Archive of Our Own

Sylvia learns her first real lesson at 5.

It’s an important one. Especially for a poor girl like her.

Her grandmother had always been the one to bring her up. Her mother had been around town, sure, but everything she learned, she learned from her grandmother.

Including how to exact revenge.

“Sylvie, help me with this.” she says one day in the dead of winter. The sun is already set and Sylvia is sitting on the counter next to the stove as her grandmother cooks.

She scoots over and leans over, looking in the pot.

There’s an orange-y red soup with shrimp and some vegetables swirling around in it, all cooking up on the stove.

“Yes?” she asks, as her grandmother brushes one of her braids back over her shoulder, so it won’t hang above the soup anymore. She then takes three bowls out, pouring the soup into all three of them before turning her gaze onto Sylvia. Two of them have a bay leaf on top.

“Pass me my special spice.”

Sylvia stands on unsteady feet, gripping the cupboard as she opens it and reaching for the wooden box decorated with painted flowers on a light-yellow background. It’s small, hiding easily behind the large tin they kept spices in and the containers that hold sugar and flour.

“Here you go, abuela.”

Her grandmother smiles at her, and it makes a warmth spread through her body as she sits back down on the counter.

“Thank you, chiquita.”

She slides the wooden top and it squeaks softly. Her grandmother keeps the inside of the box angled toward herself, not letting Sylvia get even a peek.

She carefully puts some of the substance into one of the bowls, marking it with a leaf that faces a different way than the other two.

“What is that, abuela?” She asks, making sure she’s talking in complete sentences. Her kindergarten teacher had sighed and shook her head earlier that day when Sylvia had shortened some of her words.

Her grandmother smiles and brings one hand to her head, smoothing down a stray strand of gray hair.

“It’s a remedy for bad men.”

Sylvia’s eyebrows raise and her eyes shoot open, leaning forward with a gleam in her eye. “It’s witchcraft?”

Her grandmother lets out a laugh and leans forward, kissing her forehead. “No. No, it isn’t quite as simple as that.”

Her eyes gain this far away quality about them that suggests something is off, and Sylvia tugs at the sleeve of her dress.

“What does it do?”

Her grandmother looks grim as she speaks. “It takes all the evil out of them. And sometimes, it takes the man with it.”

Sylvia leans back, resting against the blue wall of their kitchen and wishing she were big enough to be able to swing her feet from this far back. “Where does it take them?”

Her grandmother leans forward, a spark in her eye as she says, “It takes them all the way to hell, right where they belong.”

Sylvia almost gasps. Her grandmother never uses words like that. But instead, she lets out a bubble of giggling laughter and watches the tension bleed from her grandmother’s shoulder.

“Now, I think it’s about time to eat, hm?”

Sylvia nods and her grandmother passes her the hand bell that sits on their windowsill along with garlic and a small sculpture of something Sylvia has never seen before.

She rings it merrily, and hears the telltale yell from her grandfather. It echoes through the house, even though he’s all the way up the stairs and it shouldn’t be that loud.

Her grandmother flinches slightly, smoothing back her hair again and wiping the sweat from off her face with the back of a hand.

The movement wipes a bit of makeup off and reveals a purpling bruise. It’s a mottled spot of color around her eye, purple and black and yellow that Sylvia knows hides behind her grandmother’s makeup most of the time.

Sylvia also knows that she has a matching bruise right on her cheek. It had made one of her teeth go wiggly a long time before it should have, when her grandpa had raised a hand to her.

Her grandmother hadn’t said anything, but she’d run in between them, and this morning, she’d woken up with a determined look on her face.

Once Sylvia’s grandfather is at the table, she slips to the floor in time for her grandmother to  hand her the one bowl with the odd bay leaf, grabbing the other two herself.

“That one goes to your abuelo.” She whispers and Sylvia nods, walking carefully so she doesn’t spill any of it, and serves the soup to her grandfather. He smiles, not quite kindly, but warmly at her and sets it in front of him.

“Caldo de camarón.” her grandmother says before her husband can question it and waits for him to pick up his spoon and bring it to his mouth before sitting down.

