Chapter Text
Darlene has been couch surfing for about three months, give or take. The lion’s share had been spent over at Cisco’s place, her on again off again, until they’d had that row and in a fit of hurt, embarrassed rage, Darlene had broken it off with him. So, off again, for right now. Already she was tired of bumming places to sleep from people she tangentially knew enough to lend her the couch, or the floor. The only options looming were shacking back up with Mister Out-of-the-Blue-Proposals, or going back to Jersey. Or, and this left Darlene feeling even more shamefaced than the latter options, crawling to wherever Elliot was staying these days with her tail between her legs.
All her life she’d been caught between being the protector and being the protected, for him. It stung that she’d never gotten to be the little sibling, the kid sister, but not enough for her to really want it. Asking for things from Elliot felt humiliating, weak, childish. It reminded her of the way he used to sleep in her bed when they were children, the way she was never sure whether that was meant to be comfort for her or for him. Childhood was a confusing tangle anyway, without throwing in her juvenile sense of duty, of loyalty, to her brother. She supposes it’s very male of him anyway, for his little sister to end up taking care of him half their life, but she feels bad about the thought almost immediately. Like Elliot had ever asked for any of this.
She crashes on a couple girlfriends’ couches for a few weeks, overstaying her welcome in some, slinking out too early without a word of goodbye in more. It was beginning to wear her down in the same way she’d been worn down as a child, a teenager, under her mother’s thumb. There was something to be said about the way scrutiny wore on a person; the feeling of being watched was a pressure that she always felt far too close to the bone. Darlene felt as though she was on tenterhooks, waiting to be caught out, the eyes of people forever on her until it became so much that all she wanted was to lock herself in the bathroom for days on end until the itch of eyes faded from her skin and-
The fourth panic attack in a near-stranger’s bathroom was what made up her mind for good. Darlene has never been suited to the life of a rolling stone, but that was what had been carved out for her long before she walked out the front door of her mother’s house at sixteen and never looked back. She has no place, no claim to a home or to any family beyond Elliot. So, she does what she always does, the only thing she knows.
She buys an ounce of weed, picks up a copy of some shitty horror movie from Target, and spends a few tense minutes tossing the entire contents of her rucksack onto the bench of the subway in search of the slip of paper Elliot had written his address down on. It was from years ago, the paper butter soft and almost fraying at the creases with how often she had thumbed at it, folded and unfolded it. Debating.
She finds it screwed up and dogeared in the pocket of her favourite pants, and barely has enough time to stuff her life back into her bag as the train comes screaming into her stop. Luckily, it's late, and far enough downtown that she was one of only a handful on the train.
She stands alone on the platform as she watches the tunnel swallow the train whole, its lights smearing red into the darkness. It had been Elliot who had taught her how to use the subway, and she could still recall the surprise that had risen in her as he’d pointed her way home out on the pokey little map on her phone. Halfway pleased and halfway angry. She remembered exactly what she’d written in her journal when she’d gotten back to Jersey that night; crawled under the covers with a flashlight and the book she kept under her mattress, away from her mother’s prying eyes. I don’t like when he doesn’t need me.
There’s a man playing steel drums on the street as she leaves the station, and Darlene lingers nearby as she lights up a cigarette with numb hands. It isn’t that she’d been upset that Elliot hadn’t needed her. She understood her childish resentment now, after a long few years and enough time to stew in the intricacies of her anger. She’d been afraid of what it meant if Elliot no longer needed her. After so many years doing something, any change to that felt like the rug was being swept out from under her feet. That was how she’d felt, standing in the bustle and noise of Grand Central, watching Elliot’s mouth move as he had managed her route home for her. Seeing his apartment, his work shirts, seeing him nervous and cagey and still Elliot but so distinctly more grown up-
What happens when you feel suddenly disposable to the only person in your life?
She still hates herself for the smug feeling of ‘I knew it’ that had carried her through the year in which everything had come crashing down around Elliot’s ears. She hates herself for the dual resentment and relief that had washed over her when he had asked her, his whispered, paranoid voice over the phone, ”What did I do?”
Her cigarette lasts her to his doorstep, and she pitches it away from her as she takes the short set of stairs two at a time to lean heavily on the buzzer for his apartment. There’s a long moment in which she begins to fear he’s asleep, or out, or moved, and then there’s a click and the door buzzes open. She’s catching the handle of it before she can even give herself a moment to back out of it. She can’t, she can’t even entertain another night of being under a stranger’s gaze. She needs to lie down on a real bed and smoke some weed and pretend like she and Elliot are normal fucking people, at least for one night.
