At least Nana hasn’t turned on Brooklyn yet. She’s such a sweet, innocent little kid; she probably would’ve worn Nana’s dress not just because it was pretty, but because she knew it would make Nana happy, even if it itched. When she looks at her little sister, Ella wants to wrap her arms around her and protect her forever. She’s often imagined her love like a turtle shell, like she’s grown hard so she can stand between Brooklyn and the world, and especially between her and Dad. When Mom told Ella she was pregnant, she’d been worried that Ella would be jealous or angry, but Ella had immediately felt a fierce love for her baby sister that’s continued all along, even when tiny Brookie cried too much or current Brookie gets annoying. With Mom out of the picture, it’s up to her to make sure that Nana doesn’t smother that sweet smile, crush that precious spark.
Ella digs through their things and hands Brookie her toothbrush and toothpaste. Together they go into the spare bathroom Nana has assigned to them, and as Ella brushes, her little sister mimics her exactly, white foam dripping onto the marble counter. This bathroom is Brookie’s favorite, done up in an elegant sort of jungle theme, the yellow wallpaper covered in palm trees and tiny, clever-looking monkeys. When they’re done, Ella cleans off the counter and lays their brushes on a neatly folded washcloth. She doesn’t like Nana, but much like dealing with Dad she knows the rules to follow, and the first rule is Don’t Leave a Mess, especially now that Rosa’s gone and can’t follow behind them with a rag and a wink.
As Brooklyn puts on her My Little Pony pajamas, Ella pushes one of the twin beds up against the wall and borrows the throw pillows from a nearby velvet chair to build a ledge along the open side of the bed. Brooklyn has terrible nightmares and thrashes like an octopus. Her dreams are mostly about a monster that lurks in the garage or behind closed doors.
Ella knows that the monster is their dad, but Brooklyn is only starting to understand.
“Do we have to get shots tomorrow?” Brooklyn asks. “I know what vaccinations means.”
“Maybe.”
“Why maybe?”
“Because things are weird right now.”
Ella is certain they won’t get shots that cost thirty thousand dollars anytime soon, but knowing her current luck, she’ll promise her little sister no shots and a doctor in a white coat will show up with a huge needle and prove her wrong.
She gets Brooklyn into bed and plugs in her tablet for her. Earlier today she found Nana’s modem and nipped up the Wi-Fi code, so now Brooklyn can curl up watching one of her shows, the only way to calm her to sleep. Mom has so many rules about screen time, but they’re stupid. Screens aren’t going to hurt Brookie more than, oh, say…Dad. Or Nana. Screens are a constant. They can be counted on. These shows are Brookie’s friends now that she can’t go to kindergarten with real kids after Brayden G. got the Violence and gave Maddie L. a concussion with a wooden block. Screens don’t go to quarantine jail, or stomp the dog to death, or abandon their kids to live with an evil grandmother.
Shit. Only adults could invent screens and make TV shows and then tell kids that they can only enjoy them when it’s convenient for adults. No one has lectured about screen time since Covid landed years ago because without screens, everyone would go insane having to parent their own kids all day.
Lying on her back on the twin bed, staring at the ceiling fan, Ella herself is nowhere close to sleep. The mattress is very tall and way too hard, as if Nana went to a store and asked for the world’s most expensive brick. The house is weirdly quiet aside from the incessant hourly tolling of the grandfather clock, the carpet dampening every other sound. Randall is gone, and Nana’s bedroom is downstairs, and it would be spooky if this wasn’t the least hauntable place on earth, this sprawling McMansion that manages to be both very overdone and deeply, aggressively average. Ella hates this place and wishes she were back home, where things felt…if not safe, then at least reliably annoying. Most of all, she misses her car and the freedom she once had to roam.
She misses time spent reading on a bench or scrolling through her phone while babysitting kids who pretty much sit themselves. She misses knowing Mom would be there to take care of Brooklyn in the afternoons. She misses drama practice and going out for milkshakes afterward, even if it was starting to get awkward with Hayden. She misses the packed bag she’s always kept in the trunk of her old Honda, knowing that one day Dad would really cross the line and she might have an excuse to sweep Brooklyn up and leave.
To where? She had no idea.
She has almost two hundred dollars in her savings account, and she knows full well that it wouldn’t support the two of them for more than a month. It’s not like she can babysit anymore, much less get a real job. At least she’s smart, and she knows she can graduate with online schooling—if she can get her laptop, which Mom apparently forgot. Just one more year of high school, which now seems like an impossibly tall mountain to climb. Nana didn’t graduate high school, and Mom did but didn’t go to college, and Ella is determined to do both.
And yeah, she knows full well that it was a stupid, childish dream—her being the hero, marching out the door with Brooklyn and driving away in the night, windows open so she can hear her drunk dad yelling for her to stop. She realizes now that in this silly fantasy, she always left her mom behind with Dad, a final fuck you for choosing him over the safety of her daughters. Now, away from him, having seen the depths of her mother’s pain, Ella floods with shame for ever thinking that her freedom could taste sweet if she knew Mom was still with Dad and probably being punished even more.
She used to think Mom chose to stay, and that it was a bad choice. That she deserved being stuck there with someone who treated her like shit but expected her to feel grateful.
Now Ella is living that same nightmare.
She always wanted to escape with Brooklyn and start over somewhere safe, away from Dad’s abuse and Mom’s weakness.
And they are away, but it’s the same damn thing.
Helpless people in thrall to another asshole with power.
She scrolls through Instagram, hoping it’ll quiet that line of thinking and bore her to sleep. This is her constant. Pretty pictures, don’t read the comments. She follows lots of graffiti and tattoo artists, guerrilla knitters, photographers who sneak into locked-up buildings, makeup artists who do 3-D effects, dressmakers defying gravity, cosplayers defying reality, people decorating cakes that look like crystalline vaginas. Anyone making art that pushes the edges of what’s acceptable. Once the Violence happened, they started up a new hashtag to counter all the ugliness in the news: #unviolent. People just post beautiful surprises they find in their day, ladybugs and painted rocks and skateboarding dogs and old, wrinkled women with red lipstick and tattoos. That’s her favorite thing to look at—just people rebelliously searching for a glimmer of hope in a dark time.
It finally works. She falls asleep and dreams of an empty Kmart full of tiny beds splattered with blood.
The next morning, she and Brooklyn arrive downstairs smelling like Nana’s guest room conditioner and dressed in wrinkled but nice enough outfits. It reminds her of a scene from The Sound of Music, especially when Nana raises an eyebrow in disappointment. What did she expect—matching sailor suits?
“Breakfast is on the counter,” Nana says from the sunroom, where she goes back to sipping black coffee and reading a newspaper at the table.
On the counter, Ella finds two boxes of adult diet cereal that both look equally terrible. They might as well be Cardboard Flakes and Gravel Nuggets.