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Deciding to come back for her bag later, I followed after her. It took all my effort not to turn and look once more at the boys across the street, but I forced myself to keep my focus straight ahead even as their gazes burned into me.
I slammed the door shut behind me and paused inside.
Deep breath in, another out.
Our grand entrance had been larger than the space that took up the entire house, I realized as I looked around. The living room was smaller than some of our closets, the kitchen half the size of that. Not that I even knew how to cook.
Everything felt painfully claustrophobic as I made my quick tour of the house. Small kitchen, small living room, one bathroom, two bedrooms.
I peeked into what I supposed counted as the master bedroom. My mother sat on an unmade bed, staring down at the floor.
“Mom?” I asked softly. I wondered if I should try to comfort her… she looked so lost.
She didn’t look up at me as she answered dully. “Unpack. Ava brought groceries when she moved our things here. We’ll make dinner soon.”
We didn’t, though.
Mom was fast asleep before dinner could even be considered. I finished unpacking the few things I’d been able to keep before I poked my head into her room again. She lay on top of the still unmade bed, curled in on herself. Her clothing was pristine, well kept, her hair still perfectly styled. She was still dressed like the blue-blood heiress who had been the envy of the Baltimore elite, but everything about her looked painfully out of place in this run-down little house.
Instead of waking her up, I decided to leave her be. Mom often claimed to have trouble sleeping, so if she was knocked out now, it was probably because she had a little help. I couldn’t blame her. It would have been nice to lie down and simply think of nothing for the time being.
But when I thought of Dad sitting in some prison cell, it was hard to justify that kind of escapism.
Dad couldn’t escape, so why should I?
Pushing down the guilt, I made my way to the kitchen. Rifling through the pantry and the fridge, I saw that Ava had gone above and beyond stocking everything. There were boxes of dry goods, cans, frozen meats, veggies, and packaged meals. It struck me that she likely had paid for all of this with her own money. My heart seized once more thinking about her.
She was more a mother to me in some ways than my own mom. She’d gone out of her way to take care of me, to do what she could to ease this transition for us. And I had felt it in the way she’d hugged me goodbye that she still worried—that she would’ve done more to protect me if she could.
I spent ten minutes poking around the kitchen, utterly lost as to what I should cook for me and Mom, then eventually decided to say screw it. Today had been hard enough. Setting off the fire alarm and waking my mom up from an Ambien-induced nap would only make it worse. So I pulled out a box of cereal and some milk and headed to my room with a Tupperware-bowl full of Honey Bunches of Oats.
I settled on my bed, legs crossed, with my bowl of cereal in my lap. My bed was situated beside my window. Like Mom’s, it had been salvaged from one of our old guest bedrooms at the mansion.
As I ate, I looked outside. My room was at the front of the house, and I had a straight-on view of the street and the house across from ours, where the three boys still stood on the patchy front lawn. They weren’t paying attention to me or our house anymore. Now they stood close together, talking amongst themselves. The dark-haired, Latino boy with the beautiful eyes said something, and the shaggy-haired boy laughed, his face splitting into a wide grin.
For all the intensity he’d had when he’d stared at me, he looked surprisingly… soft when he laughed.
Four
Getting used to the new home was… a task.
A couple weeks had passed since we’d moved here, and it still felt like I was living in a stranger’s home. I missed the familiarity, the comfort, of the winding halls of our family manor. The way the warm scent of the hand-crafted wood floors strengthened in the summer months, and how the light filtered in through the huge bay windows situated in almost every room, making the entire place feel ethereal.
Our tiny rental house smelled like dust and harsh cleaning products—as if the landlord had unsuccessfully attempted to bleach away the years of dirt that had accumulated. Whatever sun came in through the windows was off-colored and dull; the windows had a layer of fine grime over them, and I had no idea how to clean them properly.
I stared out the kitchen window as I ate breakfast slowly. It was Monday. First day of school.
Mom had taken her sweet time enrolling me in the public school that served this neighborhood. I think on some level, she couldn’t fathom me going to a free school. Not like it mattered all that much—with Dad in jail, my going to public or private school was honestly the least of our concerns.
After finishing up breakfast—a bowl of overly sugary cereal, which was becoming my go-to as I avoided doing anything more challenging than heating up microwave dinners in the kitchen—I carefully cleaned the bowl and left it to dry on the small, chintzy dish rack.
Mom had so far refused to do any cooking or cleaning, as if that was her way of silently protesting the shitty hand life had dealt us. But with no more house staff to take care of things, it all fell to me.
I sighed, pushing down my irritation at my mom. She was trying. We both were.
And right now, housework was the furthest thing from my mind. For the first time, I was nervous about a first day of school.
I’d had friends at Highland Park Prep Academy. Caitlin Barrington, Felicia Prentice, and Allison Rhodes—we’d known each other since we were in diapers. We’d had plans to get married together, raise our kids together. The four of us had been the most popular girls at school, and that had cemented our bond even more.
