Chapter 29 #3
I stood there a minute, waiting for something else, but the room had already forgotten me.
In my own room, the wallpaper peeled down in curling strips. I had a poster of the solar system above my bed, planets spinning out on invisible lines, everything brightly colored and far away.
My old stuffed animal, Rabbit, sat in the corner, nose chewed off and one ear hanging by threads. I squeezed him to my chest and lay down on the scratchy comforter.
I could hear the dull hum of voices through the thin wall, Glenn’s laugh like a car horn, my mother’s words trailing out in long, wet sounds.
I traced the bandaid on my knee until the skin beneath burned, then peeled it off slowly, watching the scab start over. Some part of me wanted to keep the ache alive, as if a small pain could distract from the big ones.
There was no homework in my backpack, not really, just a math worksheet with ghosts smudged in the margins, a note from the teacher that said “see me” circled twice, and a permission slip I’d already forged.
I set it all aside. The room was so quiet, I could hear the tick of Mom’s cigarette ash falling into the cup on the other side of the wall.
I remembered how it used to be, back when Dad was still here, and Mom would catch me playing with Lillian’s makeup or drawing with her eyeliner on the bathroom walls.
She’d scold us, then laugh and wipe my cheeks with a warm washcloth, humming old Fleetwood Mac songs while she did it.
Sometimes she made pancakes for dinner, said it was a “special girls’ night,” and let us eat them with our hands, tearing off soft, eggy pieces and drowning them in fake maple syrup.
I wasn’t supposed to remember the part where she burned the first batch and threw the pan so hard it left a triangle-shaped dent in the floor.
It was easier to remember the good parts, so I did.
After Dad left, everything tilted.
At first, Mom tried to keep up. She bought us matching sweatshirts in bright, candy colors and walked us to school holding both our hands, tight like she was afraid we’d float away.
She promised she’d get a better job, that everything would get back to normal.
But it was like the world decided we weren’t allowed.
By the time Halloween rolled around, and the strip mall costume store ran out of all the good stuff, Mom was already sleeping through mornings, and sometimes nights, stretched out on the living room rug with a blanket she’d tried to crochet herself.
Lillian called it “hibernating,” which sounded almost cozy, but I knew bears woke up strong.
I don’t remember the first time I noticed the change.
Maybe it was the day Mom left a lit cigarette balanced on the edge of the sink and the bathroom filled up with tacky sweet smoke, or maybe it was the time she forgot to pick me up from after-school reading club, and I stood outside in the dark until the janitor chased me away.
It could have been the way her hands shook, how she’d light a new cigarette before the old one was out, or how the kitchen knives vanished from the drawer and never came back.
Mostly, it crept up slowly, like frost on a window. One day, you could see through it, and then suddenly, you couldn’t.
That winter, the cold got into everything.
The radiators never worked right, so Lillian and I slept in the same bed, arranging our bodies into a tangle of knees and elbows so we wouldn’t fight over blanket rights.
In the dark, we whispered numbers back and forth. How many days until Mom got paid, how many hours she’d been asleep, how many more times we would suffer before we had to tell someone.
We never did tell.
My thoughts drifted to the school day and Caiden’s kindness. He was a nice boy, but it made me nervous thinking about how he might turn mean or weird if I started expecting him to be nice all the time. That was how it worked with grown-ups, so why not with kids? I liked him better as a maybe.
The TV through the wall switched to a channel with people screaming at each other, then a commercial jingle I almost knew the words to.
I set Rabbit down and fished through my backpack for the little plastic dinosaur, the ankylosaurus Caiden had given me. It felt heavier now, like it had absorbed the whole day and was carrying around my secret for me.
I tucked it under the pillow and rolled onto my side. I thought about the boy who left bruises on his own fists, who knew the names of every dead thing, and how he’d peeled the bandaid for me without shaking.
I wanted to believe we could stay friends, but I’d seen how fast people disappeared in this town, how easy it was to become a rumor or a punchline or just one more empty seat at the lunch table.
I stared up at my ceiling and tried counting the cracks, but I kept losing my place.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Caiden’s hands, the bandaid, or the crows.
I wondered if he was lying awake in his house, thinking about the same things, or if he was already asleep, dreaming about running so far away that no one could ever catch him.
I thought about him endlessly until I fell asleep.