He blows some steam off the soup, smiling at his wife. “Smells good.”

No one at the table besides Sylvia’s grandmother is privy to the fact that the steam that smells so good carries with it the hint of poison.

They all eat peacefully, and that night, when her grandmother tucks her into her bed that still has railings on it, she says, “You have such pretty tears. One day you may have to use them.” Sylvia finds it to be an odd goodnight sentiment, but she doesn’t question it, simply snuggling up to her teddy bear and falling asleep.

The next morning, Sylvia wakes to the scream of her grandmother.

She sounds hysterical, and Sylvia climbs over the railing of her bed and rushes into the room.

Her grandfather is lying there, stiff.

Her grandmother climbs out of bed, ushering Sylvia along, down the stairs and out the door. As soon as they get out the door, Sylvia pulls out her pretty tears.

There are neighbors already leaving their houses, rushing over in just nightgowns or pajamas, women consoling them both as men pour into the house to find out what’s wrong.

The cops come eventually. It all becomes a blur. Sylvia gets handed a lollipop at some point, and she sucks on it while her grandmother recounts her version of events to the police. When one of the cops looks away, Sylvia's grandmother looks back at her and winks.

Sylvia understands that her pretty tears hold weight when she’s 7.

She learns this the same day she learns her pretty face and her pretty hair and her pretty words do too.

She’s in the drugstore downtown when a man comes up behind her, crouching down and clearing his throat. She whips her head around after realizing the closeness of the sound.

“Hello, sir.” She says quietly, very much wanting him to get up and move on.

“What’re you looking for?” He asks and  she can feel his breath on her neck.

“I’m just looking to get some candy, sir.”

He laughs deeply. The type of laugh she’d never heard in real life. “A pretty little thing like you ain’t planning on payin’ for her own candy bar, is she? You even got the money for that?”

It strikes her that he’d almost hit the nail on the head there. She had been planning to walk out with a candy bar tucked in her pocket, not paid for.

But she doesn’t tell him that.

“Of course I got money, mister.”

He smiles as he stands, looking down at her with a type of scrutiny she could hardly stand.

“Nonsense. How ‘bout I buy you your candy bar?”

She considers it for a moment. It sure would be a lot harder to get caught for stealing if she wasn’t stealing it. “Sure.”

He nods, and puts a hand on the back of her neck. “Go ahead and choose one.”

She gets back to looking, hyper aware of his hand on her. It’s too hot. She ran cold, had since she was a baby.

He was like a radiator.

She grabs one of the first chocolate bars her eyes land on and she hands it to him. “Here you go.”

She wants him to go up and pay so she can get her chocolate back. Hopefully it won’t be melted.

“What’s your name, girlie?” he asks, and this is the type of man her grandma always told her to yell ‘FIRE’ in public for.

“My name’s Hazel, sir.” The name of her best friend slips off her tongue effortlessly. It's close enough to Sylvia, she supposes.

The floor of the drugstore is sticky as they walk up to the counter, the man placing the chocolate there. There’s a teenage girl there, popping her gum and spinning on the stool behind the counter.

It looks fun, and Sylvia decides she wants to work in a drugstore when she gets older.

“That and a pack of Pall Mall’s please.” The man says and puts a hand in the pocket of his nice clean slacks that make him look like he’s just coming from a business meeting.

The girl takes a second before popping her gum one more time and saying, “60 cents.”

He doesn’t bat an eye at the price, just giving her two quarters and a dime.

Her eyes basically bug out of her head, but she gets herself back under control by the time he turns to her, chocolate bar in hand.

“Thank you, mister.” She says, the perfect picture of a polite young lady. “I coulda helped you pay. My mama gave me a half dollar before I left the house today.”

His eyebrows raise. “Did she really?”

Sylvia nods. It’s not true. But that’s another thing her grandma had taught her. Rich folk like other rich folk.

The man doesn’t take his hand off the back of her neck as she slips the candy bar into her jacket pocket.

