The girls cleaned out the master bedroom closet and transferred Avis’s old clothes to one of the smaller rooms down the hall—clothes that, now, everyone shared. Nobody owned any one item. Everything was communal.
Jeffrey was granted the largest room in the house, while the remaining two bedrooms were allotted accordingly: one for the boys, and one for the girls. Nobody slept downstairs despite the extra space. When Avis had suggested she sleep on the couch to give the girls more room, Deacon explained that the luxury of space and privacy was reserved for those who did not have enough room in their heart for others. He equated cramped quarters with how close Avis allowed the others to come, how open she was to being part of Jeffrey’s clan. And so they all slept together on the tiny twin guest bed and on blankets they’d spread onto the floor, while Jeff indulged in the space and privacy he denied his loved ones.
Gypsy continued to burn her incense. The sweet-scented smoke was now regulated to the master bedroom, purging Jeff’s personal space of any darkness that may have tarnished his purity while he slept. Clover cut fresh boughs of pine and arranged them in a vase on his bedside table, then smeared sap onto her fingers and pulled her digits across the windowsills and his door.
The pine tree symbolizes love and birth, she had explained while Avis watched her baptize the room. It’s why we decorate pine trees on Christmas. It’s a symbol of Jesus’s birth, of enlightenment. The pine needles ward off evil spirits and negativity.
Avis found it amazing to see so many people dedicating themselves to loving one person. When Jeffrey caught her arranging pine branches on the entryway table in the foyer, he captured her face between his palms and pressed her mouth to his. Love for love, Avis had thought. If I love them with my whole heart, this can last forever.
And yet, only a few days later, she found herself on the opposite side of the glass, exiled for a reason she couldn’t fathom. Why had they left her out? It felt like, within the handful of days that her new family had come into her life, she’d given them everything—her trust, her home, her long-standing routine. The drastic change had been immediate. One morning, she woke to the silence of an empty house, made coffee, and watched her reruns with Shadow snoring beside her on the couch. The next day, the place was bustling with unfamiliar voices and filled with exotic scents. The record player replaced the television. There was no time for lounging on the sofa. Maggie stopped checking up on her the way she used to, and when she did come over, she spent more time with the group than she did with Avis. Within the whisper of a single week, she’d gone from Audra Snow to Avis Collective. Avis Togetherness. Avis One-For-All.
But it wasn’t enough.
She turned away from the window, her stomach sour with burned coffee, her tongue fuzzy with its heat. Maybe this was a mistake. The voice in her head was familiar—it was the one used to getting its way. Worthless, it said. They’ve figured out you’re a waste of time. Just a big fat zero living in her daddy’s house, a sad, insignificant nothing that can’t offer them anything but a roof that doesn’t even belong to her. She narrowed her eyes as self-deprecating insults coiled noxiously around her heart. Perhaps that voice was right. She was stupid to have thought someone like Jeff would see something special in her. Because how can a person see uniqueness when it doesn’t exist?
Abandoning her coffee cup on the kitchen counter, she drifted through the empty living room. The silence she had so wholeheartedly loved was now disquieting, reminiscent of some sort of ill-favored doom. The cynic inside Avis urged her to open a window, to yell out at them to get their things and get lost. Forget it! I’ve made a terrible mistake! Get off my property, now! But the weight of that silence kept that defeatism pinned down beneath her newfound hope. Her father had always told her good things don’t come easy. Perhaps she wasn’t trying hard enough. Maybe this was one of those things you had to fight for, dignity be damned.
She plucked a dirty shirt off the back of the couch, climbed the stairs, and began cleaning the rooms. Folding blankets that were strewn across the floor, she stacked them one on top of the other in rainbow-colored piles. She pulled back curtains and opened windows, letting the rooms breathe with sunshine and the scent of moist earth. Stepping into the room that had once been hers, she surveyed the new living quarters of the man that had her smitten. Her hand drifted across her old bed, her mind tumbling over thoughts sensuous enough to make her blush. By the time she had the window open and the bed made, the sound of voices cut through the quiet of the ground floor, but Avis refused to falter. She continued her work in earnest, reminding herself that if she only proved her worth, they would gift her with the thing she wanted most: inclusion.
Jeffrey didn’t announce himself. When Avis turned away from arranging the pine branches on his bedside table, she found him watching her from the threshold of the open door. A quiet gasp escaped her throat. She pressed a hand to her chest, then gave him a small smile. “I was just cleaning up,” she explained, awakened to the fact that, perhaps, she shouldn’t have encroached on his privacy.
He said nothing, only watched her with intense eyes. She had to turn away from his gaze, its severity making her feel smaller than she already imagined herself to be. But rather than excusing herself and slinking out of the room, that sense of triviality gave spark to anger. Because who was he to look at her that way? Hadn’t she done enough to assure him she wanted to please him? Hadn’t she surrendered enough to prove that she was worthy of his friendship?
“I saw you outside.” She fluffed his pillow and carefully placed it at the head of the bed. “You and the group.”