Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first time she awakens, her body is numb and colder than she’s ever felt. Her eyes don’t open. They won’t let her.

Each time she finds herself near the surface of consciousness, she’s lying in a freezer. Her limbs are frostbitten, necrotic, on the verge of snapping off her body. In these moments, her mind screams at her to survive. To set herself aflame. She is literally the most capable person to turn ice to flames. Yet, before she can command her hands to obey her, she falls into unconsciousness again. And again. And again.

Eventually, her eyes open on their own will. Her eyes burn—a welcome warmth with her body still freezing. She stares at the popcorn ceiling above her. It’s white with brown and gray stains. In some areas, she swears she can see blue-tinted shadows as well. A humming electric generator and the screech of tinnitus in her ear drowns out any attempt at forming coherent thought. All her weight rests directly on a knot of muscle on her shoulder blade. It hurts, but she can’t do anything about it.

A hand hovers directly in front of her face. With the brightness of the room, the hand appears as a silhouette. She realizes, as she stares at the hand, that it’s her own. She can’t feel her hand, let alone her whole arm, nor can she understand why it’s in front of her face. She didn’t do that. Rather, she didn’t want to.

After a beat, she feels her skin shift all around her, asynchronous from the rest of her body. Her bones and muscles are left out of the equation. Her nervous system feels dull and distant. She hears her vertebrae crack but can’t feel them. Hears the creak of the rusty bedsprings of the mattress beneath her, sees the ceiling transform into a cement wall, yet she doesn’t feel her limbs do any of the work of sitting up. She tries to will her pupils to move around. When it’s clear that isn’t going to work, she strains in her peripheral vision to understand more. She can see flimsy, white material below her—the hospital gown she’s wearing. No one else is in the room. Not even any medical staff. The air is chilly enough for her to wish she could shiver.

But the door does open, soon after. At least the door is directly in front of her, and so is this mystery person. He’s dressed in a black button-down shirt with just enough buttons open to showcase the pointy necklace resting squarely on his chest. His chin, jaw, and upper lip have short but nicely shaven hair around them. She sees where he would have dimples if he was smiling, but he’s not. His lips are pursed tightly and his face is downcast, morose. In his left hand, he holds a manila folder.

Sophia has seen his face maybe once or twice, she thinks. She seems to recall a devious glint in his eye before. She doesn’t know him well enough to know his name, that’s for sure. But some voice in her head provides it to her.

Charles, it says in a booming bass voice in her head.

It’s the same voice that she heard shortly before the fight that landed her here in the first place. But it also resonates in her throat—she speaks the word at the same time the voice in her head does, also without her permission.

“Charles.” Her voice is scratchy.

The grimace he swears quirks upward for half a second, enough to see a dimple briefly peak. His eyes even twinkle once.

“Fifty million dollars,” he says. He holds the folder behind his back and moves a few slow steps closer to Sophia. “You’re worth a lot of money, you know that? And a lot of trouble.”

He stops as if he expects her to speak. She wants to ask what he’s talking about. He doesn’t.

“Look. I’ll hand it to you, it’s not all your fault. But your career’s over, Spitfire. Spitfire,” he repeats. “You know that’s the last time you’ll ever hear that name again, right?”

Her head tilts up and down in an involuntary nod. Why? her mind screams. Where’s Eddie? Surely her manager should be able to explain what happened to everyone.

Wordlessly, he holds the folder out to her. She takes it. She feels the rough exterior of the folder, still a fleetingly blissful feeling that she can process the texture at all. When she opens it, she first sees discharge papers with her name on it, dated May 14th (is that what day today is?), and allegedly from the Hatchetfield Hospital. Allegedly, a corner of her mind stresses, because this very clearly isn’t a hospital. Or shouldn’t be.

“This should tell you everything,” he explains. “Everything anyone should care to know, anyways.”

She tries reading, but he keeps summarizing before she can get to the point written on paper.

“According to anyone who cares, you were in a car accident by the Roller-Rama the night of the 9th,” Charles says. The day of her fight. The last time, to her knowledge, that she was conscious. “You sustained a concussion, internal bleeding, broken ribs—the usual. The police report—the next page—says that you were the driver. No-fault state, so doesn’t really matter who did it, blah blah blah… point being, you never fought, you don’t have any supernatural powers, and you’re free to go home.”

“Okay,” Sophia says. “I will. Where’s my dad?”

Charles’ smile returns. There’s the sinister look she remembers.

Sitting on the edge of her new bed, her belongings sparse but spread, Sophia leafs through a leather-bound scrapbook. It would have been a disservice to leave these behind; her mother, before she passed a couple years ago, was an avid scrapbooker.

As Sophia flips through the pages, her eyes glaze over the faces of her favorite grandparents and cousins. She doesn’t stare longingly at her mother’s face like she would not so long ago. She doesn’t grimace at the picture of her father and wonder what he’s doing with millions of dollars to his name. Instead, she searches the pictures for one face.

So far, out of hundreds of pictures, there is only one she can find.

The photo is from Sophia’s first Christmas. It’s at her grandparents’ place, a house she hasn’t seen in well over a decade. In the image, Sophia is in her mother’s lap with her father on their left and another woman with a baby on their right. The man she is looking for crouches on the left side of the other woman. He wears a wavering, uncomfortable smile. He’s not looking at the camera, but something off-camera on his side. He’s nearly cropped out of the image entirely from the candy cane sticker Sophia’s mother pasted over most of his body.

Even though the image is grainy and sixteen years old, Sophia knows it’s him.

She takes the photo out of the plastic cover and flips to the back side. She skims her mother’s cursive handwriting and finds the line she’s looking for.

Front row, from left to right: Larry Swift; Patricia Rochester-Swift and baby Sophia Swift; Helen Norman and baby Bailey Norman; Barry Swift…

She flips the picture over again, then again, alternating from front to back a few times.

She looks up before she can process that she heard a knock on her door. In stark contrast to the photo she was just looking at, the older Barry Swift in front of her has long, curly locks and a full beard. Even his look of discomfort is like the picture—except now, he shifts his feet and his eyes flicker around the room, at the book in her lap, at the bag to her side.

“Didya eat?” he asks. “Before ya got here?”

She nods once.

“Settling in okay?”

Shorter nod.

“Need anything else?”

“No,” she says. Her voice is soft, but it’s still sharper than she expected.

“O-kay.” He looks down the hall, still shifting, but he still stands there. He wants to bolt off, just like in that Christmas photo. Sophia doesn’t understand why he doesn’t just run for it. “You’ll let me know if you need anything, right?”

“I don’t need anything.”

“Right, but if you do—”

“Look.” Sophia sighs heavily and sets the book down. “I’m almost 17. I only need to stay here until—I don’t even need to stay here—”

“You’re still just a kid—”

“Let me talk.”

Sophia feels a spark of pride at how quickly Barry shuts up. She holds the silence and revels in the tangible growth of discomfort coming from him. That’s one tool she can use to keep him away. Finally, she speaks again.

“Whatever you do, don’t do the ‘you’re just a kid’ thing at me. It’s not my fault that I’m here right now. You didn’t have to take me in. Never had to. But you did, so here we are. I’m gonna make this as easy as possible for both of us. Until I can get out of here, I’m going to walk to school and work and feed myself. Go to the laundromat for clothes. You can just pretend I’m not here and we can go back to not knowing each other once I’m out of here. Got it?”

“I’m just saying,” he blurts, rubbing his left temple, “you’ve been through some fucked-up shit—first the accident, then your dad disappearing on you. He was always a dick, even when we were kids. It just… fucks me up that he did worse to you.”

Sophia opens her mouth to argue—but she stops before she can say any of it. She grimaces.

“Just… don’t.”

“Okay,” he agrees. The conflict still isn’t leaving his eyes. It’s annoying.

“I mean, don’t bother. Don’t feel sorry for me. Don’t you ever assume what my life was like with Dad. Shit happens.”

“Okay,” he repeats.

“Okay.”

There’s another beat of silence as Sophia puts the open album to the side and returns to unpacking her bag. Barry doesn’t move. She acts like he’s not there anyways.

“Door open or closed?” he asks.

“Closed.” It seems like an obvious question. She’s kept the door closed ever since she was brought in.

The door shuts.

When it does, Sophia picks the scrapbook back up again. She puts the Christmas photo back in its original plastic slip. It’s not like it mattered, anyways—uncle or not, Barry’s a stranger. Always has been and always will be.

She takes her first week in the new neighborhood picking up extra shifts at Subway. The move required her to move from Sycamore High to Hatchetfield High, and her new school schedule isn’t ready yet. She’s starting life all over again with no money, so spending her downtime earning more of it makes perfect sense. It also keeps her mind off how drastically her school life is going to change once her schedule is settled.

Not that moving schools is the worst thing ever. Hannah once mentioned she goes to Hatchetfield High. Daniel, too. At least she’d be around people who understand.

Her break from academia also gives her time to analyze Barry’s daily routine. He’s not home a lot. It makes sense; he doesn’t have anyone to come home to. He rises earlier than she does and comes home after dark, well after she’s done with her day.

When he’s not home, she lightly explores the new house and its surroundings. It’s a brick house that sits on the far end of a cul-de-sac. Drapes cover windows coated in a thin layer of dust. All around, the house feels too big for just one person, and it’s sparsely furnished. The living room has an empty fireplace and a two-piece sectional couch turned toward a wall, but it’s just facing a wall—not a television or a coffee table. There’s a dining room separate from the kitchen, yet no dining table. A piece of twine about two feet long hangs horizontally over the washing machine. The twine holds up what looks like hundreds of plastic hangers. It's strange, though—Sophia has only ever seen Barry wearing the same trench coat ensemble every day. She can’t imagine him owning hundreds of clothing items.

The front door squeals when it opens and groans lowly when it’s closed. Sophia figures that out just a couple of days in. While it is nice to know definitively when Barry is leaving and when he’s returned just by the pitch of the door, the sound also drives her up the wall. She’s never been this sensitive to sound before, but something about that fucking door just drives her up the wall, like there’s a needle piercing through her skull. She tries not to let it bother her. It does anyways.

A few days later, she’s in the Hatchetfield High guidance office sitting in front of a counselor. Her name is Miss Holiday. She’s gentle with Sophia in a way that would normally piss her off, except it doesn’t seem like she’s changing her demeanor to pity Sophia. It’s just who she is.

“...Or first-year German. What do you think?”

Sophia blinks a few times. She didn’t realize she’d blanked out. “Sorry, uh... Can you repeat that?”

“You can get your second foreign language credit,” Miss Holiday repeats. Her slight smile hasn’t even changed, never faltered at the potential that Sophia wasn’t fully listening. “Second-year Spanish or first-year German. Either option would fit in your fifth period.”

“Oh. Let’s just stick with Spanish.”

“Perfect.” Miss Holiday’s smile grows. She clicks the mouse on her computer a few times, presses a few keys on the keyboard, clicks again, and the printer next to her spits out a sheet. Miss Holiday hands the sheet to Sophia. Her class schedule. “Just have your teachers call me if they have any questions. Otherwise, tomorrow is day one.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“Of course!”

Sophia starts to stand. But as she keeps watching Miss Holiday, she sees some twinkle in her eye. Something that suggests that she has more to say.

“Uh, anything else?”

“Just one more thing.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“I’m a guidance counselor.” Sophia raises an eyebrow, and Miss Holiday looks amused in return. “That also means I’m a counselor. I help kids—not just with their schedules. With their lives. Even a standard move is hard to adjust to. I just want you to know there are options, if you want to set aside some time with me during the week to get some help with this transition.”

“I don’t need therapy.”

“I’m not saying therapy. I just bet you have a lot of questions, lots of things about your future that changed. Things that a homeroom class isn’t going to solve. That’s true, isn’t it?”

It strikes Sophia as odd that Miss Holiday is so sure that her whole life has flipped over. It’s odder that Miss Holiday is exactly right.

“I’m getting emancipated,” Sophia says slowly, cautiously. “Doing the research.”

Miss Holiday folds her hands in front of her. “I’ve helped with emancipation a time or two.”

“So, you know some things.”

“Enough that I can make the process quicker.”

Sophia doesn’t need help. But she’s already at school anyways, and it’s no big deal for Miss Holiday, right? The two of them tentatively pencil in “Emancipation Studies” every Monday and Wednesday during her homeroom period until Sophia is out of Barry’s custody.

On her first day of school, Sophia decides to treat herself by listening to some music in her earbuds as she gets ready in the bathroom on the far side of the house. It’s more on the heavy metal side of music, both inspirational and aggressive. She needs to be in a fighting mood after feeling sorry for herself for the past week.

And, damn, she’s feeling great. Even through the bathroom’s frosted glass window, the sun is hot and blinding—just the way Sophia likes it.

She presses her palm against the window and revels in the warmth that radiates from it.

The corners of her lips tilt upward. It’s the first time she consciously recalls smiling since her last fight. She feels a deep juxtaposition between her silent happiness and the screaming rage of the singer she’s listening to.

The tenor voice in her ear screams, “It’s times like these I feel my heart could just go—”

BOOM.

She screams, claps her hands over her ears, and squeezes her eyes shut. An atom bomb must have landed in the next room over with the deafening force of the noise. She opens her eyes again to see that the bathroom looks the same as it did three seconds prior. All the while, she feels as if she slammed her head as hard as she could on the marble sink in front of her. The magnitude of the throbs in her head that follow make her grip the sink to keep her balance. Her stomach twists. She turns toward the toilet, nausea building up with each long, pounding thump of her brain against her temple. She’s about to give up, to fall to her knees and vomit up the irritants in her stomach.

“Sophia?” Barry’s voice calls from right outside the bathroom door.

She forces the nausea back as much as she can, further aggravating the pain in her head. She just needs long enough for Barry to go away again.

“I’m good, I… slipped,” she lies. Liquid spills onto her upper lip. She presses the tip of her pointer finger onto the wetness and pulls it back to look. Blood. She sees a box of tissues on the bathroom countertop, so she takes one and holds it under her nose.

“Slipped?”

It doesn’t sound like he’s buying it. It’s pissing her off how much he’s acting like he cares.

“Yeah.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

Barry goes silent on the other side of the door. It’s at least ten seconds. Sophia is having a hard time keeping a grasp on time. For all she knows, she’s already late for school. When she looks down at the tissue at one point, the blood soaked into it looks blue. She blinks several times, baffled, and looks at the tissue once again. Red.

“Okay,” he finally says. The footsteps walk away from the bathroom. One blessing of the house is that it’s hollow, so she can hear his footsteps moving toward the far side of the house. His room, hopefully.

She puts the toilet seat down, sits on it, and nurses her bleeding nose. Her phone says that she has about five minutes before she needs to leave. Skipping school isn’t an option, even with a bloody nose and a pounding headache. Sure, she’s not sure if she’ll be able to focus on the lessons all that well, but she has to act. She’s used to acting on her feet.

Whatever the hell just happened was weird. But it doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. The volume on her earbuds just exploded for a second, that’s all. Technical difficulties. She should get a new pair with her next paycheck.