They leave the store onto the bustling main street and he asks her where she lives.

A gentle breeze blows by, making it all the way through the taller adults and ruffling the skirt around her knees.

His hand is too hot.

Scream help if a man is ever being nasty to you in public. In private, do whatever you have to. But in public, scream help. And if that doesn’t work, scream fire.

That’s what her grandma said one day while sewing a new dress for Sylvia out of the fabric of one of her old skirts that had ripped. She’d had it since before Sylvia was born and didn’t want to give up on it.

Sylvia had worn that dress a few days ago.

She looks around. There are too many people.

She tries opening her mouth, she tries to even speak and say help, but nothing comes out. That’s  when her eyes grow hot and another memory surfaces.

You have such pretty tears.

Neighborhood women had come running to comfort her.

So, she takes a deep breath and she lets her pretty tears flow. It’s pretty easy. It’s almost fun, pretending there were diamonds rolling down her face instead of tears.

But she’s lower to the ground than other girls in her grade, she wasn’t growing fast enough. Tears wouldn’t be enough.

So, she opens her mouth. And she screams.

The bustle of daily life immediately stops when a seven-year-old girl starts sobbing in the middle of a sidewalk. She looks younger than she actually is, but plenty old enough to be able to control having a temper tantrum in public.

One woman comes over right away and crouches down. She looks at the man. His hand, still hot on the back of her neck.

“Hello, sweetie.” she says, and she has to almost-shout to be heard.

“Help!” She manages between heaving sobs and the woman grabs her hand.

“Help with what?”

Sylvia imagines there are diamonds coming out of her eyes and rolling down her cheeks as she sniffles and barely manages to say, “I don’t—I don’t know him.”

The woman lets out a scandalized gasp and pulls Sylvia away from the man, tucking her into her side and the only thing Sylvia can see is a bundle of skirts.

There’s rapid fire talking as more people get involved after that little sentence and the woman takes her away from the scene. Once they’ve walked a little, she crouches down again. “What’s your name, honey?”

“Sylvia.” she says, and this time it’s the truth.

The woman nods. “Where do you live, Sylvia?”

Sylvia rattles off her grandmother’s address and the nice woman walks her all the way there, subtly probing for more information about the man. Sylvia doesn’t mind answering all the questions, if she’s being honest.

Once they’re standing in front of the familiar light gray house, the woman lets her go, watching her walk in the front door before walking along.

Her grandmother peeks her head out from behind the wall of the kitchen. “Hello, chiquita.”

Sylvia smiles and walks to her grandmother easily, sitting down at the only other seat around the table that used to seat three. There’s a bowl in the middle of the table filled with cherry tomatoes, and her grandmother is deboning two pieces of fish, her fingers moving with an experienced speed, putting the bones on a paper towel.

“Hello, abuela.”

“Did anything interesting happen today at school?”

“No.” Sylvia says, reaching over and popping one of the cherry tomatoes into her mouth.  “But after school I dropped by the drugstore to get some candy and a man started being weird.”

Her grandmother’s fingers slow, her eyes sharpening with interest. “Yeah? What did this man do?”

Sylvia shrugs. It's a big deal but she wants it to look like she can handle her own shit. Just like her grandmother can.

“He offered to pay for me and then started walking with me, and he had his hand on the back of my neck.”

Her grandmother’s eyes flash with something. Fear or danger, she’s not sure. “Did you yell for help?”

Sylvia smirks, reaching over and grabbing a second cherry tomato. “No. But I cried my prettiest tears.”

Her grandmother smiles. “That’s my girl.”

Sylvia reaches for a third cherry tomato, but her grandmother bats her hand away. “Leave some for dinner, you’ll spoil your appetite.”

Sylvia laughs and slides off the chair going up to her room. The paid-for chocolate bar rests heavy in her pocket.

She knows it’s going to taste something like vindication of her crocodile tears.

Sylvia gets her first protégé at 9.

Tim Shepard had been one of her best friends in the world for a couple months, and he was always going on and on about the twins.

The twins being his siblings.

