Chapter 3 Lily
A week into the same routine, and I still haven't found the nerve to actually walk through those garage doors.
I cut through the courtyard of my apartment complex, the fastest route home even with the weeds pushing up through the cracked concrete and the walls that have been crumbling since before we moved in.
A shuffle of movement near the dumpsters sends my pulse spiking. Not them again.
I know better than to stick around and find out.
I break into a run for the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time, lungs burning by the time I slam my own door shut behind me and throw the deadbolt.
Safe. For tonight, anyway. Parker and his friends have been getting bolder about hanging around after dark, and Parker himself gives me a specific kind of creeps, the kind where his eyes linger a beat too long and promise something I have no interest in finding out about.
The apartment’s dark and quiet, which means Mom’s still out.
I flip on the hallway light and head for the kitchen, still catching my breath.
There’s a frozen dinner somewhere in the back of the freezer with my name on it, and given the state of my legs right now, that’s exactly the kind of ambitious cooking I’m capable of tonight.
I’m not making much at the restaurant, a little over minimum wage most weeks, but I’m not complaining.
I’ve got a roof, even if it’s a small one, and I keep this place spotless because when you don’t have much square footage, clutter turns into chaos fast. Small comforts. I’ve gotten good at collecting them.
The microwave dings and I peel back the plastic, letting it cool while I set myself up at the counter with a book I’ve read twice already.
Nothing sounds better tonight than eating in peace and losing an hour to a story that isn’t mine, maybe with my thoughts drifting somewhere they have no business drifting, toward a certain garage a few blocks over, and the man who runs it like he owns the whole street just by standing in it.
I’m three bites into dinner when the front door bangs open hard enough to rattle the frame.
“Lily, are you home?” Mom’s voice cuts through the apartment, sharp enough to set my teeth on edge.
“Just got back,” I call, bracing myself before she even rounds the corner. “Making dinner.”
She doesn’t ask how my day was. She never does. Instead she plants herself in the kitchen doorway, hands already on her hips, eyes narrowed like she’s caught me at something. “Have you seen my black dress? Don’t lie to me, Lily. I know you took it.”
I count to five before I answer, mostly so I don’t say something I’ll regret. “I haven’t touched your dress.”
My mother is twenty years older than me and looks like she stepped out of a different, better funded life, tall, sharp boned, raven hair that catches the light no matter how tired she is.
We share the hair color and basically nothing else.
Whatever I got, I got from my father, who left when I was ten and hasn’t sent so much as a birthday card since.
It wasn’t always like this between us. I remember flashes of before, her laughing at his jokes, little notes tucked into my lunch bag.
Something in her broke when he walked out and never came back, and whatever grew into that space decided the world owed her for the trouble of raising me alone.
I don’t excuse it. I’ve just learned to understand it a little, the way you can understand a wound without forgiving whatever caused it.
“Why would I even want your dress?” I ask, setting my fork down. “It wouldn’t fit me. We’re not exactly the same size.”
That much is true and we both know it. My mother could slide into a keyhole if she had to. I’m built entirely different, curvier everywhere, and years of her commentary about it have mostly stopped landing the way they used to. Mostly.
“Maybe you wanted to play dress up,” she says, tilting her head like the idea genuinely amuses her. “Pretend to be me for a night. Wouldn’t be the strangest thing you’ve done.”
“I don’t want to be you,” I say, quiet but steady, because it’s the truth and because for once I want her to hear it land.
That gets a real reaction, a flicker of something behind her eyes before she smooths it back into practiced boredom. “Whatever. Where would you even wear it, anyway? It’s not like you go anywhere besides that restaurant and the library.”
I let that one go too. There’s no version of this fight I win, and I’ve stopped trying to win it, mostly because winning was never actually the point for her. The point is that I stand here and take it, and eventually she runs out of steam and remembers she has somewhere better to be.
“Fine,” she says when I don’t bite. “Check your room. If I find it in there, we’re having a very different conversation.”
“Check away,” I tell her, and mean it, because she won’t find anything, because I never took it, because I’ve learned a long time ago not to touch what’s hers even when what’s mine goes missing on a regular basis.
Case in point: the nursing school application I’ve had ready for months, tucked into a folder under my mattress along with the cash I’ve been saving, both of them secrets I guard more carefully than anything else I own.
If she ever found either one, I doubt she’d steal them outright.
She’d just make sure I understood, in her own particular way, that wanting more than what she’s given me was always going to be a mistake.
She’s still standing there working up to something else when her phone buzzes against the counter.
She glances at the screen and her whole posture changes, shoulders tightening, jaw setting, the practiced boredom dropping away for something that looks almost like fear before she catches it and smooths that over too.
“Who is it?” I ask before I can stop myself.
“Nobody.” She flips the phone face down without answering it. “Go find my dress.”
I don’t push. I’ve learned not to push when her voice goes like that, thin and careful, like she’s balancing on something narrower than she’s letting on.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen that look lately, quick, clipped calls she takes in the bathroom with the fan running, like the noise might actually hide anything.
I tell myself it’s not my business. I’m getting better at telling myself things I don’t fully believe.
“Fine,” I say instead, abandoning what’s left of my dinner and heading toward her room, because whatever’s eating at her tonight, it’s easier for both of us if I just find the stupid dress.
I find it exactly where I expect to, crumpled on her closet floor under a pile of shoes, and I don’t ask why she couldn’t be bothered to look there herself before accusing me.
There’s no point. Some nights the path of least resistance is the only kindness either of us has left to offer the other, and tonight, exhausted and still thinking about a certain garage two streets over, I’m more than willing to take it.
Mom disappears into her room without another word, dress in hand, already moving on to whatever version of tonight she’s decided to have instead of this one. I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding and head for my own room, locking the door out of habit more than necessity.
I change out of my uniform and into something softer, an old t shirt worn thin at the collar, and sit cross legged on my bed with my phone in my lap.
There’s a text from Priya, three exclamation points and a question about whether I’m coming to Jackson’s party this weekend after all.
I type out a maybe I don’t mean and hit send anyway, because sometimes a small lie to a friend is kinder than the truth that I’d rather spend my Saturday walking past a garage than doing anything a normal eighteen year old would consider fun.
I lie back against my pillow and let myself replay the day, the birthday party that ran long, the newspaper Noah never reads, the particular way his forearms flex when he’s elbow deep in an engine.
It’s a small, private kind of happiness, cataloguing details about a man who barely knows my name.
I used to think wanting something you couldn’t have was its own kind of misery.
Lately I’ve started to wonder if it’s actually the opposite, if the wanting itself is the good part, the part I get to keep no matter what happens next.
Somewhere down the hall, I hear drawers banging and hangers scraping against the closet rod.
Mom, apparently, isn’t done making a mess tonight.
I let my eyes fall shut anyway, telling myself it isn’t my problem, that tomorrow I’ll walk past the garage again, tomorrow I’ll tell myself it’s a coincidence again.
Some patterns, I’m starting to realize, aren’t worth breaking just because you can see them clearly.
But the racket down the hall doesn’t stop, and after a few more minutes of listening to her tear the closet apart, I give up pretending I can ignore it and drag myself out of bed to see what she’s after this time.
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