The next few minutes pass in snapshots. She should be aware that she’s on the verge of some sort of anxious, anticipatory meltdown, but her mind is working far ahead of her jerky movements up the stairs to his third floor apartment. Peeling yellow paint on the walls, the heavy hanging smell of weed and cigarettes and thick thick bleach. Someone is playing Missy Elliot so loud she can feel the bass through the handrail leading up the stairs. Grey carpet, fluorescent lighting, the kind she feels ill under, scratched red door after scratched red door and then narrow corner hallway and then-
“You look thin.” She says, her knee jerk reaction to be snide to cover up her shock. She regrets it as soon as she sees the hurt that passes over her brother’s face, and she fumbles, backtracks, “Elliot-”
“So do you.” He murmurs, that same low monotone, and they regard each other for a tense moment that stretches far past the point of being awkward. Elliot’s eyes are huge in his face, heavy lidded like he’s stoned. He looks sick, sickly, and Darlene can’t help but step forward and wrap her arms around him. She buries her face into his shoulder, taking in his familiar smell of cigarettes, white cotton detergent, sweat. He doesn’t move to hug her back, but that’s not new at all. He’s bony in her arms, so much thinner than the last time she’d seen him, which, god-
“How long’s it been?” Darlene mumbles, nose still pressed to his collar. She can feel him breathing; slow, shallow breaths.
“Years.” His voice rumbles from his chest. “Two?” His arms twitch at his sides, as though he’s about to hug her.
“Longer.” She breathes, and lets him go. The next part is hard to say. “I need to stay a while.”
Elliot doesn’t say anything, just stands back from the doorway and tilts his head like he’s beckoning her in. The role reversal is uncomfortable, it’s always uncomfortable, and Darlene ducks her head to cross the threshold because she doesn’t want to meet his gaze.
His apartment is barely furnished; the locus of everything seems to be the sagging grey sofa set against the wall, a half-hearted and sun sick plant drooping near it, a messy coffee table in arms reach. Elliot’s laptop glows from the sofa cushions, obviously abandoned at her knock on the door. From here, she can guess he was watching Beavis and Butthead, which makes her smile, a genuine smile for once. She turns.
“You still watch that when you’re stoned, huh?” She grins, and gestures to the laptop, and Elliot just blinks back at her, slow. She watches a smile drift across his sallow, bony face.
“Sure.” He says, the corner of his mouth tipping up in a vague smile.
The realisation that he’s stoned out of his mind and that she can’t smell even a trace of weed in the apartment settles in her stomach like ice. Her mind is blank for a second, hot prickly panic closing in on her.
“Have you eaten?” She asks, tightly. It’s always an easy way to assess how bad Elliot is; if he’s eating or not. She’s still standing frozen in the middle of the room, watching Elliot cross to the sofa and sink down into it with a sigh. He slouches, and his eyes are practically rolling in his head as he attempts to focus on Darlene.
“Did you come here just to check up on me?” He near-slurs, and the words sting more than the realisation that he’s using. It’s the final nail in the coffin. Elliot’s mean when he’s strung out.
“No, I didn’t.” She says, frostily. “But I should’ve known I’d end up having to take care of you.” The unsaid, like you should been taking care of me lingers at the tip of her tongue, but she holds it in. No use being vulnerable now. He won’t remember it tomorrow anyway.
Elliot doesn’t reply, and Darlene watches as he very slowly pulls a cigarette from a pack off the coffee table and sticks it in his mouth. He fumbles with the lighter: clumsy, doped up movements. With a noise of disgust, she stalks across the room and snatches it from him. “Jesus, Elliot.” She mutters, lighting his cigarette for him. “When’re you ever gonna learn to look after yourself?”
She only says it because she knows he won’t recall it. She would never say those sorts of things to him when he’s sober, but the anger is still there. Anger is more useful than sadness, and when she can choose, Darlene will always warp into anger that bone deep sadness that seeing Elliot like this creates in her.
She tidies his apartment, because he’s dozed off with his burned out cigarette between his fingers, so she’s not going to get anything out of him tonight. He looks so small, and sad, crumpled on the couch asleep, that it takes everything in Darlene not to cry, or scream, or break something. If it’s not drugs it’s something else; getting himself fired, getting himself hurt, throwing up all his meals or worse. Like there’s something deeply insidious at the core of himself that keeps him self destructing.