She gives herself three more minutes and the tissues she uses are still stained in dots of—thankfully—red. Her head still spins. That’s still okay. She hauls herself up while gripping onto the sink, pausing to let the vertigo settle. Then, she steps out of the bathroom.

For some godforsaken reason, Barry is in the kitchen—not in his room like she hoped. She keeps her face turned away from him just in case there’s still some residual blood dripping down her nose.

“Feeling good about your first day?” he asks.

Sophia stays silent.

“Probably not the most responsible thing for me to suggest,” Barry goes on, “but if you don’t want to go in today, you don’t have to. I’ll excuse it.”

“I’m going to school.”

That’s the end of the conversation. It’s still too long. But they both leave around the same time. Barry speeds off in a tiny bronze sedan. A trail of thick exhaust follows his car.

She steps up to the school just as the first bell of the day rings. Technically, that means she’s late. She hopes the teachers here are as lax with tardiness as the Sycamore High teachers are. Were. With a quick look down at her printed schedule, she turns the corner and—

“—But, hey, it’s just how the job goes.”

Sophia blinks at her manager in front of her. It’s dark outside. She’s not at school anymore. She’s at Subway. Or, rather, she’s just about to leave. Was she even scheduled for work today?

“Y’alright? You’ve been acting different today,” the manager asks. “Not that I know you that well, but…”

Sophia shakes her head quickly. “Nah. Fine. I’m tired. See you tomorrow.”

“You’re not working tomorrow.”

“I’m not?” Even if she didn’t remember if she was supposed to work today, she’s pretty sure she works tomorrow. She starts to pull out her phone to check her schedule.

“No, you told me yourself. Just earlier today.”

“I don’t know what I was saying. I—did you already take me off the schedule?”

The manager’s eyes look tired. Exasperated.

Sophia sighs. “Fine. Okay. Not working tomorrow. But I’ll be back on Friday.”

“Sounds good. G’night.”

Sophia survives day two of school—but she doesn’t do much more than that. At least this time she remembers it, barely. She remembers getting lost down a couple of hallways but righting herself right before the bell. A couple of teachers call attention to the fact that she’s new and transferred from Sycamore. That gets a few chuckles and a few jabs at her old school which fire up her temper. Nothing’s wrong with Sycamore, it’s just… a smaller school. It’s different. That’s all.

She also remembers going home and decidedly not being at work. That’s a break she didn’t know she needed.

At least on day three, Sophia feels a little more alive. And aware. She doesn’t have the awful headache like she had the day before. No nausea, no fucking blue.

She focuses on lessons, hoping to catch up on the current units enough to be prepared for graduation in May. One point of favor to Sycamore: they have almost the exact same curriculum as Hatchetfield High, just in a different chronological order. Her history class lecture is identical to one she had at Sycamore just before her move. Her physics class is just starting the unit on circular motion—the one Sycamore started in September.

Between classes, between lectures, between quizzes, between days and days and days of working at Subway and saving money, Sophia keeps an eye out for the familiar faces she meant to look for since day one. Hannah and Daniel are here, somewhere. They must be. So far, no luck. Not by day three, day four, week one, week two—and suddenly it’s the end of October.

A long time ago, Daniel mentioned that he thought it would be funny for him to be Daniel LaRusso from The Karate Kid for Halloween. Sophia teased him about it. Said he was the only kid who would ever find it funny. But even on October 31st, she searches the halls for any dork who might happen to be wearing a Miyagi-Do gi. No sign.

That’s when she officially starts getting worried. She’s seen every face at Hatchetfield High at least twice now. But no Hannah or Daniel.

She’s hit with the startling realization one day—during the middle of a quiz, nonetheless—that they might be dead. Just because she survived the explosion doesn’t mean they did. The thought is so distracting and disturbing that she turns her quiz in only halfway completed. She has a headache so intense that she can barely sleep that night.

Her dreams, while short, are vivid. She’s in a deep blue ocean, drowning, trying to convince her limbs to paddle but they won’t. She tries reaching out for an island where all the other kids at the Roller-Rama have fled to. But then she’s choking on her own blue snot and she’s sinking. She hears a high-pitched wail. She cries for help, but her screams also increase in pitch and shrillness until the two pitches are in unison. She wakes up in a cold sweat, tries to keep herself awake, and falls into the same dream again, multiple times, until sunrise.

“I’ll excuse you if you don’t want to go to school today,” Barry offers that morning, nonchalant. It’s like when he offered to let her stay home on her first day.

“What?”

“You look exhausted.”

“I’m not.”

She is. It just disturbs her that Barry can read her well enough to tell when she’s tired. Historically, she’s been great at hiding her exhaustion.

“Is school going okay?” he presses.

“Stop trying to get on my good side. I have a headache.”

“I have Tylen—”

“I don’t want anything.”

She stares him down. He disengages in record time. Success.

Except it doesn’t feel like success when she feels like she’s going to vomit by fourth period homeroom. Or, rather, “Emancipation Studies”—right, because it’s Wednesday, Sophia reminds herself.

Miss Holiday takes one look at her and gets on the phone. Within another minute, Miss Holiday thrusts a hall pass at Sophia, tells her to sign out at the attendance office, and that Barry’s going to pick her up and take her home in fifteen minutes.

“Oh my god,” She’s so frustrated that she’s laughing at the absurdity of the situation. “I’m not sick. I can—”

Sophia stops. She feels her mouth watering and shuts it before anything can come out. The good news is nothing comes up, so she just swipes the hall pass and stomps down the hallway to the attendance office.

She hands the pass to the receptionist, mumbles her explanation, and sits with her head in her hands, breathing deeply to help the nausea pass. She knows she’s not going to throw up, but her stomach isn’t convinced. She spends about five minutes with her eyes pressed shut before she hears the ding-ding-ding of the bell above the attendance office door. She looks up, expecting to see Barry. Instead, some other guy steps past her. He has long, dark hair, a leather jacket, and a single earring dangling from one lobe.

The nausea disappears and is instead replaced with some feeling that makes no goddamn sense. She remembers this guy, just a little bit, from the Roller-Rama. The bass voice in her head says Ethan in the same tone it said Charles all those months ago. Between the fuzz in her ears, she hears that he’s asking for someone to be excused from their class. That’s when the feeling finally makes sense: Hope.

Ethan finally turns around and sees that Sophia’s staring at him. He jolts back a little and blinks several times, surprised. He clearly recognizes her, too.

“Oh. Hi.”

“Hey.”

“You look… different.”

“Yeah, the, uh…” Sophia shrugs and gestures to herself. Without her Spitfire costume, and instead opting for jeans and a t-shirt, she feels bare. “This is how I usually am.”

“Huh.”

“You’re Hannah’s dad, right?”

He cringes, like he was waiting for her to say it.

“Uh, no. It’s a long story.” Ethan starts turning away. She can’t let him completely disengage.

“Oh. Are you picking her up?”

“No.” Ethan’s completely turned away from her at this point. He’s staring at a piece of art on the wall. The Scream. “No, I’m getting my cousin.”

“Does Hannah still go here?”

“Not—no.” He sounds shakier.

“Then where is she?”

“It’s—” Ethan holds his closed fist in front of his mouth and closes his eyes. He sucks in a deep breath. And he… doesn’t answer.

Sophia can’t piece it all together. Probably because of the damn headache. But nothing—nothing about this is making sense.

“Was she…” she suggests, “...in the car accident, too?”

The question makes him whirl around. His eyes are red, but it doesn’t look like he’s crying yet; he’s just surprised. “What?”

“Never mind.” Guess he wasn’t told that lie.

“Look, Hannah is…” Ethan tries to find the right words. Must think he owes her an explanation. He doesn’t, really, but she’s grateful he thinks so. He sighs. “Hannah is…” He repeats the words slowly and takes a deep breath. “…She’s okay. She doesn’t go here anymore. She’s gone somewhere else.”

Where? Sophia tries to ask, but she only nods like she understands. “Okay,” she says at the same time the door ding-ding-dings again.

She looks over, and of course it’s Barry. His forehead is sweaty and he’s breathing harder than usual. Did he run to get here?

“Got your stuff?” he asks Sophia, then turns to Ethan. “Who’s this? You know him?”

Frustrated, Sophia stands up. “No,” she answers in a quick mutter. She sweeps out of the attendance office and toward the parking lot before Barry can even get her signed out. He’ll catch up to her.

A few weeks later, when Sophia is feeling decently well and catching up on homework, she drops her pencil. It rolls under the bed. She crouches down, looks under the bed, and sees the pencil next to a small manila envelope. She picks the envelope up. The front reads Bailey in handwriting that’s just barely chicken scratch. She opens it and finds a small stack of twenty-dollar bills. It’s money she can use once she can get her own apartment, her first line of thought suggests. But her second recognizes that she’s not a thief. This money clearly belongs to someone. Instead, she writes on the envelope. Found this under the bed. She sets it on the kitchen table.

The next morning, first thing when she wakes up and turns on the lights, she sees the envelope slipped under her closed door. The name Bailey is crossed out, and the same chicken scratch handwriting reads You can have it.

She’s furious. She has half a mind to scream at Barry for his assumption of what she needs, for disrespecting the boundary she set.

Instead, she just writes I don’t need your charity.

She slams the envelope back down on the kitchen table. It’s no longer on the table, nor in her room, by the time she comes back home that night.

Barry’s first guest comes over three days later. It’s a Saturday afternoon, Barry’s still in his room, and Sophia’s in her Subway uniform and ready to go to work. She opens the front door and very nearly runs over a kid around her age. She stops herself well before she can run into them.

“Oh, shit,” the kid says, their arms reflectively raised.

“Sorry,” Sophia mutters.

“All good. Sophia, right?”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“I’m Bailey.”

“Oh. Okay. You’re Barry’s…?”

“Stepkid. Ex-stepkid,” they amend without much more than a blink.

“And he told you about me?”

“Yeah. Said you found some of my money. Thanks, by the way.”

She shrugs.

Bailey rocks on their heels during the pause that follows. “I mean, if you need it more than I do, I don’t really need—”

“I don’t.” Sophia’s face feels hot. Her stomach turns. Every part of her body is lit up with embarrassment. She knows her tone is turning snippy, but she doesn’t have control over it anymore. “How much did he tell you?”

“Uh—” Bailey flounders. “Not… too much?”

Sophia’s okay with letting Barry feel uncomfortable. She’s not okay with traumatizing some random kid.

“Whatever,” she mutters and walks away from the house.

At 3 AM, Sophia gets out of work and she’s starving. She’s nowhere near any 24-hour fast food restaurants or grocery stores. That’s okay; she’ll just sleep it off. Granted, it’s been several years since she had to have sleep for dinner—she’s a little out of practice.

She gets home and makes a beeline for her room, but she sees a few sticky notes up there first, one after the other.

Leftovers in the fridge

No its not charity the stupid waitress got my order wrong today and I hate shrimp and its either going in the garbage or you doesnt matter either way

Maybe just eat it today or tomorrow if you dont want to die of food poisoning

Sophia surprises herself at how quickly she reroutes to the fridge. She scarfs down the leftover shrimp and rice and even writes Thank you on one of Barry’s sticky notes and puts it on the fridge.

It’s an unspoken thing, after that, where Sophia still camps out in her room for the most part but starts doing laundry at the house instead of the laundromat like she was originally planning on. In exchange, she takes out the trash before she leaves for school on Wednesdays and takes some paper plates from work. Neither Barry nor Sophia use dishes and Subway won’t miss the paper plates, so why not? In her mind, it's an equivalent exchange. If Barry has a problem with it, he’d say something.

In fact, he’s taken the opportunity with her out of the room to start idle conversation, once or twice, and she doesn’t even bristle away.

“Why Subway of all places?” Barry asks. She’s holding one of her uniform polos, so the question makes sense. She thinks for a second that the question should offend her. It doesn’t.

She shrugs. “Walking distance from here. From school. From the home, at the time.”

“The foster home?”

“Yeah.”

“And you were there for how long again?”

“And you care… why?”

That shuts him up quickly. Instead of the swell of pride she felt last time she made him go silent, her gut twists. It’s stupid.

Sighing, she answers, “Five days.”

“You started job searching that quick?”

“Didn’t have a choice. Need to prove I can be emancipated.”

Sophia has transferred all her clothes from the dryer to her hamper by the time she’s finished, so there’s no need to continue the conversation. She turns back to her room.

“How’s emancipation going?” he asks the next week as she’s putting her clothes in the washer.

“Slow.”

“Not surprising. Sucks, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Just know I’m not kicking you out anytime soon. I’m gonna miss having the trash taken care of.”

“Yeah? It’s that big of a deal to you?”

“Bailey always did the trash. I always forgot to after they and Helen moved out. It piles up quick.”

“Damn. If trash is all that pays the rent, you’re a shit landlord.”

“Maybe. Does that mean you’re staying?”

“Let’s see what the courts say first.”

The next week, Barry’s in the living room when she starts doing laundry. It feels weird, not having him talk to her in the laundry room. She’s still close enough that they’re within talking distance, though.

“So, Bailey. They’re your stepkid, right?” she asks.

He turns toward her. There’s no denying he’s shocked that she started the conversation. He still needs no more than a beat of time to answer.

“They are. Were. Bailey’s my ex’s kid.”

“Ex-partner, ex-spouse…?”

“Ex-wife. Helen and I got divorced last year.”

“I don’t ever see Bailey stop by. Except the one time.”

“They’re not a big fan of me. I wasn’t the best stepdad.”

“How?”

“Eh, the usual. Not home enough, not enough of a dad figure. Never went to graduations, recitals. I was too busy if they ever had a problem. They had a lot of big emotions I never helped with. Bailey was already done with me long before Helen was.”

“You seem pretty aware that you’re the problem,” Sophia comments. Barry snorts a short laugh.

“Yeah. I apologized. Tried to be better. It was too late. They haven’t really forgiven me. That’s okay. Still got to go to dinner with them the other day, though. That was nice.”

The day with the shrimp leftovers, she figures.

“Now that I think about it, Bailey’s your age,” Barry muses. “And they go to Hatchetfield High. They’re pretty popular—could help if you’re looking for a little more of a social life.”

Her heart pangs painfully as she thinks of Hannah. And Daniel, wherever he is.

“I’ll think about it,” she says.

“What didn’t I like about your dad?” Barry clarifies, as if repeating something.

Sophia blinks. She has a carton of milk in her hands and she’s pouring cereal into a bowl. She doesn’t remember getting this cereal, nor the milk, nor even waking up for the day, really. She definitely doesn’t remember asking Barry anything about her dad. But it’s clear that’s what he thinks she said, and she’s not about to correct him, because she’s actually kind of curious.

“Yeah. You don’t like him much.”

“I really don’t.” Barry says the word ‘really’ between his teeth and he lets out an angry little laugh.

“You said he treated you badly?”

“This feels weird,” he admits. “I don’t think I should be saying things about your dad. He could still come back.”

“I won’t tell him,” she promises.

“If you’re sure. Well—” Barry taps his fingers against the marble kitchen counter. “I get that older brothers get to be a little evil, let’s start with that. He loved pushing my buttons just for the sake of pushing my buttons.”

Sophia hums. Doesn’t sound too horrible so far. Just normal sibling stuff.

