ZOMBIES PILE ONTO ME.
“Shit.” I hit the down key, trying to turn and run, but their teeth have already dug into my legs. “Shit, shit, dammit,” I hiss, shoving my laptop forward in defeat. The zombies’ decayed faces rise up the screen, loose-jawed, flaps of flesh peeling from their pallid foreheads. They overpower me. Continue? asks the screen, taunting me. Of course I’m going to fucking continue. It’s been seven hours of me continuing.
I sink down in the kitchen chair. This level is impossible. After the miniboss, there’s an ambush. None of my weaponry, let alone my armor, is strong enough to take this much undead power, but I’ve been trying all day. My second day of skipping school, slouching from spot to spot in our house, gaming.
Not thinking about the play.
Not thinking about Emily saying, “Please don’t. Please.”
Not thinking about the look on my sister’s face when I said, “I don’t need you.”
I have not been thinking about any of that.
As I hit respawn and start again, the door swings open, ushering in the sound of rain. Dad trudges in, pulling back his poncho’s hood. His facial hair has gone from stubble status to a legitimate beard, a furry salt-and-pepper shield covering half his face. He looks like a stranger.
I keep playing. He approaches the table and sets down a couple of grocery bags beside Olivia’s things, which lie in an ungraceful pile opposite me. I heard her yelling at someone over the phone earlier. I’m not curious, I tell myself. I don’t care who it was.
“Is this your sister’s?” Dad says, prodding the plastic pharmacy bag.
“Yeah.”
“Is she sick?”
“No clue,” I say, climbing a fence. The barbed wire makes my health bar dip. I ransack a nearby dead guy for medicine as my dad opens the pharmacy bag, rustling through the contents.
“Katrina,” Dad says. I hit pause and look up. His eyes, sharper and more awake than I’ve seen them in God knows how long, are flooded with disbelief. He’s holding a small green box. PLAN B: EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTIVE.
“I . . . oh,” I say. “That’s . . .”
“This is your sister’s?”
I’m silent.
“Go and get her, please.” He sits down hard opposite me. “Now.”
THE THREE OF US SIT IN DEAFENING SILENCE. MY gaze darts around the kitchen. Walls the dismal color of soggy bread. Rain still tapping halfheartedly at the glass. Sunset through the window, like firelight, simmering low under heavy clouds.
Why am I here? If they want to talk about this, fine, but why do I have to be involved?
Dad folds his hands on the table and stares at them. “How long has this been happening?”
“Maybe the start of sophomore year?” Olivia says. “Dad, please don’t be mad. The point of that pill is that I’m being responsible. That’s the whole idea.”
“This is responsible?” he says, disbelieving. “Olivia, you’re seventeen years old.”
“I know, but it’s—”
“This is not acceptable,” Dad says.
A weird look spreads across Olivia’s face. She chuckles.
Dad frowns.
“I mean,” she says, “you’ve got to admit, that’s funny. The idea of you popping in to pass judgment on, like, this kind of information, while the rest of the time you’re totally in absentia.”
Dad leans back, looking baffled. “What? What’s that supposed to mean?”
She tilts her head. “Do you really not know?”
“Know what?”
“How distant you are.”
His voice rises. “No, I don’t know what you—”
I cut in. “She’s right.”
In my peripheral vision, Olivia stares at me. I don’t look at her. Dad goes silent again, apparently stunned that I agree with this obvious assessment.
“Dad,” Olivia says, “we have to talk. We have to. It’s not just this you didn’t know about. You’re missing so much, you know? I made Honor Society in September, and you didn’t come to the ceremony, even though I asked you. You didn’t come to the plays Kat was in last spring or fall. She was amazing in both of them, and you missed them. And she’s been skipping classes, and she told me you signed off to say that she was sick? That’s not—did you ask her what she’d been doing? Because I can tell you. She’s been getting addicted to gaming and isolating herself, and honestly? It’s scary. She doesn’t get out of bed on the weekends, she’s not eating, and you don’t see it. You don’t notice, Dad.”
I stare at Olivia. Aimed at someone else, her words don’t sound like accusations anymore. They don’t trigger that defensive instinct in my chest—all I feel is a tight pang at the panic in her voice. Why does it sound so different when she’s telling Dad?
When it clicks, I’m humiliated at how long it took me to figure it out. Olivia wasn’t trying to force me to be like her. She was worried.