her fair hair swept into a severe bun, her makeup minimal; she looked irate that a man had snuck into the women's barracks.

She doesn't know the half of it, Billie thought, with a mixture of contempt and amusement. Her mind raced with flashes of memories she had made in this house—one of several others she had made her mark in with the local high-school boys.

"You're never at the house, and you don't give a shit about what I do when I'm in it or when I'm not, otherwise you would have caught me with Stacy when you were stationed at Pearl," Billie remarked; they had lived in Pearl Harbour before spending three months at the Naval base in Greece; Greece had been their last stop before here, Charleston, South Carolina. "You don't even know who he is, do you?"

"You are not allowed to have boys over when I'm not here to supervise," Lt. Cdr. Kingsley said sternly, her eyes narrowing and her nostrils going white.

"Supervise! Look who's trying to act like a mom—but you can't be a Navy career-woman and a mother at the same time; it doesn't work," Billie said spitefully.

"That boy could be dangerous—for all I know, he is!"

"Please! Garrett has a huge penis and knows what to do with his tongue, and he's too stoned most of the time to do anyone any harm. Now, James, he was dangerous—Lewis, he used to cut himself; Brad, he was bipolar, and he cut himself down his wrists, not across, so he meant it; Davie, he was anorexic and did drugs—and Steven tried to rape me."

"Billie!"

Billie had never before spoken to her mother about anything—she was always at the base, always working, testing aircrafts and training, being deployed to Iraq—and Billie knew her mother had never noticed when she snuck boys out of the house in the mornings (which was frequently, as Billie was as insatiable as her ADHD made her scatter-brained and overly energetic). Her mom didn't know that Billie skipped school most days, or at least a handful of her classes every day, to go to the movies or get high with her boyfriend or just hang out somewhere that wasn't on the base. Her mother didn't know that Billie had lost her virginity on the hood of a car. Billie's mom didn't know that she had quit dance classes when she was twelve; she didn't know that Billie was on the pill, or that Billie had taken up boxing and self-defence classes when the aforementioned Steven tried to rape her. She didn't know that Billie couldn't wait until she turned eighteen, when she could get the hell away from her mother.

She didn't know Billie had ADHD—no-one did—until the school had forced the Lieutenant Commander to come to a parent-teacher conference (after at least a dozen entreaties) where all of Billie's teachers had met with her and voiced their disapproval and concern at Billie's behaviour—the skipping classes, turning up stoned (though if they'd noticed that, they had looked the other way), disrupting the kids in her class, turning in half-completed homework assignments.

Now she was trying to force drugs down Billie's throat; she didn't like them. She hated what happened to her when she took them, and she was terrified of getting hooked on them. She was who she was, she was Billie, ecstatic, irrepressible, fidgety, overenthusiastic, and a nymphomaniac.

She loved being Billie Thorne; she loved laughing, loved chattering away with people, being bouncy all the time; she loved her hobbies that her buoyancy allowed her—skateboarding, surfing (when she was near water), rollerblading—and she loved, loved, loved sex, and she'd had lots of it since that first kinky time on the hood of the gorgeous '68 Chevy Impala she'd helped Jake restore. God, she had loved Jake—he had hated the Navy almost as much as she did; they had spent all their days working on his car, getting high in his room, having sex and just generally getting into trouble on their skateboards, taking a leaf out of the legendary Z-boys' books and finding empty pools to try out their tricks when they couldn't find or access the skate-park.

"What? You're trying to act like a mom, trying to act like you're concerned about me having a mental problem. Aren't I supposed to open up to you and have a heart-to-heart moment? Because I can tell you a lot more. Those are just a handful of my ex-boyfriends. Don't you want to know all the sordid details of my life that, up 'til this point, you haven't given a shit about?"

"That is not fair!"

"Yes it is!" Billie hissed. "Your baby is the Navy; it always has been. If you didn't want to be my mommy, you should've sent me to live with Daddy when he left you."

Billie's dad had left on Christmas Eve when she was seven; her parents had officially divorced by the time she was eight, and she hadn't seen her father since. She could still remember watching her dad out of the window, past midnight, walking away, a dark shadow disappearing into the snow. She could remember the house shuddering with her parents' raised voices, huddled in her bed.

Billie received expensive presents from her dad on her birthday—a gorgeous diamond-studded Montblanc watch for her sixteenth birthday was one example—but she hadn't seen her father or heard his voice or even seen him since she was a little girl.

"He left us," her mother snarled, her shoulders whipping back straight in defence.

"He left you, because you cared more about the Navy and your promotions than you ever cared about us," Billie said venomously. "You know my teachers asked you thirteen times to go to a parent-teacher conference? I've only been there for three months but they noticed more in a fortnight than you have in sixteen years! And now you're trying to play the Mom-card—that's not happening. You lost that leverage years ago."

"I am still your mother."

"No—you're Lieutenant Commander Kingsley. Do you know how many people I've met on-base who don't even know you have a daughter?" Billie hissed.

"Well you are my daughter, and I'm in charge of your well-being, and you will take your Ritalin," Lt. Cdr. Kingsley said sternly, some of the crimson leaving her face. Billie's hackles rose again, bristling; she was a lot taller than her mother and enjoyed glaring down at her.

"And how're you gonna do that from Baghdad, Lieutenant Commander?" she asked in a low, dangerous snarl.

Tomorrow, Billie was going to the airport via taxi-service.

She was going to Boston.

The day after tomorrow, her mother was shipping out to Baghdad, Iraq.

By the time the Lieutenant Commander's latest tour-of-duty was over, Billie would be eighteen and so far gone even the Navy's state-of-the-art satellites wouldn't pick her up.

Or maybe she'd still be in Boston with the McGowans.

She liked the idea of being in one place for two years. Her last two years of high-school. Soon she'd have to start thinking about college, which meant four years in the same place, not that college was an appealing prospect to Billie, who hated school. Billie had been a Navy brat since birth; her mother had given birth and gone back to work and their family had moved around the globe to accommodate her rising status in the Navy officer ranks.

Billie's parents had divorced when she was eight and since then Billie had moved with her mother every six months, like clockwork—unless they spent a few months here, a few months there, spent a little while at that place, and then spent a fixed term at such and such a Navy base.

The longest Billie had ever lived anywhere was eight months, and that was with the McGowans also, during another of her mother's tours of duty, when she was twelve, going on thirteen.

Two years seemed astronomical.

A.N.: A little more Teen-Rated than usual, but I wanted to capture the raw fury between mother and daughter. I'm sure we can all remember vicious arguments with our mothers! I'm going to upload this first chapter and then go to bed. I hope I'll have some reviews in my Inbox when I wake up!