“But then there’s the one time he lit my coat on fire while I was wearing it.”

The fuck?

The weird stories start coming one after the other. He spread rumors that Barry wrote love songs about an elderly math teacher. He took their mom’s car for a party, totaled it, and then blamed Barry for it. He locked Barry in the cellar in the middle of winter and poured water on the doors so they would freeze shut. He lured a moose into the house knowing Barry has alkiphobia (fear of moose—good vocabulary word). Extra puzzling is the fact that moose don’t live in the lower peninsula of Michigan, but Barry swears it was an honest-to-god moose.

“One thing I can give him,” Barry concludes, “is that he’s really good at getting what he wants out of people.”

Sophia didn’t get that exact theme out of every story Barry shared, so she asks, “How so?”

“I mean, he did most of that stuff for attention. That’s what he wanted. Then he outgrew attention, so he did it for control. That’s when he’d use his lies to make me do stuff for it. Then he outgrew control, so he did it for community. That’s when he found his friends, your mom… where he pretended to repent, got the entire family to forgive him for being a little shit.”

“You don’t think he was honest?”

“About being sorry? No way.”

Sophia has her doubts. Her dad may have been genuinely cruel and even abusive to Barry (that’s the part that’s terribly difficult to swallow), but she never saw any of that behavior toward her or anyone else he interacted with. It’s hard to believe that they’re both talking about the same person.

“Ah. Well. Anything else?” Sophia asks, half-sarcastic. Barry doesn’t pick up on it.

“I dunno. I’m mad at what he did to you. I wish I understood why.”

“You and me both,” she agrees, even though $50 million is a predictable reason. “Did you have any good memories with him?”

“A few.”

He doesn’t elaborate.

“Well, I have good memories of him,” she says.

“Like what?” Barry practically snorts the question, disbelieving.

“He was a social guy. He liked planning events. Parties. Picnics. Did he just, like, love birthdays when he was a kid or something?”

“Uh, not really,” Barry answers. It’s enough of a hook that he leans back against the counter and focuses on what Sophia has to say, now infinitely more interested. “But there was that one time not too long after you were born…”

Her heart convulses. Her hand goes up to clutch it. When she looks down, both of her hands still appear to be at her sides. Her heart still pounds and writhes against her chest and between fingers. Weird, Sophia mentally catalogs.

Instead, she tells the story of her fourteenth birthday, the last one before her mom died.

Her birthday was the same day as the Sycamore High prom, and most of her friends were upperclassmen, so they did little more than comment “Happy birthday” on her Facebook wall before ignoring her for them to have the night of their life. A small part of her had hoped one of her friends would invite her—underclassmen were allowed to be invited to prom—but no one did.

Her dad, of course, saw her moping. Within two hours, he dragged her out to The Birdhouse where a bunch of his friends had completely transformed the place. Leather-clad and tattoo-covered bikers wore sparkly party hats, threw colorful confetti at each other, and hung purple banners that read HAPPY BIRTHDAY SOPHIA. The brightly colored decorations contrasted against the thick, smoky air of the bar. Sophia giddily witnessed her dad and some dude with a blue mohawk duke it out over the last of the Starburst from a piñata. She had root beers and mocktails and cake and ice cream and so many candies she was sure her teeth would rot out by the end of the night. Her dad and his friends made her feel far more special than any prom would.

Barry surprises Sophia by laughing aloud when she recounts how much her dad embarrassed her by making her duet “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” with him on the karaoke stage that day.

“He was a fun guy when he needed to be fun,” Sophia recounts, laughing with him. Barry hums in agreement. “Like, even when things got hard, he took care of what counted. He always made sure there was food on the table, always—”

“You mean the bare minimum a parent’s supposed to do for their child?” Barry interrupts. The last of his enthusiasm on the topic drops, as does the light smile on his face.

Back on the defensive, Sophia takes a step back. “It’s not like that,” she argues. “After Mom died, things got really hard for him.”

Barry pauses. The contemplation on his face suggests that he’s never really thought about it before. That it would be tough to be a single dad after the loss of his wife.

“But our parents helped, right? Your grandma and grandpa?”

“Grandpa put them both in so much gambling debt that they couldn’t help us.” She says it in a ‘duh’ tone, but then she remembers that Barry hasn’t been in the rest of the family’s life for a decade and a half.

“Oh, god,” Barry groans, shakes his head, and rubs his temple. Sophia never knew how far back her grandpa’s gambling addiction went, but Barry’s reaction is too knowing for it to be a new development.

“And then Dad got laid off for ages, racked up a bunch of debt himself just trying to keep us both alive.”

“But he bought you two a really nice house a year ago, right?”

“Right.”

“What changed?”

“He got a better job,” Sophia lies. Her tone is even enough that Barry doesn’t press further, thank god. She wants to go on and share a positive story about her dad, but she sees the time on the oven reads 7:40, which means it’s 7:30 (Barry keeps every clock in the house running ten minutes early), which means she should have left for school five minutes ago. She tosses her cereal in the kitchen sink and runs.

“You don’t work Sunday, right?”

Sophia looks up from the couch with a raised brow, forgetting for a moment that she had started putting her work schedule on the calendar in the kitchen. She doesn’t even have to check the schedule to know when she’s working anymore.

“Nope.”

“Could I pay you for a favor?” he asks at first, but abruptly shifts his wording when Sophia’s gaze darkens. “Could you do me a favor?”

“Depends on the favor.”

“I need to be at the airport by 6 that day.” He asks no more—just looks at her expectantly.

She’s used to this by now, connecting the dots that he doesn’t bother finishing. It must be maddening for him to deal with anyone who doesn’t speak his language quickly enough.

“You need me to drop you off so you don’t have to pay for parking?”

“Yup.”

“How long are you gone for?”

“’Til Wednesday.”

“I don’t work that day, either.”

“Perfect,” he responds, shooting her a thumbs-up while already looking away and heading for the fridge. “How’s school?”

“Nothing special. Do you even know if I have my license?”

“You didn’t say you don’t have one.”

“Guess not. You trust me not to burn down the house while you’re gone?”

Barry snorts a half-laugh. “Doubt you could burn anything even if you wanted to. You’re harmless.”

No matter how off handed the comment is, it makes Sophia stiffen and grimace. Her hands tighten into fists. When she looks up, Barry has a can of Monster in his hand and he’s looking inquisitively at her, head tilted slightly. She shakes her head and waves her hand in a dismissive gesture. More than ever, she wishes the flair of her fingers could summon even a slight flicker of fire to prove him wrong. The flame never comes.

“What are you even flying for?” Sophia asks instead.

Barry cracks open the Monster. “Work,” he answers with a sip of the drink.

“I don’t even think I know what you do for work.”

“Quality manager. Ann Arbor Freight and Couriers.”

“Where are you flying?”

“New Mexico.”

“Albuquerque?”

“Acme.”

“What, like the Looney Tunes company?”

“Something like that.” Amusement creeps into Barry’s voice. It feels a bit condescending.

Barry sits on the far opposite side of the couch and flips on the 52-inch flatscreen he bought the week prior. He insists it’s because it’s NASCAR season and he wants to get back into watching racing. Sophia hasn’t been able to dispute the claim yet—even now he’s flipping to the NASCAR channel—but Barry made no indication of being interested in TV at all until he mentioned how he missed cable and Sophia noted that she would watch some stuff if he got cable.

The next day, he was hauling a new TV into the house.

While the commentators go on about their predictions of the upcoming game, Sophia props her history book and worksheet back onto her lap.

She blinks, and suddenly she’s in a pitch-black living room with a hand waving in her face. Instinctively, she slaps the hand away.

“Ow!” Barry’s voice sounds in front of her, tinged with both pain and surprise.

“Sorry,” Sophia apologizes.

“You slap hard.”

Barry rubs his hand. Based on the heat radiating from her palm, she guesses he’ll be feeling that hit until tomorrow morning. Maybe even tomorrow afternoon.

“Just wanted to ask if you were done with your essay yet,” he says.

With the sudden fast-forward through time, Sophia knows better than to be too surprised. Her laptop shines where her history book had been just a second prior. The corner of her Google Doc reads 2,104 words—just slightly above the word limit for her English paper due the following week. The same paper she had been dreading for the past month, the one she had regretfully accepted would be a procrastination project.

Sophia smiles. Sure, she still has no idea where this stupid amnesia is coming from, but at least she knows now that it could help her. If she must live with this forever, there’s hope that she can keep harnessing it to her power.

“I’m done,” she says, yawning. Her eyes are heavy and tired, much more so than earlier. Sophia shuts her laptop, sets it on the coffee table, stands, and stretches her arms over her head. The vertebrae between her shoulders gave a satisfying pop-pop-pop, one after the other, down to her mid-back.

“Well,” Barry comments, “besides the slapping thing, you seem to be in a good mood.”

She sits on that comment for a moment. Life still isn’t where it needs to be. She can’t have her house anymore, sure, and she’s still not emancipated. Her health isn’t at its peak and she’s incredibly busy between work and school. But, for what it’s worth, she’s not drowning. Not anymore. Even if she can’t understand exactly why.

“Yeah,” she answers. “I am.”

The amnesia is less fun when she next comes back to full consciousness upon jolting forward in the driver’s seat of Barry’s car. A honk comes from the car in front of her. The car she just hit.

“Fuck,” Sophia curses, pulling over. She throws open the car door and jumps out to assess the damage of Barry’s car. The hood crunches inward accordion style and the passenger-side headlight is smashed. Her heart pounds and only doubles in speed once she hears a car door opening in front of her. It makes her look at the sedan she hit. It’s only slightly dented, and some blue paint is chipped off. She’s also forced to look at the victim of her inattention.

It’s some guy in plaid with sandy hair and a beard. There’s also a tall guy that hops out of the passenger seat. He’s clean-shaven and wears a dark brown business suit. He combs a stressed hand through his once styled, now slightly mussed hair. He also looks down and crouches to look at chipped paint on the back of their sedan.

“I am so, so sorry,” she apologizes to them. She hates how much her voice shakes when she says it.

It’s like the bearded guy doesn’t even hear her apology. He steps closer. “You okay?”

“I’m sorry,” she repeats. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey, calm down. You hurt?”

“I’m—” She swallows back her next apology. She shakes her head.

“No need to call an ambulance?”

Sophia shakes her head again, quicker this time. No way can she afford an ambulance on top of what kind of hell she’ll pay for trashing Barry’s car.

“Alright, we can work with that. Hey—it’s an accident, don’t freak out.”

“Do you need my insurance?”

“For this? Nah. You’re young; you don’t need that kind of mark on your license for this.”

She recalls the car accident story Charles fed her and that she was the driver. Michigan is a no-fault state, but that doesn’t exempt her from points on her license. There’s no way he would have been able to issue points on her license… right?

The guy in the suit stands up straight and lets out a sigh of relief. “Just a tiny dent and some chipped paint,” he informs Plaid. “That’s a cheap fix. Right?”

“Yeah, yeah. We can handle that.” The Plaid then looks to Barry’s car and gives a low whistle. “Yours, on the other hand…”

“Yeah.” She groans and runs a hand down her face. She also looks at the damage to Barry’s car again. It looks even worse than the first time. She huffs out a sigh, taps her foot, and tries to think of some way to salvage the situation.

“This… isn’t your car, is it?”

Sophia looks back to the one who spoke. Suit. His light-colored eyebrows are furrowed in concern and his light blue eyes are wide. She has no clue how he knows. She also has no clue why she feels like trusting him. He looks a little bit like an older Daniel, and she misses Daniel, so maybe that’s why.

“My uncle’s,” she answers.

Suit sucks in a breath between his teeth. “Yikes.”

“He’s out of town,” she continues explaining. “I just dropped him off at the airport. He comes back on Wednesday. I can’t let him know I damaged his car.”

“He’s gonna have to,” Plaid says, resigned. “A fix like that would take a week at least.”

“Tony fixed the hood of yours in two days,” Suit counters.

“Tony?” Sophia asks.

Plaid keeps talking with Suit. “Tony’s a friend. It’s different.”

“So—so maybe she’s a friend of a friend. He’s the best bet here.”

“Who’s Tony?” Sophia repeats her question.

“He runs an auto repair shop on the north side of town,” Plaid answers. “You can see if he’s any help, but he’s not cheap.”

“I don’t care. I can pay it.”

She’s not sure if she can pay for it. She just needs it done.

Plaid looks warily between Sophia and Suit. Then, he goes back to his car. He comes back with a slip of paper with an address written on it and the name Tom Houston scribbled in the corner.

“This is Tony’s shop,” he says. “He doesn’t do work on Sundays, but if you tell him you’re a friend of Tom Houston, he might do you a favor.”

Sophia takes the slip of paper and breathlessly thanks Plaid—Tom.

“Hey, Paul’s the one you need to thank here,” Tom says, turning back to his car. Paul must be Suit.

Paul? The bass voice in her head asks. It sounds intrigued. She ignores it.

“Thanks, Paul,” Sophia answers.

“Yeah, not a problem. Good luck with the car, okay?”

“Will do.”

He starts to turn away. She must ask, even if there’s no logical basis for her line of thinking.

“Paul?”

“Yeah?”

“Weird question—you don’t happen to know a Daniel, do you?”

Paul looks deeply shocked for a moment.

“I have a cousin,” he answers slowly.

“Goes to Hatchetfield High?”

“Went,” Paul corrects. He buries his hands in his pockets and looks down at the ground. He’s somber.

Sophia hates the guess she makes next.

“He was in a car accident, and…?”

“He passed a few months ago,” Paul finishes. “I’m sorry. Didn’t know the news was that private. Was he a friend of yours?”

Sophia swallows hard. Her eyes burn.

“Something like it,” she answers. “Thanks.”

Maybe it’s because of the stress of the car accident, or the lack of guarantee that Barry’s car will be fixed in time, or the news that Daniel is fucking dead, but Sophia feels like shit all through Sunday night. Mentally speaking, it’s bad—but physically speaking, it’s unbearable.

Her head feels feverish and tingly; her stomach refuses to settle. When she tries sitting up from her bed, she feels vertigo so disorienting that she tumbles out of the bed. Her shoulder complains from the impact, and so does her knee. Tinnitus hits after her fall, screaming into her ear so loudly (and so much like That Night) that she sobs for the first time in months. She wipes the snot under her nose with her arm. It’s vividly blue and the consistency of chunky jello. It makes her sob more—a desperate, ragged sound that she can barely believe is coming from her. On the ground, she begs silently for relief. She falls into unconsciousness, into sleep, into an endless stream of dreams.

“500K won’t do it, huh?” a voice in the back of Sophia’s mind snarks. She whips around; the corners of her dream are endless black, hazy around the edges. In the far corner is her sponsor, Eddie, leaning against the counter at the Roller-Rama snack bar. His left eyebrow is raised, and his hat is tilted downward, creating a silhouette that hides his sclera.

“I’m telling you, and I won’t tell you again, no,” a voice responds. A new figure materializes—the back of them, at least. The voice is familiar. Shaky. Distant. Missed.

“Dad,” Sophia sobs. She slaps her hands over her mouth to conceal the sobs. She can’t interrupt this. As deeply as she misses her dad, she needs to hear this.