She’d be trying to do her homework or listen to the smooth voices of Frankie Avalon or Elvis Presley coming from the radio and he’d just be talking.

Strange thing is, he never really said their names. Just “the twins”.

And the times he did say one of their names, it was Curly. He was always the more troublesome of the two.

Sylvia’d learned to tune him out.

Now, though, they’re both in the living room of Tim’s house, writing an essay about shadows for Mrs. Chamberlain’s class.

She had, of course, turned the radio on. She’d been obsessed with music ever since she turned eight and devoured anything she could get her hands on, even if half the time it was just coming from the radio.

Her grandmother couldn’t afford a record player.

“Curly’s getting held back, and Angela, the idiot she is, starts failing because she doesn’t want him to be alone! The kid has straight A’s all year and all of a sudden gives it up because of Curly. Can you believe it?” Tim says, and he sounds real fired up.

She scoffs. “Uh, yeah, whoever that is.”

He rolls his eyes. “You know Curly.”

She nods. “‘Course I know Curly. I’ve met the little tyke. I’m talkin’ ‘bout Angela.”

Tim snorts. “You know Angela, too. My sister, Angela. Ringin’ any bells, genius?”

Sylvia’s immediately sitting up straighter, her pencil had dropped, the essay forgotten in an instant.

“You got a sister?”

Tim sighs. “Of course I have a sister! Who’d you think Angela was?”

Sylvia glares at him. “You ain’t ever mentioned an Angela.”

Tim’s eyebrows raise and he thinks for a second. “Huh. Guess I haven’t. But that’s good. Means she ain’t gettin’ in buckets of trouble like her brother.”

Sylvia bites down the retort of ‘which one’ that sits on her tongue, and glares at him. “That’s an important thing to mention. Something you should mention like, clearly.”

Tim shrugs. “What’s the big deal? You know now.”

“What’s the big deal? The big deal is that girl ain’t gonna know how to survive ‘round here with two brothers and a junkie mama.”

“You’re making it sound like she’ll die, Sylv.” he says, brushing off her concern with the casual ‘whatever’ tone that never failed to infuriate her.

“There are worse things a girl can go through than death.” Sylvia says and lets the words sit heavily in the air between them for a second, broken only by the radio and the gentle tick of the clock. It’s two hours early, and she doesn’t usually look at it.

Tim looks down and bites his lip. “What do you want me to do about it, huh, Sylv? Seriously, you want me to turn into a big sister or some shit? Because I can’t.”

She holds her hands up in a surrender motion. She knows he didn’t choose to have to become a father to those kids.

“No. I don’t want you to become a big sister, I know you can’t just flip a switch like that.” she says, and she almost chokes on the next words that come out of her mouth. “Maybe I can help her out?”

Tim scoffs and Sylvia feels the anger she usually tries to keep in check come to a boil.

“What’s so funny?”

He looks her up and down. “You ain’t got any idea how to be a sister. You don’t even got a mama.”

Sylvia feels her cheeks heat up and she stands. “Like yours is any better, laid up in bed all day. Boozed up or stoned out of her mind half the time. Don’t you talk about my mama when you don’t get a leg to stand on. No matter how inexperienced I am at it, I’d be a better big sister than you.”

Tim stands up, ready to fight her on it, but Sylvia storms out of the room and down the hallway.

She knows which room is Tim’s and which room is his mom’s, which only leave two other rooms.

She throws the first one open a little too aggressively, hearing Tim chase after her, tripping over his own feet in his haste. 

Curly stares back at her and she clicks her tongue, walking to the next door and opening it slowly.

An adorable little girl stares at her from the floor. She’s got some crayons scattered around and when Sylvia looks at her paper, she sees writing practice.

She walks in the room and sits down in front of the girl easily, hearing Tim coming down the hallway with his cool storm of anger whipping through the halls and making her wish she hadn’t said all that.

“Hey. What’s your name?”

The girl stares at Sylvia with wide eyes. “Angela.”

“Hey Angela.” she says. “I’m Sylvia.”