Darlene thinks its inherited. She scrubs viciously at the weeks-dirty dishes in the sink, the taste of iron at the back of her throat from how hard she is chewing the inside of her cheek so she doesn’t open her mouth and, do what? Scream, probably. She wants to shake Elliot awake and scream some sense into him. She wants to hold him close and cry and make him promise to try harder. Harder than he already does.
She sleeps in his bed, and it feels so much like the nights they would share a bed as children that she can almost forget that Elliot is sleeping off whatever opiate has become his new thing on the sofa. The sheets smell like him, like home, as if he still uses the same detergent their mom did. She watches the shape of his small, sleeping body by the rising light of the dawn, eyes heavy with tiredness but only able to sleep fitfully. Short bursts at a time.
Elliot sleeps long into the morning, while Darlene gives up on sleep around the 6 am mark. She showers, spending a long time under the almost too hot water, watching it wash away down the dark eye of the plughole. The water begins to run cold after a while, so she dresses quickly and wanders down the street with her hair wet and heavy down her back, in search of a bodega because Elliot’s cupboards are predictably empty. He doesn’t eat when he’s using, and even sober he resents hunger. Darlene can still remember sitting with her head in her hands after coaxing him to eat a meal during that year after he got fired from that job, listening to him vomit it back up in the bathroom. It’s a control thing, it’s an anxiety-nausea thing, it’s something so far out of the realm of her understanding but so familiar to her that she almost knows how to deal with it.
He’s awake when she gets back, standing at the sink filling a glass of water. He turns, a cigarette hanging unlit from his mouth, and she doesn’t miss the flash of uncertain confusion pass over his face.
Neither of them speak for a long minute, and then Elliot pulls the smoke from his mouth and says, “Darlene.” It’s a little dumbfounded, like he wasn’t expecting her to be standing in his apartment. His brow wrinkles. “I thought-”
It’s a little raw for how terrible Elliot looks in the light of day. His eyes look like hollows in his face, and her eyes follow of the path of his hands as he shakily lights his cigarette. “What,” She drawls, deadpan. “You thought I wasn’t really here?” The bag of groceries is heavy, the plastic handle of the carrier digging into her fingers, but she can’t make herself step near him yet. He’s sober, presumably, and it makes her feel like she’s asking to stay all over again.
Darlene hates feeling like this. She comes to him for comfort, time and time again, and is always the one doing the comforting, the caring for. The sad part is is that she barely even cares that their dynamic is so unbalanced. She watches Elliot take a sip of water, the glass trembling on its way to his mouth. Who else is gonna look after him if she doesn’t?
“I thought-” Elliot says again, and he screws up his face for a second before it falls. He sighs, and shrugs. “I don’t know. Darlene,” He takes an unsure step forward, and the glass of water sloshes over the side, over his hand. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Are you hungry?”
She’s crying before she really registers what’s happening. Angrily, she swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand, the plastic bag of groceries digging awkwardly into her chest. Elliot looks lost, a sweet look of utter bemusement on his poor, bony face. It only makes her cry harder, abandoning the bag to the messy kitchen counter so she can cover her face with both hands. It’s heartbreaking.
“Cisco proposed.” She manages, voice choppy with tears. And then, “You look like shit.” Her voice breaks on a sob, and she groans, pressing her hands over her face.
Elliot is speechless, she can tell by the way he’s frozen, the way his mouth is hanging open. “Uh.” He murmurs, eyes darting to the side. “Congratulations?” His cigarette is casting a veil of smoke over his head, and blindly, Darlene reaches for it. He surrenders it to her with no complaints.
“I said no.” She says, shortly, taking a harsh drag on the cigarette. The tears are still threatening at the back of her throat, but she sniffs loudly, and takes another steadying drag. “I said no.”
Elliot is silent, so she just stands there untethered in the middle of the apartment and smokes her cigarette down to the butt. He doesn’t hug, but she doesn’t even want one, she tells herself. She wishes she could reduce herself to base animal needs, that food in front of her and a warm place to sleep would be enough. She wishes she didn’t want so bad.
“I feel like shit, too.” Elliot offers, finally, and Darlene half-laughs, pressing the back of her hand to her eye to swipe away fresh tears. “If that’s any help.”