“Alright, alright,” Eddie concedes with his hands in front of himself. “I hear ya.” A pause, and Eddie starts to turn away. Then, he looks back to Larry. “Not one number would convince you? Not even a million?”

“No.” His voice sounds less sure.

“Ten million?”

Larry shakes his head.

“Well, not like I can go much higher than that. Indulge me—let’s play a thinking game, then. What would your number be? I won’t tell your little firecracker, I swear.”

“Noth—”

He can’t finish the word. Sophia begs him to.

But she remembers his daydreams. Ever since she was a little girl, there was this mansion in Clivesdale, right by the lakeside on the other side of the bridge to Hatchetfield. We make it there and we’re set for life, he’d tell her, even after they had been evicted for the first time. Not too long ago, just out of curiosity, she asked him how much that mansion was worth. He told her—

“Fifty million.”

“No,” she whimpers.

“Fifty million?” Eddie repeats, then chuckles. “Well, you drive a hard bargain, Mr. Swift. I’ll have to make a call or two, but I can make it happen. I gotta ask—why?”

That’s all she needs, really. A reason. So she leans in. She wishes. She hopes.

A long, silent moment passes. Then, her dad releases a shaky breath. The scene turns 180 degrees. Sophia swivels in a half-circle without moving her feet. Now, instead of seeing Eddie from the front and her dad from the back, they’re switched. She sees her dad’s face, his wobbling chin, his wet eyes.

“I just want my daughter to have the best chance at life as she can,” he weeps. “She’s been through enough shit. She’s tough. She’ll survive this. And, god damn it, if there’s one thing I can guarantee with fifty million, she’ll never go hungry again. Not while I’m around. If this is how I can give her the life she finally deserves, then fine. I’ll do it for her. You just have to promise she’ll live, okay?”

The noise around her scrambles. She’s flung backward, time rewinding as the scene flips again. She’s back to seeing Eddie’s shit-eating grin and her father’s back.

“I gotta ask—why?” Eddie repeats.

Her dad’s voice is low and gravelly when he answers this time.

“I just figure,” he says, “she’s needed for a greater cause.”

“What greater cause?!” she yells to him.

“Something much bigger than her,” her dad tacks on at the end. “Something better. Something… that will unify us all.”

“Ah, so you’re aware.” Eddie grins.

“I’m not quite as stupid as you think, Chip.”

“I never called you stupid, you son of a bitch.” There’s no malice in Eddie’s voice; in fact, he laughs. “You know she won’t make it, right?”

“That’s the point, isn’t it?”

“What is?” Eddie presses.

Sophia wakes up, clammy and jittery, to the sound of her phone ringing. She jolts and scrambles for it. The time reads 11:45 AM. The call is from an unknown number—but it’s local, based on the area code. She answers.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Sophia.” It’s Miss Holiday—using that damn annoying soft voice she uses when she’s acting sympathetic. “The attendance office didn’t get a notice that you were going to be absent today. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Sorry. Fever.”

“Oh. Did your uncle say he was going to call?”

“N—” Sophia reconsiders. “Yeah. Uh, maybe he forgot. But I can… excuse myself, can’t I?”

“Sorry, sweetheart. Not until you’re eighteen.”

“Fine, whatever,” she snaps. “Then just leave me unexcused or whatever, I don’t care.”

“Soph—”

Sophia ends the call. She throws the phone at the end of the bed and curls back under the sheets. She cries blue.

Barry calls on Tuesday morning. Sophia doesn’t answer, so he leaves a voicemail.

“Hey, the office at school says you haven’t been there in two days. I excused you. Just give me a call when you have a second. Listen, I don’t even care if you’re just skipping because you want to, but let’s talk about it. Bye.”

He still sucks at hiding the hints of concern in his voice, even though his voicemail sounds like he’s trying to keep his tone as even as possible. The voicemail is just stupid and pushover-y enough for Sophia to call him back. Just a headache, she says. She’s not feeling good. Probably won’t feel good for another few more days.

She even admits, to her own surprise, “I just learned one of my friends died.”

The other end of the line goes silent. Bet she threw Barry off with that one.

“Shit. I’m sorry,” his voice crackles on the other end. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Alright. I’ll excuse you for today and tomorrow. You still good to pick me up from the airport?”

She pauses. “I can do it.”

“Need anything from me before I come back?”

“No.”

“What about your school stuff?”

She’s not sure. As sad as she is, she doesn’t want to fall too far behind on schoolwork.

“Bailey’s in your grade, right? Maybe they can drop off your homework.”

The last thing she wants to do is deal with anyone else, but she accepts the offer anyways.

“I’ll give them your contact info. See you tomorrow,” he says, then hangs up.

Two brighter moments come up later that afternoon. First, Sophia gets the call that she can pick up Barry’s car at any point on Wednesday morning. Second, due to the isolation she’s been putting herself through for the past few days, Bailey’s presence at Barry’s house is a welcome change. They must feel it, too, because they don’t even think twice when Sophia asks if they want to stay over to do homework together.

Bailey and Sophia work silently apart from each other for a while. They’re both in the living room. Sophia kneels in front of the coffee table, finishing her assigned reading of Fear and Trembling. Bailey lies stomach-down on the couch with their science textbook and worksheet in front of them.

Bailey finishes their science homework well before Sophia finishes her reading, evidenced by the doodles littering their worksheet.

“You don’t really seem to mind being here,” Sophia comments offhandedly. An offer at conversation.

Bailey shrugs. “I grew up here most of my life. Don’t know why I would.”

“It’s just…”

She doesn’t know if she should mention what Barry said about Bailey’s semi-estrangement from him. Bailey picks up on it, though, as they flip around onto their back on the couch nonchalantly.

“Barry was my dad at one point. I’m not, like, hard no-contact with him. I was for a while. He’s just not dad material, that’s all.”

“It’s not just about him, though. He chose to take me in. Doesn’t it feel like he’s replacing you with me?”

Bailey shrugs. “I replaced him with my mom’s new boyfriend.”

That doesn’t feel like a fair comparison. “I guess that’s fair.”

A beat of silence.

“Why did you decide to stay?” Sophia asks. “You didn’t have to.”

“Honestly? You seem like you could use a friend or two.”

“I have friends.”

“Bullshit, you’re a new senior in a new school. I see you moping around all on your own at lunch.”

“I do not mope.”

An amused smirk sits on Bailey’s face, but they don’t say anything else.

“Fine,” Sophia concedes. “You want to prove how much I don’t mope? Where do you sit for lunch?”

“By the gym entrance.”

“Then I’ll see you and your little friends by the gym during lunch tomorrow. Then you’ll see how much I don’t mope.”

“Challenge accepted.”

Both start giggling. Then Bailey starts giving warnings about their friends. Sophia remembers Barry mentioning that Bailey was popular, but Bailey’s version of details is much more interesting. It’s a misconception that they’re popular; they’re just branched out enough between niches and cliques that it seems like there are millions of them. Not quite popular, but not so nerdy that they’re ostracized. Bailey warns that the football players tease them and sometimes push them around on occasion. Sophia is explicitly given full permission to kick someone named Max Jägerman in the balls if he gets too close. Even though the group sits by the gym entrance every day, the teachers not-so-regularly insist that they can’t sit there. But it’s their trademark spot. And, soon, it’s also going to be Sophia’s.

Bailey makes their way out of Barry’s place well after dark that night. Sophia realizes, somewhat belatedly, that she just made her first real friend since moving. Bailey is no Hannah or Daniel, but they sure are something.

Sophia stares vacantly out the window as snow reflects off the glass barrier between her and the Subway customer lobby. The clouds have gathered in an angry grey array, bringing forth the winter gloom that will haunt Michigan for several more months.

To her own chagrin, Sophia has never been a winter person. She’s never felt so overheated that she felt like tearing her skin off. Winter is different. It lasts forever. It brings a bone-deep chill that not even three layers of clothes and a warm fireplace could allow her to feel full warmth again. It’s been consistently chilly and on-and-off snowy for several weeks now, but this first serious snowfall seals Hatchetfield’s gloomy fate. Even as things started to tilt sideways in Sophia’s life all those months ago, at least she had the sun to keep her company.

At least the inside of the restaurant juxtaposes the dismal outdoors in its own unsettling, corporate way. The walls are lined in that shitty green and yellow schema that both matches her apron and burns her eyes. One wall is lined with extreme close-ups of various breads and vegetables and shiny-toothed “casual” models getting ready to take a giant bite out of a sandwich. They’re all unsettlingly saturated to the point that they look uncanny, even though they’re the definition of hyperrealism. The perfectly dew-dropped tomato slices on the wall are nothing like the sad, dull, mushy tomatoes in the tray in front of her. Are they even the same vegetable?

“A-hem,” a voice huffs at her.

She looks up. A grumpy customer stares at her expectantly.

“Sorry,” she answers, shaking her head briefly to force herself back into the moment. “How can I help you?”

“Footlong Black Forest ham sub, herbs and cheese bread, toasted, provolone, add pickles, black olives, red onions, all the sauces,” he demands in a singular breath.

Good afternoon to you, too, she continues the conversation one-sidedly from inside her head as she grabs the bread and pops it in the toaster oven.

“Want to make it a meal?” she asks once she’s turned back to the customer.

“Obviously,” he grumbles. He snatches up a bag of Lays, opens it immediately, and starts angrily munching.

Again, she mentally answers, Well, aren’t you full of goddamn rainbows and sunshine?

“Okay then,” she says instead in a mumble. She grabs a cup and slides it over the counter to him. Except it’s not a cup at all. It’s a bottle of mustard.

He stares at the mustard stupidly for a moment, as does she.

“Sorry,” she tries to dismiss with a humorless chuckle, then passes a paper cup to him. The paper cup is now a bottle of peppercorn ranch.

“Is this some kind of game?” the customer asks. His face starts to turn red, and his frown is worthy of the Guiness Book of World Records.

She watches her hand very intentionally as she reaches out for a fountain drink cup. She feels her arm reaching in the direction of the cup. However, her actual, physical hand goes right for the condiments again. This time, her fingers wrap around the buffalo chicken sauce. What the fuck? She doesn’t even feel anything in her hands. She still feels her arm outstretched toward the cups, but that’s clearly not where her arm physically is.

Then she’s staring at the toaster oven. When the fuck did she do a 180-degree turn? She tries to force herself to turn back around, but there’s no use. She’s still gripping onto the buffalo sauce even though that same arm is still reaching for the goddamn cups and she can only watch in horror as she watches her other arm, which still feels like it’s at her side, reach up toward the handle of the toaster oven and then take out the barely-baked bread.

“Whoa, whoa, what the fuck,” she tries to say. She feels her jaw move, yet she doesn’t hear any words come out, nor does she see her mouth moving in the reflection of the toaster oven.

“The fuck are you doing over there?” the customer interjects.

The bread falls to the floor. Plastic crinkles in front of her. A glove flies down, landing beside the bread. Her gloveless left hand reaches back out for the toaster oven. It’s actually going inside the toaster oven, totally separate from her. It’s not touching the grates yet, and she still doesn’t feel the heat of the toaster oven around her fingers. She hears cries of shock and confusion and outrage behind her, including her own internal screaming, yet she’s powerless to stop it.

Her palm touches the red-hot grates. She doesn’t feel anything. Her hand sizzles. As she tries to pull away, it just feels like her skin is stretching. No part of her actually moves.

Sophia’s manager steps in a moment later and shoves her away from the toaster oven.

“Sophia, what in the world?!” her manager cries, equal parts outraged and confused. She’s led to the industrial sink and the manager holds her numb, burned palm under a stream of water. Three red welts sit directly in the center of her hand, perpendicular to the lengths of her fingers. She still feels none of it.

The pissy customer is long gone by the time Sophia’s manager finishes bandaging up her hand. Neither she nor the manager have said a word since the sink. They just sit in the kitchen, facing each other, silent.

A few beats pass, and then the manager sighs. “You should go home.”

“Okay,” she answers. It’s not worth putting up a fight. At least her mouth obeys her this time, and her limbs allow her to stand. She hisses and her palm stings when she uses her injured hand to brace against the chair. It throbs in tandem with her left temple, which is also suddenly painful. She just grits her teeth, sweeps past the manager, and grabs her winter coat.

On her way back home, she kicks a brick wall and huffs out an annoyed breath. Worse than the pain, she’s now going to be short on money this paycheck. The car accident wiped out all of her savings. Even being back at square one, she’s now losing more time at work when she needs it most.

Barry’s already home, to Sophia’s annoyance. Even when she tries to hide her bandaged hand in her coat pocket, he sees it.

“Hurt yourself at work?”

“Yeah,” she mutters.

“Accident?”

When she tries to answer, nothing comes out. She feels her joints moving for her again, trying to wordlessly steer her back in the direction of her room.

Oh god. This can’t be happening again. Not right now.

Phantom limbs try to grasp onto a counter, bookshelf, anything, and she feels her jaw screw open wide trying to scream herself out of this out-of-body fit. It’s not working. Her physical body is still silent and walking away.

“Sophia?” he asks again. “It was an accident, right?”

No matter how many times she tries to scream It was!, nothing happens. Her physical body continues into her room and slams the door behind her. And, once she’s behind closed doors again, her soul snaps back into her body like a snap fastener clicking into place.

“It was,” she answers hastily.

“Okay,” Barry answers. There’s an upward tilt to his tone that suggests he doesn’t believe her.

Huffing, she opens the door again. Barry stands on the other side and takes a step back once the door swings open.

“I’m fine,” she says in an attempt to be more convincing. “Just had a bad day. Just need to be alone. Okay?”

“Okay,” he says. He doesn’t believe her. “I’ll be out in the living room if you want to chat about anything.”

She closes the door again.

The police stop by the house at the start of the new year. They found her dad. In Argentina. He’s dead. They can’t say if it’s murder or suicide, but at the end of the day he’s just… not alive. Not anymore.

Barry’s there when the police deliver the news. He’s fuming. He raps his knuckle against the kitchen table. His face is beet red. He’s barking for explanations from the cops, demands to know how the hell long he’s been there, cussing out how much of a selfish piece of shit Larry is and how his death just proves it.

“Stop talking about him like that,” Sophia spits. It’s the first time she’s felt fire in her veins the past month. That was when he first called her a kid. “That’s my dad, he’s dead, he was in my life. You haven’t been in ours.”

“Right, because I knew he was busy being a piece of shit. No one else in the family listened. And I knew he would do the same shit to you and your mom, and I didn’t do shit. Of course he would fuck off and run halfway across the world to life out his selfish dreams.”

“What?”

“I mean, it’s such a dick move. I have no goddamn idea how you’re not pissed off at him! You had your car accident, he fucked off because suddenly it would ruin the dreamhouse life he built. So if he can’t have it for two, he takes it for one and leaves you in the dust. Why am I more pissed than you are? Why is that?”

She can’t tell him. He wouldn’t believe how they were able to afford such a big house, nor can he know. She takes the lie, crosses her arms, and quietly asks for the officer to continue. Whatever they have to say, she doesn’t hear. She just wishes her body would let her cry. But her vision is blue, which means her body won’t listen to her again.