Angela waves and Sylvia can feel her heart melt. She never could resist stopping on the street whenever there was a cute baby or toddler. It might be a girl thing or it might just be a Sylvia thing, she’s not sure. “How old are you, Angela?”

Angela holds up six fingers.

“You’re six?”

Angela nods and Tim’s steps are dangerously close as he calls out “Sylvia!”

“Wanna learn how to be a woman?” she asks, and she could’ve worded it better but really, what could she do with Tim on the warpath and this little girl the only chance she’s got at stopping him from throwing her out with no way back in.

Angela nods enthusiastically right as Tim stops in the doorway.

“Sylvia.” he says, his anger slightly cooled in the presence of his sister. “Get out.”

Angela is up in a second, over in front of Tim, standing up to him even though he’s more than a few feet taller than her.

“She ain’t done nothing, Tim. Let her stay.”

Tim’s face softens and he crouches down in front of Angela. They seem to almost have a conversation, because eventually Tim gets back up, glares at Sylvia in a way that makes ice run down her spine, and walk away.

Angela comes back over and sits down in front of Sylvia, pushing the piece of paper and crayons to the side.

Sylvia smiles triumphantly and looks at the small girl in front of her.

“What do you wanna know?”

Angela’s eyes sparkle. “Everything.”

Sylvia laughs. “Let’s pace ourselves a little, hun.” She remembers all those times Tim would talk about one of his mom’s many men coming into the house and running it like it was his with an iron fist. A bloody one, too.

So, she starts with what to do when there’s a bad man in your life. How to deal with them.

It occurs to her when she finishes the first bit of advice that this little girl, who’s hanging off her every word might have accidentally just become her little sister.

She lets out a long sigh. At least she wouldn’t stay in the doghouse with Tim too long.

Sylvia learns death when she’s 11.

It’d always been a concept of course. And her grandfather had died, but that never cemented as a loss to her.

It couldn’t. Not when he beat on her and her grandmother.

She knew what it was supposed to look like, losing someone. She knows she’s supposed to scream and cry and run out to the street and talk to the cops when they wanted her to.

She knows all that, but it’s different when It’s her grandmother. The one woman who she’d ever look to as a mother was lying dead in the room she’d made her home.

Sylvia doesn’t have to fake the tears that come. And they’re not the pretty ones. They’re the big ones. The ugly ones that do nothing but demand sympathy.

Her screams aren’t fake, and she can’t even get downstairs when there’s urgent knocking at the door.

She’s thrown herself over her grandmother’s body, desperately shaking her, trying to see those brilliantly green eyes open again.

Eventually someone must find the key hidden under the mat, because there’s more people in the room, suddenly. A couple neighborhood women are pulling her away. She scratches at their smooth arms and tries to get close to her grandmother one last time, but they’re strong from years of hauling around wet loads of laundry and wrangling their children.

They bring her down to the living room, one of them pulls Sylvia into her lap. She doesn’t even mind how humiliating it is to seem like a child.

She can’t help but cry into the woman’s sunshine-y yellow dress that is so wrong right now. Her dress shouldn’t be yellow.

Just like her grandmother’s nightgown shouldn’t have been pink.

Happy colors.

She’d died in them.

People are talking to her but she can’t hear over the rushing in her ears.

She can’t hear over her tears.

She cries and cries for hours, even when her mother comes to pick her up. Her real mother, the one she hadn’t seen in years.

They go back to her mother’s house (which is really her stepfather’s apartment) and they set her up with a blanket on the couch.

Her mom doesn’t tell her a story to put her to sleep, which is okay because her grandmother hadn’t for years.

This apartment is different than the sunny house she’d grown up in all her life. It doesn’t have baby blue walls and a bowl of cherry tomatoes or strawberries on the table.

It’s broken down, the peeling wallpaper and the ceilings with stains from cigarette smoke give off a lived in but not nice feel.

It’s like the despair of the east side had seeped all the way into this place.

Even the phone is gray, the cord has a small stripe of black electrical tape on it.

There are pills on the kitchen counter, and they’re not the kind that her grandma had been taking before she died. They come in little baggies instead of the prescription orange bottles.