“‘S not.” She mutters, and finally steps forward so she can give her brother a hug. He doesn’t hold her back, but presses his face into her hair and that’s more than enough. He’s wearing last night’s clothes, still, and the smell of his sweat is so familiar that if she closes her eyes she can imagine she’s nine again. Hiding in the cupboard in Elliot’s arms; his chin pressed to the crown of her head as they listen to their mother yell and crash around the house. Elliot was freshly fourteen, hitting the stride of puberty, and the trigger for those memories was always the smell of his sweat.
Four years later, Elliot turned eighteen and moved out, and Darlene lost the buffer she had always had against her mother. One she hadn’t even noticed until he left. She could still feel the sensation of long nails clawing grooves into the skin of her forearm as her mom grabbed at her and shook her, screaming because Darlene had swiped on a garish, clown’s mouth of her best red lipstick. She was thirteen, 2003, the year she’d gotten her period. Her mother, drunk, smoking, had told her she was a woman now.
“It’s the curse.” She had muttered, and had turned to ash her cigarette in an empty mug by her elbow. Darlene, cramping, bleeding, had watched the movement of that cigarette warily. An arched eyebrow, and her mother added, “Life’s about to get a whole lot worse from here on out for you, young lady.”
She hadn’t been wrong.
“Let me help you.” Darlene murmurs, face up against the buttery soft fabric of Elliot’s old t-shirt. “Let me make you breakfast.”
She knows he won’t be hungry, that he’s probably having a supremely uncomfortable comedown made all the worse by his kid sister knocking around.
“Pass on the food.” Elliot replies, extracting himself from the hug with practised ease. His eyes are bloodshot up close, and Darlene can only imagine the headache he must have. It annoys her, in some distant way that she’s sure has everything to do with her gradually slipping control on just about everything in her life. It feels like a landslide, culminating in her brother with an obvious opiate hangover hanging unspoken in between them. Her offer of help unacknowledged.
She had dug through his medicine cabinet early that morning, and amongst the abandoned prescription bottles of mood stabilizers, her digging had revealed morphine, suboxone. It had settled something heavy in her chest, dreadful in its resignation. It had been morphine last time. It’d be morphine again.
“Sorry for ruining your buzz last night, by the way.” She says, only a little snide. The crying has left her feeling a little too raw, nerves singing under the way Elliot was shakily smoking a new cigarette now, fetched up against the counter across from her. The pallor on his face isn’t withdrawal, but it’s damn near close to it and she won’t let him get that far. She’s warping her hurt into anger with the ease of a master.
His eyes dart away, the corner of his mouth pulling down slightly. She knows exactly when he’s about to lie.
“What do you mean?” He asks, trying for curious but landing directly in nervous. “What buzz?”
Darlene doesn’t say anything, just snorts. Elliot backtracks.
“Okay, I was drunk.” He won’t make eye contact, and Darlene pushes past him to start putting the groceries away, fed up and angry with herself for her tears. “Can you just trust me?”
His expression is pleading, and Darlene regards him for a long moment. “You don’t drink.” She says shortly, nudging him out of the way of the cupboard door to shove a loaf of bread inside before turning to face him, arms crossed. “You can’t bullshit me, Elliot.”
“I swear.” He says, a hard edge to his voice now. Darlene shoots him a look that she hopes conveys just how stupid it would be for him to try and fight her right now. “Just alcohol, nothing else.”
The pity that she feels with how hard he’s lying almost offsets the annoyance it brings. His addiction is the only thing he won’t let her help him with. It’s the wall between them, the reason why Darlene finds it so hard with him these days. He’s erratic, when he’s using. A danger to himself, despite all signs of him being pretty functional. He’s a functional addict until he isn’t, and then it’s detoxing, and then re-toxing. Some hideous cycle that hurts him more every time it repeats.
There’s a long stretch of silence, after that. Darlene puts the rest of the groceries away, thoughts of cooking a late breakfast long gone. She doesn’t have much of an appetite anymore. Instead, she takes another cigarette from the pack abandoned on the kitchen counter, and she makes coffee. Elliot washes down a few Advil with the dregs of the pot, looking more and more haggard and pale as the morning wears on.