“Did they—?” she starts to ask, but a lump in her throat stops her for a moment. “Did they find anything… else… in the house?”

“Anything else?” the cop repeats. “Well, not really. Just a bunch of stuff that belongs to him—in police custody now.”

Nothing that would indicate that he has what she’s looking for. The edges of her vision tint blue.

The emancipation papers come through much more quickly after that. It’s in the bag. I’m free, she thinks as she opens the letter from the Hachetfield Department of Family Affairs.

She gets all but one word in before her heart sinks. Rejected.

She calls the number on the bottom of the letter. She screams. She yells to the poor receptionist about how she’s proven her ability to be independent, how she’s able to support herself, how she doesn’t need help, how the system is stifling her because she has a damn life to live out there. She demands to know why her application was rejected because the fucking letter doesn’t say shit.

“It looks like your supporting affidavit was not accepted,” the receptionist says.

“Miss Holiday’s letter?”

“Yes, she wrote that it doesn’t appear that emancipation is in your best interest.”

She sits with Miss Holiday in her office the next day.

“Sophia, emancipation is not in your best interest,” she says out loud for the first time that Sophia’s aware of.

“You could have told me that before you sent the letter!”

“I thought it was. It’s not that I don’t believe you. But—trust me.”

“Barry called you,” Sophia accuses more than guesses.

“I called him. It’s part of my process.”

“He told you to botch the letter.”

Miss Holiday doesn’t answer for a few seconds.

“I know you’re a strong kid. It’s great that you’ve moved to this whole new school and that you found a good job. But… Sophia, something is clearly wrong. Something you don’t want anyone else knowing about.”

Stop reading me like that, Sophia’s thoughts growl. She clenches her fists.

“He told me you hurt yourself at work not too long ago,” Miss Holiday goes on, “and you couldn’t tell him if it was an accident or not. He was worried you were hurting yourself on purpose.”

“I wasn’t. I’m not!”

“Lots of people have after the loss of a loved one. First your friend, then your dad…”

Sophia drags a hand down her face. A disingenuous, outraged laugh bursts out of her. “Shit, I’m not allowed to mourn anymore? I’ve been going to school, going to work, saving money—what the fuck else do you want from me?”

“When was the last time you asked for help?” Miss Holiday presses. It’s a strange turn of subject in Sophia’s mind, but she’s too filled with furious energy to not fall down the rabbit hole.

“I don’t need help.”

“You don’t want help,” Miss Holiday corrects.

“No, no, you don’t get to tell me how I feel. I don’t need it. I did everything I can to prove I need to be emancipated. I deserve to be emancipated. I do not need help.”

“Sophia, I promise you.” Miss Holiday leans in closer.

Her eyes are green. Rather, green with some blue.

And the way the light shines, suddenly they are blue. Bluer than anything she’s ever seen, her whole damn vision is blue, she hears screaming and she swears it’s her voice and not her voice, and she has two mouths and the left mouth is bleeding blue and the screaming is now static and the static is blue, nothing but blue, nothing but blue, NOTHING BUT BLUE—

“You need help.”

Silence.

“Sophia?”

Her mind explodes.

She swears she’s dead at first.

But then she thinks, wait, dead people probably can’t think.

She sits with the feeling for a while, then concludes she’s in purgatory. She’s awaiting judgment day. Neither of her parents were firm believers of anything, but she’s been dragged to more than a couple Sunday School and Teen Bible Study programs by grandmas and grandpas and even old grade school friends. The concept of purgatory doesn’t mean much to her except an in-between. Which is what this feels like. An in-between. All alone She likens it to lucid dreaming. Or camping.

She’s left alone with nothing but her own thoughts. So why not dream? Why not camp?

Why not both?

Sophia’s first memory is when she’s four years old and sitting on a picnic table.

She sits with her knees on the picnic table seat. There’s a flimsy paper plate in front of her, weighed down by a big, juicy hamburger. She’s wearing Winnie the Pooh overalls and her hair is tied in two big, springy clouds of pigtail. She picks meat off her burger, no bigger than a pea-sized bite each time. Adults laugh and chat all around her—faceless wanderers who Sophia can’t recall in the slightest. She hears her name in their conversations a time or two. She just doesn’t really care.

A big hand reaches out for her plate and snatches half a pickle. Aghast, Sophia screams at the thief and pulls the plate closer toward herself. She pouts at them. Soon after, another smaller hand snatches fries from the other side of her plate. Sophia deems the second robbery unacceptable.

“Mama!” she whines at Thief #2.

“What’s wrong, baby?” Mama asks, teasing laced in her voice.

Sophia huffs. She clambers up to her feet and reaches for the stolen fries. She grunts and reaches with all her might. But the thief extends her arm up and away from Sophia; there’s no way she’d be able to reach. The next best option is to climb. So she does.

“Oh my god.” Mama wheezes in laughter. “Okay, okay. You win.”

Mama returns the fries into Sophia’s patiently waiting hands, and Sophia scarfs them down.

“Sophia,” another voice calls for her. “Hey, Sophia!”

She munches on her fries and looks back at the voice. Dad stands there with a bright grin on his face by the fire pit. He holds a red can with a long, yellow spigot on it. She watches him, curious.

“Want to show everyone your fire trick?” he asks.

Sophia squeals, giddy. She hops off the picnic table. She stands by the fire pit and bounces on her toes.

“Just like we practiced, okay?” Dad instructs. She nods and takes a step back. He counts down. “One. Two. Three!”

She thrusts her hands out in front of her, palms up, with all the brute force she has in her little body. At the same time, Dad tilts the can downward. With their forces combined, a giant flame bursts out of the once-barren fire pit. It whips up toward the sky and whooshes a force so powerful that Sophia can feel the intense heat on her face. She’s blinded for a second, and then her entire vision is filled with bright orange flame until it settles back down to a reasonable height. It makes the other adults yell and scream in horror; it makes her giggle.

“Holy shit!” one of the adults in the crowd yells, at the same time as another cries Language! “How the—?!”

“There’s no way that’s just gas,” someone else says. “That’s—what?”

“I’m telling you,” Dad chuckles, “Sophia’s got it all figured out. It’s her magic power.”

“No, for real! Tell me what it is!”

As the adults argue, Sophia toddles back over to the picnic table and watches the fire continue to burn. With her mind, she makes it change color. The other adults are too busy arguing to see it.

The fire starts out orange, but when she squints it turns more yellow. She squints her eyes so tightly she can barely see out of them—but she can see that the fire is violet. When she opens her eyes wide again, it turns deep red. She flicks her eyes upward and watches flickers of flame burst up toward the sky. She blinks quickly and little embers pop out of the fire pit with each blink. That last trick always makes her giggle.

Dad is right, no matter what the other adults say. She has magic.

“Alright, baby. You can’t stare into that fire forever. You’ll hurt your eyes,” Mama warns gently.

She turns around and sees that Mama has returned to her life of theft.

“Mama!” Sophia screams. She scrambles up to fight again. “My fwies!”

After quite a while of camping, she hears voices. They’re distant at first. They’re not hers. Sometimes they become hers. One of them is Barry. Or maybe it’s her dad. She realizes for the first time that her uncle and dad have remarkably similar voices.

Soon after that, she starts to gain sensation in her body again. She swears her eyes are superglued shut and her body is superglued to a cardboard box floating down a sticky, gooey river. She experiences motion sickness for the first time in her life when the box tilts over backwards over a gushing waterfall. The sudden rush of river water dissolves away the superglue. Her eyes snap open.

She’s in a hospital room far too much like the one she woke up in after her last Roller-Rama fight. It’s not empty this time, though. Barry sits on her right side, facing a television that’s in front of both of them. He’s also sitting on top of her arm—or at least she thinks he is. She sees both of her physical arms in front of her, and yet he’s sitting exactly where she feels pain from her second right arm.

Delirious, she tries to tell him to stop sitting on her arm. She’s mortified when no words come out—only gurgling. But it gets his attention away from the TV screen. He looks like he wants to cuss her out at first. He’s pissed. But he stops. He reigns it back. His eyes still give it away—they always have. They’re wide and blue and flickering from place to place, searching for something safe to say as if words alone will break her.

“Welcome back,” he says.

She’s so damn tired and yet she can’t close her eyes. They might glue themselves shut again.

“So… you probably can’t talk right now. Not sure if you remember everything I told you. Just—just filling you in.”

He pauses. Silence.

“It’s weird when you’re not backtalking me,” he jokes. It’s weak. It doesn’t land. “Anyways. So. You… know what happened to you?”

It hurts, but she turns her head to one side and then the next. She just remembers camping.

“Gotcha. So.” He clicks his tongue once. He’s never waited this long to tell her anything. This must be torture for him. “You had a seizure. And something happened with your blood pressure, I think. Your organs were… they weren’t shutting down, but they were freaking out, I guess. So you’ve been—I dunno—out of it for about a week. Not a coma, but… you didn’t wake up for a while.”

Her eyes go wide. At least she thinks they do. They must, because Barry responds in kind and nods.

“I know. I don’t get it, either. It seems really damn out of the blue. Must be some, I don’t know, anomaly. Some super long-term reaction to your car accident. But, uh, it’s getting worked out. I think.”

By this point, Sophia is aware that she has near total control of her head movements. Getting worked out? How? She tries to convey by raising an eyebrow. He starts to say something, stops again, gets half of another syllable out, and stops once more. He sighs.

“I don’t want to lie to you. I have no damn clue what’s happening. I know you don’t want me giving a shit about you, but—okay, I’m allowed to be scared for you, alright? And I’m trying not to be scared because I don’t want to scare you, but I know you don’t get scared that easily. It’s also not about me. So. You know.”

Barry shrugs. Sophia stares.

“But, uh, they’re going to keep you here for a while, probably. So you don’t even need to worry about coming home again. To my place. At least for a while. Because… I know you don’t like it there. And, look, I’m sorry about telling Miss Holiday what I told her. What happened with your dad, it just pissed me off. Like, other than your mom, you had no role models in your life. None.”

Without so much of a pause, he goes on. “And, hell, it’s not like I’m a good role model myself. But, I mean, I should’ve been there before. At least a little. For you. Point is, I thought I knew what was best for you. I’m sorry.”

He wipes his eyes. Sophia wasn’t paying attention to if he was crying or not. Apparently he was. He has no reason to.

“I’m going to go against what you want one last time and cover the part of your medical bills insurance won’t cover, but then I’ll stay out of your way.”

He looks at her expectantly, as if she can say anything. Her tongue feels like a rock in the back of her throat. Her eyes are so dry she bets they’re bloodshot. No damn way she’s able to say anything, but to hell if she doesn’t try.

She makes a sound that rattles her entire body, shoots pain down her chest, makes her cough once. Still, that one cough is enough to cause a giant lightning bolt of pain to shoot through her body. She loses sense of where she is. Everything goes white (not blue, thank god) for a whole two seconds. Barry winces in front of her.

“I’ll, uh, let you sit on that,” Barry concludes. “You let a nurse know to call me if you want to chat. Okay? And, for the love of god… work with them. Let them take care of you. Just because you like being independent doesn’t mean it’s the smartest choice.”

Just because I like being…?

What the FUCK.

She’s too stunned to glare him down. Just lets him walk away without any indication that he said anything wrong. Barry walks away with no consequences to his actions.

Well, one consequence. He’s lost the last of Sophia’s respect.

Sophia lets the medical professionals do their work without a fight. As pissed as she is about Barry’s last words, he has a point. Not like she has anything to lose by getting treatment here.

She rolls her eyes when doctors tell her that they can’t pinpoint what started the total-body shutdown, nor can they predict if it will happen again, so for now they’re just ‘monitoring her vitals’ and ‘running some tests’ with the hope that they’ll be able to find something. She’s sure they won’t. Maybe she’ll die just like Daniel did. Not like it matters anymore.

Absent everything else, it feels pointless to be herself. Maybe she should just let whatever’s possessing her do its thing and make her a chronically ill puppet, doing its otherworldly biddings.

At least Barry doesn’t visit.

Miss Holiday does, though.

“Oh god, no,” Sophia groans. Her throat’s healed enough that she can speak again, and of course those are the first words she says.

“Hello to you, too.”

“I’m sick. Leave me alone.” Sophia turns on her side. Her sternum aches from the pressure of moving.

“Sophia.”

Miss Holiday says her name, short and even a bit irritated. It shocks her enough that Sophia turns over again. Miss Holiday’s expression is tilted and disapproving.

Sophia feels a wave of shame over her as if she had been scolded by her own mother.

“Barry wasn’t aware of your history,” Miss Holiday says.

Sophia snorts. “I gave my papers to CPS.”

“And they gave the papers to him. He gave them to the doctors and, with his consent, me. Those papers, Sophia, they’re fabricated.”

“They’re not.”

“They are, Sophia, and you know it.”

“Okay, fine. I faked them. I wanted a sob story. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“That’s not true, either.”

“Fine. You know the truth so well, why don’t you tell it to me?”

“I don’t know the truth. What I do know is that you weren’t in a car accident on August 14th.”

Miss Holiday sets a spread of documents out on the tray in front of Sophia. There’s her initial police report and medical discharge papers, but there’s another police report and some document with a raised United States seal, among other notes and paperwork. She doesn’t say anything about them, even after she and Sophia stare at them for a bit.

Then, Miss Holiday leans closer. “Sophia, do you know what happened right before you passed out in my office?”

“No.” Sophia forces her shoulders to remain planted against the back of the hospital bed. For half a second, she was about to lean forward in interest.

“Your eyes went blue. Entirely blue. Pupil, sclera—all of it.”

Oh no. “Weird.” There’s a slight quiver to Sophia’s voice that she can’t hide. Fuck. Miss Holiday must hear it, too, because she has that stupid fucking sympathetic smile again.

“Very strange. I’ve never seen it before. But you wouldn’t consider that normal, would you? Any scientific explanation for it?”

“I guess not.”

“I help kids,” Miss Holiday emphasizes, much like the first time she met Sophia. “I help kids with a lot of strange things. And, Sophia, I promise you—I understand more about what you’re going through than you think.”

Miss Holiday can’t possibly mean that she’s worked with kids who’ve been through what she’s been through. “I doubt it.”

“Sophia, I’m serious. Not a lot of people would believe that something unbelievable happened, but I do.”

Sophia goes quiet.

“I don’t know why you’re hiding what happened, and I doubt you would hide it for no reason. I don’t care if it’s illegal. I don’t even care if you yourself summoned a demon. I’ve been there; I’ve seen kids summon demons. But I promise you, if you don’t let someone know what happened, we can’t help you. These seizures, they might happen again. You might die unless you tell someone. You’re the only person who knows what you’ve been going through.”

Previously, the thought of dying from the aftermath of whatever’s going on with her was nothing more than theoretical. If it happened, it happened. It’s not like anything in natural science could explain it. Doctors could write it up to some mysterious cancer and shrug and move on with their lives. But, in this moment, faced with mortality—just after she started to understand life after her father’s disappearance and subsequent death—the thought scares her.

She doesn’t want to die. But either she dies of this cancer, or she dies of whatever Charles could do to her for spilling the beans.

