Chapter 1 Harper
Harper
September, Three Years Later
“Here it is.” Mom unlocked the front door of our new house, beaming at me. “What do you think?”
I glanced around the small, shabby living room, and my heart sank.
Not because it was small and shabby but because of a visceral feeling that some unseen calamity lurked behind the walls.
Termites, maybe, or a crack in the foundation Mom didn’t know about because she’d passed on doing an inspection when she’d made the one and only trip to Rhode Island earlier this summer.
Either I was quiet a half second too long or Mom read my face.
“Gee, thanks, Harper,” she said. “You know, I worked really hard to buy this place instead of renting some shitty apartment from another shitty landlord that—”
“Mom, it’s fine,” I said, smiling. “Really. You did good, Maeve Bennett.”
“Yeah?” Her face filled with dubious hope as she brushed a lock of hair out of her face. Once it was sandy blond, but now it was full of gray.
“Yeah,” I said. “My eyes just needed to adjust to the dark.”
She blew a sigh of relief and rallied her enthusiasm.
“Thanks, baby. You’re gonna love this place. Trust me. I mean, wait till you see that school. It doesn’t matter how much money I have in the bank or what neighborhood we’re in. What matters is how much smarts you got in that brain of yours. You’re finally gonna be at a school that deserves you.”
Then I felt like shit for being so pessimistic. As usual.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, giving her a hug and a kiss on the temple. “This is going to be great.”
I was excited about Castle Hill Academy, but a bit intimidated.
Ninety percent of the student populace weren’t living in shabby houses with foundation problems. But Mom was right—where we lived didn’t matter.
The Academy was my gateway to MIT, or maybe NYU.
Then I could get a great job in the field of chemistry, and my family’s next house would be the opposite of shabby.
My little brother—half brother, technically, though I never thought of him as half of anything—had been tearing around the tiny front yard. Now he burst inside and pushed between me and Mom, singing, “I love it. I love it. I love it!”
He started racing around the tiny living room.
Mom had been prescient to name him Dash—the kid loved to run.
He made a circuit around the whole house, then jumped on the furniture that came with it.
Mom had done well in that department too.
The furniture we’d had in our crappy Pittsburgh apartment hadn’t been worth the price of the U-Haul, so we abandoned it.
We piled everything we could in a storage bin secured to the roof of Mom’s ancient SUV and crammed the rest in my old blue Prius.
“Do I have my own room?” Dash asked with wide-eyed, seven-year-old enthusiasm.
“You sure do,” Mom said. “Look upstairs. Yours is the smaller one. Harper gets the big one because she’s the big sister.”
“I thought you said this was a two-bedroom,” I said, while Dash thumped upstairs to investigate.
“It is,” Mom said. “I’ll sleep down here on the couch.”
“Mom…”
“You’re going to need your own space to study. I’ll be fine. Plus, with my jobs, I’ll be coming and going, so this will make it easier.”
Easier. I clenched my teeth. That was the thing about Mom.
She was admirable yet frustrating as hell.
Adamant I have my own space to study and not get a job, so I could focus on my grades and get into a great college.
To pay the mortgage on this new house, she’d work nine to five as a receptionist at a local dental office, and clean Airbnbs in whatever time she had left over.
But the bulk of my “study time” would be spent babysitting Dash, getting him to and from school, supervising his schoolwork, cooking meals and taking care of the house. Just like I did in Pittsburgh.
Like I did when Mom was drinking.
She went into the postage-stamp-size kitchen with its old linoleum flooring and splayed her hands on the counter that faced the living room.
“I can’t believe it. This is all ours, Harper. We’re homeowners. Wow, we’ve come a long way, baby. I’ve come a long way.” She shook her head, disbelieving. “What a road.”
Like a movie montage, my mind played out that road.
Long years of pitfalls and potholes that nearly sent us off a cliff more than once: Mom struggling as a single mother because my father split before I was born.
My grandparents dying and Mom struggling harder, a parade of nameless friends and neighbors stepping in.
I might’ve been three when the struggle became too much and suddenly there were a lot of bottles lining the counters and littering the floor of our tiny apartment.
Here the montage turned bleary, steeped in whiskey-and-beer uncertainty, watching my mother stumble around drunk. By age six, I was either helping put her to bed when she came home smashed or cowering under the covers, alone and terrified, when she didn’t come home at all.