“We can’t keep going on like this.” Darlene says, eventually, perched on the windowsill with her cigarette angled under the bug screen. The sun through the glass is warm on her back, and she’s beginning to feel distinctly grungy in her clothes despite her morning shower. She needs to do laundry, she needs to buy new underwear, unpack the balled up contents of her rucksack and settle in, but there’s far more pressing things at hand. “I dunno what I expected,” She mutters, more to herself than Elliot, who is watching her from the sofa. “I guess it was childish to think you’d be the more put together one right now.”
Elliot’s lying on the sofa, one bony arm thrust out and messing with the dog eared corner of a magazine on his coffee table. Darlene watches him for a long time, trying to remember what he had looked like when she had last seen him. What he had looked like when he was eighteen, her idol, her big kid brother, leaving home just like she’d been wishing to forever. That was the beginning of the end, no matter how necessary it was to move away from the poison that their childhood home was. Elliot alone was no good thing. Being wowed and jealous and a little hurt by how adult he seemed was a kid thing, she realised that now. Looking back, he was probably as strung out then as he was now.
“It’s not like I want this.” He replies, and Darlene just rests her temple against the side of the window, eyes on the heads of people passing by in the street outside. She wonders if they too have difficult families, strange sad brothers who they’ve had to protect their whole lives.
“I know.”
A woman in a yellow dress crosses the street away from Elliot’s apartment, and Darlene watches the bright spot of colour until she’s swallowed by the grey buildings. Elliot shifts on the sofa; the creaking of springs. She can’t look at him. She can’t break this tenuous truce.
“I don’t do it like I used to.” Elliot says. Darlene drags her gaze from the street so she can level him with a doubtful look. His face falls a little, and the annoyance and the pity and sadness swirl in her stomach. Nausea inducing.
“It escalates.” She says shortly.
The look that Elliot gives her is enough for her to regret being snide. Those big eyes of his, so much like her own. Sometimes it was like looking into a mirror. It was painful to see the hurt in them as if she's the one hurting. “It’s a disease.” Elliot says. His gaze flicks down, head lowered, and Darlene notices for the first time that his hair is long enough that it’s starting to curl again. There’s something so sweet and tender in the little curls that she feels herself begin to soften. He messes with it, that nervous little tic he’s had for as long as she can remember.
“Do you feel diseased?” She asks, quiet.
The moment stretches, taffy slow in the warm, sunlit apartment. Elliot’s lying down again, arm over his eyes like the light hurts him. “Yeah.” He breathes.
Darlene wonders what she would have been like if Elliot wasn’t the way he was. If their mother wasn’t the woman she was. If their father hadn’t died. There are too many ‘ifs’, and they consume her. Surreptitiously, she slips her free hand into the sleeve of her other arm, the one holding the cigarette limp and forgotten through the cracked window. Traces the burns her mother had given her.
“I feel it too.” She says, voice hard. Sadness to anger. Pain to anger. Anger is an energy. The rest is just distraction. “Always thought it was like, genetic.”
“Probably.” Elliot mutters, rolling over onto his side with a groan, arm locked around his torso. “Explains mom.”
She takes a drag off her dwindling cigarette, watching him closely. “You gonna throw up?”
“Maybe.” He says miserably, and Darlene stubs her cigarette out on the windowsill so she can join him on the sofa. He groans again, shifting so he can put his head in her lap.
“I’ve got some weed.” She says, “If you want.” She combs her fingers through his hair, and he sighs, closes his eyes at the touch.
“You always know how to make me feel better.” He says, words slow and thick as she scratches at his scalp.
“You’re just easy to look after.” She says, countering with a bare-faced lie. “Can you eat?”
He shakes his head, no, so Darlene fetches the weed from her rucksack; changes into a pair of Elliot’s sweats and steals a t-shirt while she’s at it. No more grungy clothes she’s been wearing through the whole city for a week. She pulls the collar of the tee over her mouth and nose as she sits with her feet pushed under Elliot’s thighs, breathing in the smell of their childhood detergent. They’re half-watching the same Beavis and Butthead episode she’d interrupted the previous night as they work their way through a bowl. Elliot seems better with the weed in his system; his colour is better, and he doesn’t seem quite so miserable.
Darlene goes to the bathroom, and has to talk herself out of flushing the remaining morphine down the toilet as she’s washing her hands. She meets her gaze in the scratched mirror above the sink, and wonders when was the last time she tried to make herself look pretty. She grimaces at herself, pulls at the bags under her eyes, scoops her hair back off her face and angles herself this way and that looking for something flattering. She doesn’t know why she cares.