Sophia becomes aware that the heart monitor behind her is beating faster. She feels her chest tighten.

“I don’t think I can tell you,” she admits softly.

“Who can you tell?”

“I don’t know.”

“Barry?”

Sophia laughs humorlessly. “God, no.”

Miss Holiday sits back a bit, eyes wide and blinking in surprise. “Why not? I thought you two were getting along.”

“Yeah, right.”

“What happened?”

What did happen? Sophia wonders. Up until the prior day, he never questioned her independence. Rather, he let her do what she wanted. Now he was deciding that she was just a stubborn brat who never proved herself as independent. Sure, he didn’t know anything about how deeply in control of her life she was before CPS got involved, but she was sure she had proven herself capable over the months she had been living with him.

“He doesn’t respect me.”

“That’s not true.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“He’s worried about you,” Miss Holiday tries to compromise.

“He’s not. He said he’ll leave me alone from here on out.”

“Did he say that because he wants to or because you wanted him to?”

“He thinks I want to. I mean, I want to.”

Miss Holiday taps the spread of papers in front of Sophia with the pen, then shifts one of them closer to Sophia. The one with the U.S. seal.

“You might want to take a look at these,” Miss Holiday advises. “I’ll be back tomorrow if I don’t hear anything.”

Sophia rolls her eyes as Miss Holiday leaves. But she looks at the papers anyway. It sucks that Miss Holiday gets to be so ominous sometimes. She could just be straightforward. Because she has nothing better to do, she reads.

HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

UNITED STATES MILITARY
SPECIAL UNIT: PARANORMAL, EXTRATERRESTRIAL, INTERDIMENSIONAL PHENOMENA (P.E.I.P.)
ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO — FACILITY OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL STUDY REPORT RC-12.651 — HATCHETFIELD, MICHIGAN
INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY GENERAL JOHN MACNAMARA
REPORT ORGANIZED AND STENOGRAPHED BY LIEUTENANT TANSLEY WENDELTON

BACKGROUND

See Daily Monitor Report May 9, 2019, § 12.45.1, ¶ 3. Private Alexander Carpenter noted spike of psychic abnormality from upper-north quadrant of Hatchetfield, Michigan at 20:32:05-20:32:08. Hatchetfield Police Department Report #64663 reported deadly car accident with similar time and location parameters.

A quality audit conducted at Ann Arbor Freight and Couriers on October 14, 2019, indicated that delivery employee Monica DeGroot was stopped from her delivery route upon hearing gunshots near the same quadrant. DeGroot and her manager, Bartholomew Swift, were summoned to conduct a live interview with General John MacNamara.

INTERVIEW

MACNAMARA: We are on the record at 9:29 in the morning on November 3, 2019. We are located at the Roswell Facility of Extraterrestrial Study. The certified stenographer is Tansley Wendelton on behalf of the United States Military. I will have Monica and Bartholomew introduce themselves and briefly summarize their relation to the case.

DEGROOT: My name is Monica Harper DeGroot. I’m a second shift delivery driver for Ann Arbor Freight and Couriers. I was working the night all of this went down and now I’m here, I guess.

MACNAMARA: Bartholomew?

SWIFT: Just call me Barry.

MACNAMARA: Go ahead, Barry.

SWIFT: I’m Barry Swift. I’m a quality assurance manager at Ann Arbor Freight. I was working on the audit about… whatever the hell happened.

MACNAMARA: Monica, start from when you began your shift on the afternoon of May 9, 2019.

DEGROOT: Uh, pretty normal day. Don’t remember much about the beginning. My route’s usually pretty much the same every day, same was true the 9th. I was running a little bit later than usual, kind of. Usually I’m done and heading back to work by 8:30.

MACNAMARA: What kept you from being done at 8:30 on May 9?

DEGROOT: Couple of things. Had more packages than usual. But then there’s the obvious, of course.

MACNAMARA: Please explain further.

DEGROOT: Well, I started hearing a bunch of guns. Like, not handguns. Machine guns.

MACNAMARA: How do you know they were machine guns?

DEGROOT: They were firing way too fast to be handguns. Like, [trilling noise].

MACNAMARA: You said machine guns, as in plural. Do you believe there was more than one?

DEGROOT: Yeah.

MACNAMARA: Why do you think that?

DEGROOT: There were at least two, maybe three. They were firing at different, like, pitches. One was higher and one was lower. Sometimes one would stop, and the others would keep going.

MACNAMARA: Did you see any of the gunfire?

DEGROOT: Nah, just heard it.

MACNAMARA: Where did you hear it from?

DEGROOT: Well—

MACNAMARA: Let me rephrase. Where were you when you heard the gunfire?

DEGROOT: I remember I was by where there used to be an old Pizza Pete’s before they moved downtown. I think it’s a laundromat now? Yeah, it is.

MACNAMARA: Were you driving when you heard it?

DEGROOT: No, I was parked on the street and grabbing packages.

MACNAMARA: Where?

DEGROOT: Lester Ave and 12th. I was facing, uh, west on 12th, and I heard it from my right—I’m a little deaf in that ear so I had to turn to hear it better. So it was coming from the north. Like, straight north.

MACNAMARA: How far away did the gunshots sound?

DEGROOT: Half a mile, if I could guess. Well, it was muffled, so it wasn’t outside, but it was close.

MACNAMARA: Were there any landmarks you could trace the sound near?

DEGROOT: Best guess would be the old roller rink. Closed years ago. I think that might’ve been where the noise was coming from.

MACNAMARA: Did you make any further attempt to locate where the gunshots were coming from?

DEGROOT: No. I like being alive.

SWIFT: [stifled laughter]

DEGROOT: But I did try to call the cops.

MACNAMARA: What stopped you?

DEGROOT: Nothing stopped me. It’s just that the phone lines were so hung up. I tried calling 911. Just got a busy signal. I looked up the number for the HFPD and tried calling them. I told them what I was hearing and they said they were going to send police cars over.

MACNAMARA: What happened next?

DEGROOT: I drove a block or two away to keep myself safe. Kept an ear out for more guns. They stopped after, like, 5 minutes. The cops never showed up.

MACNAMARA: How long did you wait for them?

DEGROOT: About an hour.

MACNAMARA: Did you try calling them again at any point?

DEGROOT: After an hour, yeah. Their line got hung up, too. I thought that was weird, so I tried calling 911 again. Nothing.

MACNAMARA: Did you see or hear anything else odd at the scene?

DEGROOT: For some reason I remember seeing a bunch of white vans, but those could’ve just been other delivery people, or a coincidence.

MACNAMARA: When did you see the vans?

DEGROOT: Maybe 10 minutes after the guns stopped.

MACNAMARA: Have you tried investigating the matter further since the night of the incident?

DEGROOT: Nope.

MACNAMARA: Thank you, Monica. Barry, how did you become aware of the incident?

SWIFT: I didn’t really know what happened until I called Monica in for a performance briefing. She’s a damn good employee and we were doing a quality audit, when all of a sudden I see she didn’t do any deliveries for over an hour while she was on the clock.

MACNAMARA: This was her shift the night of May 9th, correct?

SWIFT: Yep.

MACNAMARA: What did she tell you?

SWIFT: She said she heard guns, called the cops, and was waiting for them to show up. Didn’t believe her at first.

MACNAMARA: Why?

SWIFT: Well, okay, I believed her at first, but I needed to prove that was the case. Asked her to give me a police report. She didn’t have a number. We called the HFPD, they didn’t even have any call logs around that time. So I’m like, “Huh, that’s weird,” and I talk with my supervisor, and the supervisor says Monica’s a liar, so we have to have a disciplinary meeting with HR.

MACNAMARA: So human resources got involved?

SWIFT: Yeah. My boss wanted to call it “time fraud” or whatever, but HR wouldn’t let that happen.

DEGROOT: Thank God.

SWIFT: So Monica’s telling us, “No, really, there was a gun fight there.” And she doesn’t really have any evidence, except one thing.

MACNAMARA: What was it?

SWIFT: Dashcam footage.

MACNAMARA: Are all delivery trucks equipped with dashcams?

SWIFT: Yup, for insurance. One in the front and one in the back.

MACNAMARA: Did you review the dashcam footage?

SWIFT: We did. The video was kinda scrambled for some reason, but we could hear the guns and we could see the white vans Monica was talking about. Also saw her on the street calling the cops.

MACNAMARA: Note that the dashcam footage has been provided to PEIP as investigative evidence. Do the timestamps on the footage match the story Monica provided?

SWIFT: Yup.

MACNAMARA: You heard and saw Monica call 911 twice and the police once?

SWIFT: Yup.

MACNAMARA: Interesting. As you both know, there was no police report collected of Monica’s initial call. But they did collect a different police report around the same timeframe. Do you know what they reported instead?

SWIFT: Yeah. Your guys said it was a car accident.

MACNAMARA: Monica, did you see or hear any vehicular accident around the area?

DEGROOT: No, nothing like it.

MACNAMARA: The report of the car accident from the Hatchetfield Police Department notes that law enforcement arrived at 8:48 PM.

DEGROOT: No one showed up at 8:48. Didn’t hear any cop sirens or anything.

MACNAMARA: You mentioned you are hard of hearing in one ear. Could that have impacted your ability to hear sirens?

DEGROOT: No, sir. I can hear plenty fine when it comes to stuff like sirens. I was making sure to listen and look out for cop cars.

MACNAMARA: Did you see anything that resembled a car accident?

DEGROOT: No.

SWIFT: Nothing on the dashcams, either.

MACNAMARA: Monica, one last question. Did you see or experience any other strange sights or phenomena the night of May 9th?

DEGROOT: Uh… not really.

MACNAMARA: Nothing?

DEGROOT: Well, there’s one stupid thing. My vision went all blue about a minute or two before the guns started.

MACNAMARA: How so?

DEGROOT: It’s like when you get blinded by light, except instead of all white it’s all blue. I just thought the light was playing tricks on me, or maybe I was having a migraine. I did have a headache and I’ve been having them since. It’s probably just the stress of hearing what I heard.

MACNAMARA: I wouldn’t be so sure. We will continue talking about this at another point. Barry, do you have any last comments, thoughts, observations worth noting?

SWIFT: I don’t know. This is all just really weird. Are fake car accidents common or something?

MACNAMARA: Not at all.

SWIFT: Okay.

MACNAMARA: You look like you want to say something else.

SWIFT: Not really. I’m just thinking about my niece. She was in a car accident not too long ago. It’s nothing.

MACNAMARA: How long ago?

SWIFT: [silence]

MACNAMARA: How close to this incident?

SWIFT: I don’t know. But it doesn’t have anything to do with her. She wouldn’t lie to me about something like this. It’s just a weird coincidence.

MACNAMARA: What is your niece’s name?

SWIFT: I’m not talking to you anymore.

She makes a call, reluctantly. Barry’s there within ten minutes.

“Just to let you know,” Sophia starts, “what you said yesterday was completely uncalled for.”

He starts to say something, but she interrupts him first.

“You don’t think I can be independent, huh? Then you don’t know shit about where I’ve been.”

“I never said you couldn’t be independent. It’s good that you are. You have a lot of fight in you, and that means you’re gonna do awesome things when you’re back on your feet.”

“Acme wasn’t a work trip.”

“Kind of,” he clarifies. “It was about work.”

“Why would you say you were in Acme when you were in Roswell all along?”

“I didn’t know I was gonna be in Roswell. They told me and Monica to go to this place in Acme, then they picked us up from there.”

“You didn’t tell them about me.”

“You were going through enough. I figured you would tell me if something was really wrong. Or you would, someday. I just didn’t think it would be something like… this. And now something’s really fucking wrong, and I feel like an idiot for not putting it together before.”

Sophia shrugged. “You’re not an idiot. You just believed me.”

Barry doesn’t respond to that.

“I just hope that your dad—”

“Stop talking about Dad. It was never about Dad.”

“I just hope—however he built that house—”

“I built that house!” she finally screams.

Barry stares in stunned silence.

“What?”

“I did it. CPS, they took my home. Dad didn’t buy it. It was my money going to him. Mine.”

Sophia can practically see the questions flying around in Barry’s head as he scrambles to figure out which one to ask.

“You’ve been doing it on your own for a while,” Barry hazards a guess, “haven’t you?”

Sophia nods.

“You’ve been nothing but independent since you moved to my place. You’re more of an adult than any other goddamn adult I’ve met in my life. And I’m guessing that means you’ve been through some shit.”

“You won’t believe me.” It feels like a drastic topic shift—rather, it would if she was talking to anyone else. Barry’s good at following the thin threads between topics.

“After being interrogated by the military about alien shit? Try me.”

Sophia takes a deep breath and starts at the only place she can.

No thrill ever beats being in the ring, under the supernatural-enhancing influences of the Mind Milk.

It’s like maneuvering a top-speed roller coaster, only this ride throws flames and she gets to decide which way it twists and turns. More often than not, she walks away sweaty and victorious. Best of all, she gets money. Respect. And at the end of the day, most importantly, stability.

Even losing a fight isn’t terrible. Not anymore. It’s not like she’s short on cash. It takes just a couple winning fights to earn a tens of grands. Sophia losing in a time of prosperity allows others to have a taste of the success she got early on in her fighting career. Once in a rare while, they deeply impress her.

Those rare few make her think. Their powers are unique, reflective of personality, secrets to crack and hidden weaknesses to overcome. Brute force usually does the trick, but not always.

For quite a while, Daniel’s the one who impresses her the most.

Brute force actually works quite well when fighting him, at least for the time being. He’s not even one of the most accomplished fighters. But regardless of if he wins or loses, he walks out of a match with the same spirit and cheer. He enjoys himself. He takes himself seriously but not too seriously. This attitude, however, also makes her suspicious. Maybe it’s an act. Maybe he’s trying to get people to believe he’s really this naïve kid so they underestimate some OP uberskill he and his manager are working on.

She learns pretty quickly that it’s not an act.

“I—I was thinking, uh…” Daniel stutters and rubs his neck with one hand. He stands in front of the bench Sophia sits on. He rambles on. “After, you know, after tonight’s fight, the… you know, the floor’s perfectly good for actually skating, and there’s all sorts of unused roller blades in the back. And I was thinking, you know, I love skating, and I bet the other kids here love skating—not, not because we’re childish or anything, but just because it’s fun, and, I mean, we deserve to have a good time here, too, outside of the fighting… right?”

Sophia has her Mind Milk in one hand and the colorful flier he just handed her in the other. She stares up at him, searching for some sort of deceit, a flicker of duper’s delight. If there is any deceit in his expression, she can’t find it. He’s too busy looking like he’s about to piss himself to have any useful nonverbal cues.

“Anyone else showing up?” she asks.

Daniel’s expression brightens. Was he expecting outright rejection? He gladly informs her that almost everyone there he’s talked to said they’ll be there. He shares more details of the pizza and ice cream and party favors he’s ordered with his latest brawl winnings, of the hopes that all the fighters in this ring can find a community in this place since they’re all here so often. There are friends, sure, but what if there were more?

Daniel becomes the organizer of the excitement behind the scenes after that. Roller rink party #1 is far more of a success than Sophia ever expected. Where she expected all the kids to be on edge, acting as wallflowers (or even worse, actively antagonizing each other), it appears that Daniel had the right idea that all of them are searching for camaraderie. Community. Family. And a damn good time.