More pitying neighbors helping me get her off the front lawn because she was too loud to ignore and too heavy for me to lift.
There were stints in foster care when it got really bad, and periods of relative normalcy when she’d dry out. But it never lasted. When I was ten, she took up with a fellow alcoholic, and Dash was the result of that blessed union. That guy didn’t stick around either.
Then the movie tried to find a happy ending, showing a room full of clapping people as Mom got sober, went to night school, and got her AA degree.
“An AA degree to go with my AA meetings!” she liked to say.
She’d been clean and sober for four years now, but the damage had been done.
No finish line crossed as far as I was concerned.
My trust in her was built on a shaky foundation and she knew it.
I tried my best to forgive, but when you’re eleven years old and hiding your one-year-old brother in a closet because some rando boyfriend is on a drunken rage and your mom just makes excuses the next day…
I still had nightmares and took stairs instead of elevators.
Buying this house was a big step, and I was proud of her, but doubt gnawed at the corners of my mind.
While our apartment in Pittsburgh may have been shitty, at least we had Benny the landlord.
If the toilet clogged, he fixed it. If it required a plumber, it was on him.
We may have been one disaster away from eviction, but repair bills weren’t why.
Stop being so goddamn pessimistic, I thought. Be happy for once in your life. Let a little bit of hope in.
Hope wasn’t in my nature. My default setting was stressed to the fucking max.
But I could try. Castle Hill Academy held the key to unlocking a lot of doors for me. Our new neighborhood, the Bend, was surrounded by lush trees, and we had a yard Dash could play in, instead of a cracked concrete parking lot.
I smiled at my mother—a real smile. “Thanks, Mom.”
Her expression turned perplexed. A little wary. “What for?”
“Working so hard. Both for us and for yourself.”
Tears filled her eyes, and she put a hand on her chest. “Oh, baby. I needed that.”
She came to me and gave me a hug, then held me away by the shoulders, her expression brighter than Dash’s on Christmas morning.
“Our luck has changed. I can feel it.” She kissed my cheek. “Let’s unpack.”
I heaved a sigh and glanced around our new, old place.
Please let her be right.
***
The first day of school arrived.
As predicted, Mom wanted to be at the dentist office early to make a good first impression, so I drove Dash to Castle Hill Elementary where he was starting second grade.
“Are you excited, bud?” I said, glancing at him in the rearview where he was cheerfully kicking his feet against the booster seat.
He was such a happy kid. God, I loved that little bugger.
He looked nothing like me—sandy-blond hair to my dark curls, blue eyes to my brown.
Whoever my father was, his genes beat out Mom’s. Hers won with Dash.
“I’m super excited,” Dash said. “I hope my teacher is nice. I hope I make lots of friends. I hope they have tetherballs on the playground. I love tetherball. Do you think they’ll have tetherballs?”
I laughed. “I have no idea, buddy. I hope they do.”
I hope they have everything you could possibly want.
“What about you, Harper?”
“What about me?”
“Are you nervous about your first day of school?”
“A little.”
I was more than a little nervous. I wasn’t normally preoccupied about other people’s opinions, but back in Pittsburgh, there’d been hundreds of kids in the same socioeconomic range as me. At Castle Hill Academy, I’d be in a very obvious minority.
So what? Might not be a big deal. Don’t get defensive already.
“Why are you nervous?” Dash asked. “Because you’re going to be new?”
“Exactly,” I said. “Doesn’t that make you nervous, Dash?”
“Nah,” he said. “I like meeting new people. If you get nervous, all you do is turn to the person sitting next to you, and say, ‘Hi, I’m Harper. I’d like to be your friend.’”
I grinned. “That easy, huh?”
“Yup.”
“Where did you learn that?”
“Sesame Street, of course.”
“Of course.”
I pulled up to the car line and helped Dash out of his booster. “You know where you’re going?”
“Yup.”
“Good man. I’ll be here after school to pick you up, okay?” I ruffled his hair. “Have a great day, buddy. Love you.”
“Love you, Harper.”
He waved his little starfish hand at me and jogged eagerly into the school.
Brave kid, I thought. I wished I had half of his courage and a fraction of his optimism. I’d long ago decided my real job—more important than making good grades or getting into a good college—was to preserve that spirit in Dash for as long as I could.
***