“We’re gonna clean your apartment tomorrow.” She announces, flopping back down onto the sofa next to Elliot. “And then we’re going outside and you’re gonna eat a meal.”
A smile slides across Elliot’s face, and he gives her a sidelong glance from under heavy lids. “No we’re not.”
She stares at him blankly for a second, and then frowns. “What?”
He turns his gaze back to the laptop, and he’s slouched down with his chin on his chest in a way that makes him look so small, but that smile still glued to his face is annoying enough that she wants to smack him, not pity him. “Best laid plans, whatever,” He sniffs, rubs at his face with his knuckle. “It’d be awful. And we’re broke. Plus, the place is kinda clean already.” He gestures, aimlessly, and Darlene follows his hand in the hopes that it’d reveal some magically clean part of the apartment she had missed. The trajectory of his hand encompasses old pizza boxes on the counter, the overflowing trash can, and Darlene drops her gaze.
“You’re ridiculous.” She says, and his smile stretches a little, becomes a little more real.”C’mon,” She shoves him the shoulder, smirking. “It’ll be fun.”
“You’re lucky I missed you.” He mumbles, and snorts when she smacks his chest.
“You need some sun on you.” She counters, and Elliot tips his head against the back of the sofa to look at her, arms crossed over his chest. “And some food, whatever you want.” Her voice may be straying a touch desperate, judging by the way Elliot is shrinking into himself a little. She can practically hear his brain whirring through everything that could go wrong. It’s hard to hold back when she can see him catastrophizing. “Elliot, it’ll be chill. We’ll just go down the block.”
“I said yes.” He says, quieter. The smile is sliding. Darlene flicks her eyes to the clock, and wonders if he’ll start jittering soon. The weed had taken the edge off what she thought was a comedown, but it’s starting to dawn on her that this may be the first comedown in which Elliot hasn’t self-medicated in a while.
“I’m sorry,” She says, a little petulant even to her own ears. “Elliot, I’m worried about you.”
The look in his eyes is something unreadable and sad. The problem with Elliot, the problem she’s handled her entire life, is that he doesn’t share anything that’s wrong with him until it’s too late. It’s there, simmering under the surface, and he doesn’t let anyone know. Not until the pot boils over, until he is throwing himself from the window of childhood bedrooms, until he’s losing his mind at work and breaking things, until he’s strung out and shivering like he’d rattle apart if he doesn’t get anything in his system in time. The only reason she knows about his addiction is because she’d seen him withdrawing, not long after she had left home. To be sixteen and scared out of your mind that your brother is dying is something hard to shake. She feels hypervigilant for it now. If she hadn’t been there for that, Darlene is certain it would be a secret to this day.
She puts the back of her hand to his forehead, and feels the heat of it. Elliot doesn’t move, he doesn’t blink. She stares at the sallow skin of his face and wonders what exactly could be going on under it.
He grasps her wrist. “‘S not all on you.”
Darlene almost laughs at that. It’s both funny and hurtful that Elliot can’t grasp the sense of duty she feels for him. Like she hasn’t been looking after him their whole lives. He’s incredibly blind when he needs to be; eyes always turned outward to the next thing, the big thing that’s going to absolve him, change the world. Darlene is the one turned inward, eyes on the back of his head for fear he’ll lose it, one day. She’d follow him into anything.
“You don’t even know.” She murmurs, stroking her thumb down the centre of his forehead. He’s burning up, all those secret demons, and he closes his eyes at the touch like it’s baptismal water. The fan beats softly overhead, offset by the obnoxious noises of the cartoon from the laptop.
Darlene barely sleeps that night, heavy eyes trained on Elliot’s sleeping profile. They’re sharing his bed, just like old times, and Darlene finds herself waking with every movement of his body as he shifts in his sleep. He’s restless, twitchy. She dozes, afraid he’ll sneak morphine while she sleeps. Reality feels altered, half asleep and exhausted as she is. It always does in those quiet, small hours of the morning, the cold of outside creeping in through the poorly insulated walls and up through the mattress to settle into her bones. Twice, she’s sure she can hear footsteps in the bathroom. Once, she jerks out of her shallow sleep and she’s seven again, huddled down against her big brother’s back as she listens to her mother break glasses in the kitchen downstairs. She doesn’t come to full wakefulness that time, the situation so familiar and borderline comforting in its mundanity that she slips back asleep.