Soon, Daniel earns his retirement from party planning as the rest of the team picks up what he started. His legacy is contagious and the fighters are all high achievers, ambitious people. They can make anything happen.

That’s what impresses her about Daniel. Not only that he could crack through the walls of so many toughened fighters, but that he introduces the driving force of love to the rink.

One day, someone impresses her even more than Daniel.

He has to hold his breath to do it.

Those are the first words she hears from her future favorite opponent. She doesn’t hear, literally. But she hears.

Her eyes are drawn to the stands beyond the glass barrier. She makes eye contact with the little girl in plaid and knows what to do.

The first feeling that hits, upon exiting the Roller-Rama that night, is jealousy. It burns in her and stays strong even after the mind milk wears off. Her dad praises her for another success and another paycheck, of course, and she can’t disappoint him by saying that it wasn’t all her.

The jealousy flies right back when she’s face-to-face with the little girl in the ring, this time decked in yellow and black and bearing the name Yellow Jacket. It would be a low blow to call her look “nerdy”. Her size compliments the wasp aesthetic, actually makes it look pretty badass.

Where Sophia was once prepared for her fiery roller coaster, she’s now prepared to set the whole damn park ablaze.

“It’s you,” she says. She needs to assert some kind of dominance, so she straightens up. Being taller has its advantages, and one of those is intimidation.

“You know, I didn’t need your help the other day,” Sophia adds. She feels defensive, yet she can’t stop talking. “With Stopwatch? I would have figured it out on my own.”

Sophia can barely hold back a satisfied smirk as she watches Yellow Jacket, wide-eyed and quaking in her stupid yellow boots, calculate her response.

“I—I didn’t mean to.”

The nervous energy of her opponent sets her mood ablaze, high on confidence. She pounds her fists together and sparks fly out from between them. “Don’t think I’m gonna go easy on you.”

Yellow Jacket swallows. “I’d never think that.”

She understands me, Sophia thinks. A little too well. That’s how she knows, even then, that this fight is going to be terrifying.

Within less than a minute, she feels her mind go dull and her flames die out in an instant. Being powerless in the ring, suddenly, is a more vulnerable feeling than it’s ever been. It scares the shit out of her. It makes her act like a little kid.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Yellow Jacket admits.

“You’re in my head,” Sophia tantrums. “Not. Fair!”

Even as Sophia yells, Yellow Jacket feels around her mind and still tries to get out. Sophia recognizes that Yellow Jacket is in the best position she can possibly be to establish her professional career, yet she’s resisting it. Spitfire is losing to some newbie who’s making her look bad—a chump who doesn’t even really seem like she wants to be here. It’s the biggest hit her ego’s taken in a while.

Not that it stops Sophia from trying. When Yellow Jacket seems distracted, she grabs her by the arm and starts dragging her toward the edge of the ring. Her brute force, sans pyrotechnics, is still something to be reckoned with.

She soon hears Yellow Jacket grunt, “No. I need that money.”

She blurs the rest of the memory out of her head. She’s become part of Roller-Rama history, but not the right side of it. Not the victorious side.

Once the fight is over, she refuses to see her dad. She lost. It happens sometimes. He’ll live. They’ll live.

Most of all, the course of that fight reminded her about what she values. What she respects. Because Yellow Jacket and her share a similar drive. Above all, they need money. They’re survivors. Most of all, they’re fighters. Neither of them are going away anytime soon. That’s why Yellow Jacket—Hannah—is someone she knows she wants to befriend. Maybe even for the rest of her life.

Sophia isn’t going away anytime soon. Not even in the face of The Champ.

Otho, to her and the other fighters, is something like a myth. They all know each other outside of the ring. All except for him. Them? Nerves don’t come easily to Sophia anymore, not as Spitfire, but something about Otho just sets her entire mood off-kilter. She had a day to prepare for this fight. That’s more than she usually gets with anyone. She should be fine.

She sees him up-close for the first time as he enters the ring. Otho and their unison partner share deadly pale skin and bulging blue veins around their arms, legs, and faces. They look sickly and frail from a distance. Up close, they look inhuman. She wonders how many people think these are costumes, because they’re clearly not. Not from this up close. The masks are the only artificial part of these two.

Yet again, she’s never seen any fighter come back after a fight with these menaces. None of them ever came back to tell the others the truth.

She’s determined to be the one who does. She fights harder than she’s ever fought. At one point, she’s sure she’s won.

And then Otho has her face in his hands as a high-pitched, monotone whine fills her ears. His mask becomes less and less visible as the blue glow of his eyes increases in intensity, as it fills her vision.

A familiar voice enters her mind, distant but clear. She’s my friend. Don’t you dare take her, Hannah warns Otho.

In return, Otho challenges, Stop me.

She doesn’t fault Hannah for being helpless. There’s no way she could have known. She just hopes Hannah can escape before it’s too late.

Sophia has one last conscious thought that’s entirely her own. She doesn’t need to be worried about Hannah; she’s a fighter, just like Sophia. She hopes Hannah is listening.

Sophia screams, and then everything is bloodlust blue.

“Look. I’ll hand it to you, it’s not all your fault. But your career’s over, Spitfire. Spitfire. You know that’s the last time you’ll ever hear that name again, right?”

Sophia takes the key hidden under a flowerpot and unlocks the front door to her house. Her head is killing her, and she doesn’t quite remember how she got here.

No light escapes the crack in the door. That’s her first clue that something is seriously wrong. Her dad always forgets to turn the light off when he leaves.

“Dad?” she calls out. Her voice bounces off the hardwood floors and high ceiling, returning her echo back to her. She wipes her sneakers off on the doormat. When she steps into the house, her soles squeak. “Pippi?”

Her heart starts beating faster, growing more nervous by the second as no one comes out to greet her. Dad might be out running errands, she excuses, but Pippi always comes running whenever the door opens. Not today.

“Pippiii,” Sophia calls again. She clicks her tongue a few times. No answer.

When Sophia looks around, the living room appears untouched, for the most part. She had left one of her jackets on the couch, and it’s still there. But some stuff is missing. Her dad’s jacket isn’t hanging by the fireplace. His Detroit Red Wings memorabilia no longer occupies the glass cupboard; it’s empty. Pippi’s scratching post and cat tunnel aren’t lying around.

Were we robbed? she wonders. She dismisses the thought soon after. If there had been a robbery, she’s sure the array of missing stuff would be more grandiose. The TV, for example, is still there. No one would have interest in her dad’s jacket—no one she can think of, anyways.

She investigates upstairs next, where her and her dad’s room are. She checks her room first; it’s still in a pitiful condition, filled to the brim with useless junk she bought with her first Roller-Rama paycheck. Her bed is unmade with dirty laundry thrown on top of it—all her fault, sure, but it really makes her wish she had the foresight to get that done before her fight.

But Pippi’s litter box is also supposed to be sitting in the corner of Sophia’s room. It’s not.

She checks her dad’s room next.

It’s empty.

Dust bunnies and orange-white fur clump together in multiple little balls across the dusty floor. There are circular marks where her dad’s bed and bed stand used to be. The closet door is wide open, and it’s also empty, besides a singular cardboard box that reads Pat’s Scrapbooks in cursive Sharpie.

Sophia reaches out for the box as if she can reach it from where she stands just outside of her dad’s room. It’s clearly impossible. But stepping in means facing that what she’s seeing is real, and it can’t be real. Or maybe she’s just misunderstanding. Maybe her dad sold a bunch of stuff to take care of her medical bills. Maybe he’s asked one of his friends to take care of Pippi while he and Sophia try to figure out their lives.

Except there’s one crucial problem. Dad’s also not here.

Finally, she races downstairs and checks the kitchen. For the most part, the kitchen is also entirely intact, if not a little messy. There’s a sticky note on the table. She peels it off of the tablecloth and holds it up to her eyes.

Sophia,

I’m sorry.

The note has no signature, but she knows who wrote it. She’s seen that handwriting on the calendars around her house. On birthday cards. On notes from Santa. On the letters he used to write to the landlords and utilities companies when they threatened to turn off power and water at their old place.

Alright, so what the hell am I supposed to do now? the left side of her brain asks.

I’ll figure it out, says the right.

Going to school is still a priority, even though Dad’s not around to tell her that she needs to. It’s just that Mom would be so upset if she dropped out, and there’s only a couple more weeks in her junior year.

During class, she makes a spreadsheet with the bills she finds lying around the house. Water bills. Gas bills. Electricity bills. Phone bills. Property taxes. Mortgage payments. Late fees on mortgage payments. Credit card bills. (It’s her dad’s credit card, but she also has the number to it and has been using it to pay for groceries. He hasn’t shut it off yet.) All of it ends up around $5K a month. That means that she would need to make $60K per year, after taxes, to keep the house in its current condition. That would be great and all, if only she qualified for making more than $15 an hour and could work 80 hours in a week.

A fight and a half would have easily paid off that $60K.

On lunch breaks, she calls collections departments to negotiate lower bills. Says her dad’s fallen on hard times and medical issues, so they need a break. What’s the minimum they would need to pay to keep the power on? Can they do a payment plan? Can they legally own the house but not pay for water, or would that raise any red flags? She’s a bit of a master at these kinds of calls, if only because she’s seen her dad do it so many times in her childhood.

One particularly kind customer service representative compliments her once they agree on a payment deferral.

“Your dad is so lucky to have a daughter like you, hon,” they praise with a southern twang. “You tell him to be real nice to you once he’s back on his feet, okay?”

Sophia hangs up.

Luckily, job hunting is a lot easier once the school year wraps up and exams are over. She’s already been doing odd jobs for neighbors and got in contact with someone who runs the kayak rental shop by the southwest lakeshore. It’s a decent gathering spot, gets a good amount of traction in the summer for how big Hatchetfield is, and it’s only a half-hour walk from her house. Base pay is $16 an hour plus overtime commission on anyone she gets to actually buy gear or boats to take home. It’s still not enough, but the fact that they’re willing to hire her full-time with overtime is pretty damn good. She can usually get away with racking up about 50 hours a week before the owner shoos her home.

Even better, she gets her priorities straightened out without the stress of school. She pays every bill she can with her dad’s credit card—that’s her dad’s problem, not hers. The only things she can’t pay with a credit card are property taxes and the mortgage, cutting her monthly expenses in half. She can even use all of the utilities she wants, now that Dad’s footing that bill.

When she goes home and watches TV to decompress, she sometimes looks to the other side of the couch and her mind wanders back to old memories. Pippi used to sleep there. Upon waking up, she’d climb up onto Sophia’s stomach and rub her face against Sophia’s cheek, trilling and purring and demanding to be pet. She tries not to think too hard about where Pippi is now. She just hopes she’s okay.

All in all, it’s a good summer.

The first Your payment has been declined document comes through the week before Sophia’s senior year starts. She calls the gas company and asks about it. They agree; the credit card remains declined. She gives her debit card number and hopes that was just a once-off issue. Dad kept the credit card open for so long. It must still be working.

But then the phone bill comes in. The email from the internet company. All of them agree that her dad’s credit card is declined.

She skips the first couple of days of school. It’s just syllabus week, and she’s not dropping out. (Not yet.) But she cancels all of the bills she can. No more phone. No more internet. No more electricity. No more gas. No more water. But that’s okay; she’s been through this before.

With summer gone, she has to find another job, too. It takes longer than she expects. Nowhere’s willing to let her work a full night shift, and they refuse to pay her more than $12 an hour. She settles on a couple of part-time jobs at fast food joints near her house. It doesn’t quite pay the bills, but it’s as close as she’s going to get.

It really starts to suck when she has to choose between the mortgage and grocery bills. Working in fast food supplements the grocery part to a degree, but it means she has to hide a meal or two since she doesn’t get free food as an employee benefit.

She’s a couple hundred dollars short on the mortgage. Everywhere online is telling her to just pay as much as she can and that should be enough to withhold foreclosure for a while. It’s enough to keep suspicion on the downlow.

By mid-September, a woman shows up at the door just before Sophia’s supposed to go to work. Stupidly, she answers. The woman says she’s with CPS. She won’t say who called her or what clues she got into Sophia’s situation, even when Sophia demands to know.

“Do you have a warrant?” Sophia asks. She knows to ask for this. She’s been preparing.

The woman smiles sadly and holds out a piece of paper.

“I think we need to talk,” the CPS officer says.

Sophia defends herself furiously, even while she’s packing up bags to be relocated into a group home.

“I’ve been paying all the bills,” she argues to the officer. She throws her mom’s scrapbook box into the bottom of the bag and then goes to her clothes. “I’ve been handling myself just fine. You can’t prove he’s not here.”

“Even if we can’t,” the officer explains, “we have proof that he’s abandoned his job. None of the neighbors have seen him, either.”

So one of the neighbors called CPS, Sophia deduces. Brenda across the street did ask about her dad a few times while she was still doing odd jobs. She wishes she could deck Brenda in the face.

“That doesn’t mean he’s not here.”

“Then where is he?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Sophia goes silent and resumes packing.

The group home is on the other side of town, which means she can’t work at her last two places anymore. She gets bussed over to Sycamore. She gets fed three times a day again. It’s great and all, but the house that she built for herself and her dad, that she defended to the end, is no longer hers.

It might not be for long, but she interviews at Subway. She lies and says she expects to work there for a long time. They hire her on the spot. Just part-time, but it’s something. It’s money she can use to rebuild.

Sophia spends four days in the group home and then gets pulled aside.

“So, good news,” the officer who first interrogated her says. “We’ve made contact with your uncle, Barry Swift, and he’s more than happy to take you in.”

Sophia thinks she mishears at first, or maybe the officer misspoke. She doesn’t know a Barry. Her dad’s name is Larry, but there’s no way the officer is talking about Dad right now.

“You know Barry, don’t you? He lives just a few blocks away.”

“No.”

“Huh.” The officer goes on, decidedly not too surprised anymore. “Well, he already has a room ready for you. He seemed surprised but he was very willing to take you in. And he seemed pretty nice. You’re pretty lucky to have an uncle like him.”

Your dad is so lucky to have a daughter like you, hon, the voice of one of the utilities representatives rings in her head.

“I don’t even know the guy.”

“Well, there you go. Gives you something to talk about.”

Before Sophia realizes, it’s dark. Her throat is sore again, like the first time she woke up. She feels breathless. Lightheaded. To some degree, in a state of shock. It would have been one thing if she had just shared a small sample of what she had been through—no, this was the first time sharing so much of her life that she had kept so closely under wraps.

To some degree, she didn’t expect to live this long to tell the tale. She was sure Charles or someone among his ring of influence would have figured out that she was talking, barged in, and killed her. Surely they would have surveillance.

Instead, Barry sits at the side of the bed. He doesn’t fidget like he usually does when he has to focus for long periods of time. He just sits with his arms resting on top of his legs, listening. Waiting to see if there’s more to the story. No Are you done yet? or Okay, cool story, I’m in a hurry. Just sitting patiently with bated breath.

“So, yeah,” Sophia finishes, clearing her throat. “That’s how we got here.”

