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There's a steel-grey box in Roxy's room, pushed flush against one wall in her closet. It's made of metal and no matter how hard she pulls at the lid it won't come free, so by the time she's eight she's given up. When she raps her knuckles against it the sound rings hollow so she figures, it's probably empty anyway and consoles herself with that thought. On hot summer nights she lies sprawled across it, grateful that it's cold. Sometimes she piles things on it. It makes a decent table, she supposes. Her interest drifts away from it; there are so many other things in her room that actually occupy her, boxes and boxes of clothes, neatly labelled five years old, six years old, seven years old, eight years old, nine, ten, eleven. Soap and jumbles of computer parts and eyeliner and buckets and so many things, a haphazard mess that seems to be anything her mother could think of in whatever time she had. (Had she made lists? Had she worried about forgetting things? Roxy is terrible for that. Perhaps it's a family trait, or perhaps not.)
Then Roxy turns twelve and the lid pops up.
She knows it's her birthday because her laptop was programmed to tell her so. She waits up every year until the message pops up, because that message means presents- it means a new video message from Mom, sometimes, or the password to some file or other that won't open. This time, though, there's a crash on the stroke of twelve as the books piled on top of the chest tumble to the floor. Roxy nearly falls off her bed in shock, kicks out in alarm, feet tangled helplessly in her sheets.
She stares at the screen in front of her. Look inside blinks back, which goes some way to calming her heart down, because if the computer knows about this then it was supposed to happen, and so logically she's not about to be attacked by some evil robot stashed inside, biding its time. Or something. Maybe it's a nice robot. Dirk has one; it would only be fair.
Her legs are clumsy as she clambers over to turn the light on. She tries to force them steady as she walks over to the box, slowly, carefully.
Inside is a gun.
She knows what guns are because she's seen them in films, read about them in books. This one is large by any standard, and she squints, wondering if she can even lift it. Sure enough it feels heavy when her arms reach down and her muscles strain as she tries to tug it out. It doesn't help that she holds it gingerly, nervously; she almost wants to drop it, slam the lid and forget it ever opened, but if Mom put it here then she thinks that would be a bad idea. Everything else has been needed and useful. What if this is too?
She pulls it over to her bed and sits down. There's another text file open now, and a paused video in the corner of the monitor, frozen on a picture of Mom in motion, a pale smudge on the screen.
She presses play and Mom comes into focus.
"Roxy," her mother starts, and Roxy feels her hand curl around the cold metal laid across her lap at the sound of her name. "Happy birthday."
The sound soothes her. It's been a year since the last video and Roxy closes her eyes as she listens. Her mother explains about the gun- "I waited," she says, voice smooth and sensible, but never gentle, "because goodness knows there have to be limits. But even if this is still sooner than I'd like, you're going to need to learn to protect yourself, Roxy."
The file is forty pages long. There are diagrams and lists and bullet points and safety warnings in bright red. "This isn't an ordinary gun," her mother explains as Roxy click-click-clicks through each note, eyes darting around the screen. "You won't need bullets. It won't run out."
She continues, voice clipped as she reels off every note of interest in more detail that is probably necessary. Roxy stops clicking through the pages and goes back to watching the video, grateful for her mother's wordiness like she is every year. It means the videos are longer.
"I love you," her mother finishes eventually, looking straight into the camera. "I want you to be safe." Her mouth dimples at one side for a moment; Roxy smiles back, instinctive. "And as my daughter, I expect you're perfectly capable of ensuring that yourself."
The video blinks out. Roxy hovers over the 'replay' button for a moment, but closes the program instead, and finds page one again. There'll be time for that later.
"Gun safety," she reads aloud. Everything sounds formal and dull and sensible and just a little scary, but Roxy thinks about her mother fighting and her mother being proud, and only gnaws her lip briefly as she keeps reading.