“The guns,” Barry says. Even though he hasn’t spoken in hours, his voice is hoarse. “They killed the people in that arena.”

Sophia’s eyes swell with tears. She wants to blame it on how tired she is. Instead, she nods.

“Now that I know there were guns,” she admits, “I remember. I remember hearing guns. Screams. Daniel was crying for help.”

She focuses on her breathing. Her ribs feel hollow and achy. And she’s freezing. She folds her arms over her chest. She looks to the floor. She tries not to remember one of her best friends sobbing for his life. Her vision clouds and blurs. A tear falls. When she tries to lift her arm again to wipe the tear away, it’s too empty. Or maybe it’s Otho stopping her again. She’s not sure and she doesn’t care.

“Now I just told you my whole goddamn life. And I’m going to die.”

“You’re not,” Barry says forcefully.

“I could.”

“You’re not. Not without a fighting chance you’re not.”

A forced laugh strains her already sore throat. It feels like it’s on fire. “My mind’s literally been infected by a fucking alien or some shit. What doctor is going to treat that?”

“I don’t know. But we’re going to figure it out.”

“No, I’m not. I can’t.”

Barry goes quiet again. He thinks. He thinks for a long time. At least a minute. He never thinks for more than five seconds. He must be doing some sort of aerospace engineering in his head.

“I need you to answer me honestly,” he says.

She nods.

“You don’t want to fight anymore. Is it because you don’t want to do it all alone… or are you really too tired to keep fighting?”

“I’m really tired,” she admits.

Barry stiffens, then tries to right himself again immediately after. Tries to play it off like he never reacted at all. He sticks his hands in his trench coat pockets.

Another beat passes before a sickening realization comes to Sophia’s mind.

“But… you’re not going to make me keep living if I’m too tired to keep trying.”

Barry’s hands burrow deeper in his pockets. What was once discomfort now looks like genuine strain.

“Right. It’s just up to you to say what’s less painful for you.”

“I don’t know how to fight this. I don’t even know where I’d start.”

“Miss Holiday seems like she has ideas. So does PEIP. And if they don’t know, I can help. Bailey and your other friends would help if they knew.”

“Maybe.”

Barry’s last point doesn’t comfort Sophia exactly how she wishes it would. Miss Holiday could know. PEIP could know. There’s no guarantee that they would be able to prove anything. It would suck if she died regardless of what kind of treatment plan they came up with. The only thing she can imagine that could be even more painful is watching them exhaust the last of their ideas with no results, only for them to say there’s nothing else they can do. That might be a pain worse than dying.

But dying is a pretty damn painful thing.

“I think I need people to fight with me,” Sophia admits.

Barry’s demeanor switches around instantly. His hands remain buried in his pockets, but he looks right at Sophia again. He doesn’t smile yet, but the rest of his face brightens, as if he started going grayscale with the doom and gloom of the prior talking points.

“You have people who will fight with you,” he answers quickly. “You have all of us.”

“You shouldn’t—”

Sophia almost says You shouldn’t feel like you have to.

It’s the same thought that bothered her so deeply when Barry first volunteered to take her in. The fact that, even if he wouldn’t say it, he felt obligated—when he doesn’t owe her shit. No one owes her shit. She’s been able to do it all alone for so long.

“Why would any of you do that for me?” she asks instead.

Barry lets out a soft exhale, a partial laugh, shaking his head as if it’s an obvious question.

“Because,” he says, “because we want to.”

Normally, this wouldn’t be a satisfactory answer for Sophia. But she knows Barry, and she knows how to read him, and she knows how to peel back the layers of his quick, condensed answers and see the hundreds of other words he isn’t saying.

They want to help her because they just want her to live. She doesn’t even have to keep being physically near any of them. But they all know each other, and they know she has a soul, and they know she wants to live, and they know she wants to fight, and they know she’s struggling to do it alone, so god damn it they want to help because they want to.

“Just don’t make sure PEIP uses me as a science experiment,” Sophia warns.

“Never.”

“I want Miss Holiday’s word, too.”

“I’ll bring her in right now.” Barry starts walking out of the room, then stops by the doorway. “Door open or closed?”

Sophia smiles. It’s weak, a physical strain for her, and it aggravates a slight throb in her head. She doesn’t care.

“Open.”

“Wait, wait wait wait—so you’re dropping out?” Bailey’s voice crackles over the phone.

“Not dropping out,” Sophia answers on a tired sigh. She stares out the window, and she wants to smile, but this conversation was a long time coming. It’s a hard one. “Just changing my class schedule.”

“But you’re not going to be at school anymore?”

“Online classes.”

“So you’ll still be graduating with us?” Bailey’s voice is hopeful, almost desperate. Even though Bailey and their crew took her in quicker than she could count to three, it still shocks her sometimes how much they all care about her. She wishes Daniel could meet them. She wishes Hannah could meet them.

“Uh…” Shit, this is harder to say than she thought. “Not exactly. Not at the same time as you,” she tacks the clarifier onto the end.

“Oh.” It’s clear Barry raised Bailey. They both suck at hiding their feelings behind their voices.

“I’ll graduate next year.” There’s an unspoken probably, but Sophia feels too optimistic to humor any other possibility. “Maybe even as early as this summer.”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line.

“I guess I didn’t realize how serious this diagnosis of yours really is,” Bailey murmurs.

“It’s pretty serious,” she agrees. “I’m actually flying in for one of my first big appointments today.”

“Flying in?”

“Yeah. The specialists, they’re in New Mexico.”

Bailey gives a low whistle.

“You nervous at all?”

“Nope.”

Wait, that’s a blatant lie.

“Actually, yeah,” Sophia amends. “I could have surgery as early as tomorrow, depending on what they find.”

“Ohhh—oh.” Bailey’s contemplative sound shifts at the last second into one of realization. The pitch even turns upward, suggesting it’s a positive realization. Sophia’s eyebrow raises; she can’t imagine what must have clicked in their mind just then. “Okay. Well, you should let me know as soon as you know when you’re back in town, alright? Depending on how you feel about having guests, I know we’d love to come see you at your place soon.”

Sophia chuckles. “Sounds great.”

“Your dad hasn’t told you any other news lately, has he?”

“Uh, not that I can think of.”

Sophia hears the ping of a text notification while her call with Bailey is still going. Miss Holiday, who she has given her phone number to, wishes her good luck and asks her to keep in touch. Sophia appreciates the message, but she’ll get back to responding later. For now, she just wants to have a chat with her best friend while staring out the window of the plane that landed just five minutes ago in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

She knows there will be someone from PEIP escorting her and Barry from the airport to the same place he went for his interview with Monica—the building where they host their Roswell missions. Apparently the alien shit the tourists love so much has a basis of truth in Roswell specifically, but of course Hatchetfield also had to have some of the extraterrestrial fun. She hopes she’ll be able to see some of the alien gimmicks before she leaves. Even if she doesn’t, she’s sure she’ll be back. The landscape is dusty brown and orange and green—not as different from Michigan as she expected—but New Mexico already gives her a good feeling. Maybe because there’s not as much blue.

“Alright. Well, you just keep me updated. Keep in touch. Love you.”

“Love you, too.” Sophia smiles as she hangs up.

“Bailey?” Barry asks from the aisle seat next to her. He’s not nearly as interested in the landscape of New Mexico; instead, he seems eager to find an opening in the line of passengers already gearing up to get out of the plane. They’re not really in any rush, but of course it would be out of character for Barry to be patient for once in his goddamn life.

“Yeah.”

Barry’s phone pings not too soon after that. He huffs in annoyance and the screen illuminates. There’s a pause as Barry’s eyes flicker from one line to the next, speed-reading and taking in the message he apparently received. His eyes brighten and he pockets the phone.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile at your phone once,” Sophia comments. “What was that all about?”

“Nothing,” he answers automatically. As much as he wants to pretend he didn’t react to the message, his faux neutral face is even less convincing.

“Oh my god, tell me. Did you finally find a girlfriend or something?”

“Nope.”

“Boyfriend?”

The side of Barry’s lip quirks up in amusement. “No.”

“Will I get to know in the future or is this just some private bullshit?”

“Oh, you’ll know.”

Sophia squints and uses all the energy she can muster to analyze his face. To get him to confess.

She must be doing something right, because he relinquishes sooner rather than later.

“Okay, fine. I wanted to wait ‘til we got on the road or something.”

He takes his phone back out, turns it back on, goes to his texts. She sees Bailey’s name in bold. TELL HER NOW, they demand, which immediately doubles her interest and validates her earlier insistence.

She sees what it is before the photo even fully loads. She audibly gasps, but it feels more like the breath is sucked out of her lungs.

“No way,” she sobs, clapping a hand over her mouth while she grabs Barry’s phone with the other.

“I wanted us to get on the road before I told you,” Barry tries to explain, but Sophia’s wails drown him out. There’s a startled young businessman passing by in the aisleway who has no clue what just happened in the two seconds since he passed their seats. She doesn’t give a shit.

“Oh my god,” Sophia gasps once, then continues gasping while she cradles the phone in her hands. “Oh my god. Oh my god, you better not be fucking with me. This better be real.”

“It’s real.”

“How the fuck did you find her?”

“The cops were investigating your dad’s place, interviewing people in the area—turns out they remembered he had a cat. They found her in a nearby animal shelter, and, well…”

Although most of her heart is soaring through the cabin roof, another part of it collapses to the ground.

“She’ll… she’ll be okay there, right? Is someone going to adopt her?”

Barry laughs. “Well, funny thing.”

Everyone around Sophia knows that she’s miserable, and for that she’s thankful she doesn’t have to hide it. Except she’s not that miserable. Not really. Not now.

The trip back to Hatchetfield had wreaked havoc on her body. She has no memory of boarding in Albuquerque. She threw up twice on the plane. When she tried to sleep in her seat, she had a nightmare about That Night so vivid it woke her up and she had a panic attack. Her entire body ached and she had to lie down in the back of Barry’s car to cope with the start of a migraine. Her everything still hurts, but, genuinely, she’s not miserable.

She sits in the corner of Barry’s couch with a blanket thrown around her shoulders. The fireplace is lit; it’s finally gotten cold and snowy enough to justify using it. Her head leans on Bailey’s shoulder and she dangles a feather teaser toy in front of an orange and white cat who stares at it intensely. Her golden eyes follow the pink feathers, and a paw reaches out to catch them tentatively every once in a while. She’s nowhere near catching it whenever she tries.

Pippi is a perfect, lovely, dumbass cat.

That being said, it’s great how easily Pippi took to Barry’s house. She was only mildly suspicious of Barry’s place for a few days after being thrown halfway across the world twice in less than a year.

“Not gonna lie, the senior prank this year sucks,” Bailey complains. “You’re lucky you don’t have to associate with us.”

“Don’t tell me they went with the shaving cream idea.”

“They went with the shaving cream idea.”

“Oh, thank god I’m not gonna be in your graduating class.”

“Truth. I’ve already thought about dropping out and graduating first thing next semester. Mom said no.”

“Your mom’s got the right idea.” Barry interjects from the other side of the couch.

Sophia laughs and then has her attention pulled away when she feels a yank. Pippi finally has the feather. She flips on her back and gnaws and kicks at it. Sophia doesn’t have the heart to tease her again. She deserves this satisfaction for now.

“Buzzkill,” Bailey groans. “Steve would let me drop out.”

“Your mom’s boyfriend has nothing to do with this.”

“You’ve never even met the guy, have you?”

“I think I saw him once.”

“Believe it or not, I think you two would get along.”

Barry hums vacantly. Sophia understands—he’s not really that interested in meeting the man who replaced him in his ex-wife’s life. At least he feels something other than apathy about his ex-wife and ex-kid’s new life. Discomfort is just as well.

“I think I’m good to come back to school full-time,” Sophia comments. “Online school is slow. It’s boring.”

“Uh-uh,” Barry scolds. “You heard McIntosh.”

“MacNamara.”

“Whatever. His team has you scheduled for that surgery next week, and that’s gonna knock you out for a few weeks at least.”

It’s weird, already having a solid treatment plan. For right now, General MacNamara clarified back in Roswell, Sophia’s job is to monitor her symptoms, log them, and rate their severity. Keep an eye out for triggers. They think they found a major part of Sophia’s brain that Otho lingers in, and they’re very close to knowing with full certainty that they can study and remove that infected part without affecting her cognitive capacity.

Granted, there are very likely other infected areas. But it’s a start.

“Surgery, schmurgery,” Sophia dismisses, teasing.

“Oh my god,” Barry groans.

Bailey snickers.

“You’re having that Zoom call with Miss Holiday to check in on your school stuff, right?” Barry asks.

Sophia nods.

“Got it. She’ll talk some sense into you.”

“Sure she will,” Sophia says sarcastically. (Yes, Miss Holiday will talk some sense into her.)

“She will,” Barry emphasizes.

“Look, Sophia’s been through a lot of medical tests this week,” Bailey says, sticking up for Sophia. It’s teasing, suggested by the way they’re still chuckling a little when they say it. “You’ll give her another migraine if you keep fighting with her.”

Barry balks, also in full satire mode. “After all I’ve done for her, after every test I’ve been right by her side, how dare you assume—”

Bailey and Barry keep egging each other on, cackling and nudging each other, while Sophia zones out of the conversation. Granted, concentration is harder than it used to be before the seizure. She doesn’t know if that’s going to get any better over time. Hell, she doesn’t know if anything is going to get better over time, she remembers for the umpteenth time. It’s still pretty terrifying.

She looks at the fireplace and sees that the flames are starting to die out. Light orange embers dance around ash. Curiosity strikes; she flicks her eyes upward. Nothing happens. Then, a second later, the logs shift and the embers do a pirouette. The fact that the logs move at all causes her to startle, then stare at the fire in awe. She hasn’t tried using her powers for almost a year, and… well, she can’t prove if they’re really still there or not. Briefly, she considers trying again, then ultimately decides not to. Before the present moment, the last time she had even tried summoning her powers was That Night. The thought of trying, then failing, would have been heartbreaking. Now, it’s not so heartbreaking. Maybe she’ll try again when she feels a little better.

Pippi demands Sophia’s attention again with a whiny meow. With her claws, she grasps the feathers at the end of the teaser, but she’s affronted that Sophia’s stopped trying to challenge her. She’s equally affronted that Sophia isn’t doing anything about Pippi’s claws being stuck in the feather.

Sophia smiles and reaches down for the feather. She stops when she realizes that the feather is a deep blue color. This the first time, at least in recent history, that she’s thought of the color blue without losing her shit. It was that aversion to the color that forced her to look away from the window when the plane back home crossed Lake Michigan, the tint she’s seen out of the corner of her eyes that’s caused her to whip around with the thought that Charles must have found her, Otho must have found her.

But this feather is harmless. The cat attached to the feather is harmless. And neither of them are forever, and neither is she, and neither is her uncle nor her uncle’s ex-stepkid/her best friend, but they’re here in this moment and they’re all not letting each other leave this moment too soon. They’re letting the simplicity of laughter and warmth and stupid jokes and family keep them all together. The beauty of it all is, briefly, overwhelming. Her heart is truly full.

She feels human.