She knows what they are. She knows what her mother is and, by extension, her.

She understands that she’s just like the other east side girls who had druggie mothers and deadbeat fathers. That’s how it always has been and that’s how it always will be.

She pulls the blanket up closer, even though it’s threadbare and won’t do anything no matter how much tighter she draws it around herself. The radiator on the wall across from her rattles metallically.

She falls asleep, eyes still puffed up with tears.

The next morning, she’s awoken by a little girl poking her in the face.

Her immediate instinct is to lash out, and her second instinct is to ask who the fuck this kid is. She’s got strawberry blonde hair, but the tan skin of Sylvia’s mother and the same mouth as Sylvia but the slope of the nose is all wrong.

And then...

Her stepfather comes out of his room, and picks the girl up. Sylvia shuts down, for just a second because there’s no way she’s got a half sibling.

No way there’s a child her mother actually kept and it wasn’t her.

There’s just no fucking way.

But the proof is there in the face of that little girl she doesn’t bother learning the name of before she runs out of the apartment.

No one chases after her.

Sylvia gets her first real boyfriend at 13.

Just a week after she’d turned 13, and just four after her stepfather had come out to the couch late at night and stuck his hand down her pants.

She couldn’t do anything in the moment besides cry. She cried and cried for hours, even when he’d already left for work and she was supposed to be in school.

And Sylvia’s tear ducts had burned up a long time ago, the first time her stepfather had thrown her into a door.

The second time it happened just a week later, she’d slapped him, unwilling to let herself be a victim. Unwilling to let herself be pulled into the lap of a neighbor and cry over her own tragedy.

Unwilling to let herself be weak.

She’d run out of the house. Really, tore would be a more fitting word. She slammed the door behind her so hard the walls had shaken as she thundered down the steps, racing into the street, without any shoes on.

It was the dead of night, and she had nowhere to go. So, she’d curled up on a park bench and tried hugging herself as close as possible in the cold night air of a Tulsa February.

The next day, she’d returned around noon, only to find that the locks had either been changed or there was a chair blocking the door handle because she couldn’t get in.

She’d cursed herself, kicking the wall of the apartment building, only to immediately regret it. That hadn’t been a good idea with only socked feet.

She turns to the Shepards. She’d turns to Tim, who’d stayed a friend to her.

She jumped from her mother’s couch to her friend’s. Angie was thrilled of course, asking her a million questions and listening to everything she said with rapt attention.

Her stories told of what to do if a man ever touches you. Her stories were of what to do when you’re alone. Her stories were of survival and Angela, sweet Angela at only newly 11, listened like it was the story of Cinderella.

But she couldn’t stay on Tim’s couch forever. She needed someone else.

So she went and she found a man.

She’d fucked around before, gotten boys wrapped around her finger for the thrill before leaving them in the dust.

She’d let some of them stick their hand up her shirt and slapped just as many of them for doing it without permission.

She slipped on some of Tim’s mom’s shoes on. They were way too big on her, and she sounded basically like a horse when she walked. She put on her prettiest (smallest) dress and put on some makeup stolen from a corner store.

Sylvia looked good.

She didn’t look a day over 13, but she did look good. And she’d get better.

She made her way to Buck’s, knowing he was likely the only bar in town that’d let her in looking like how she did.

Her grandmother would’ve slapped her upside the head for going out like this and told her she looked like a hooker.

But the best way to draw guys in is to give them something to want.

And she has something to want.

She wobbles into the bar in her heels that are basically stilts and sits down at one of the many stools there. There’s a party raging and she crosses her legs and politely tries to find some type of rhythm in the god-awful Hank Williams that’s blasting.

Buck gives her a bewildered look when she asks for a vodka soda, and she gets a water back. She smiles and he ruffles her hair. He gets it.

He understands what it means to be struggling. He may not get it the way a girl does.

He may not understand why she has to put on a dress that shows too much and heels that are too big and makeup that’s too heavy, but he gets it.

It’s barely 30 minutes before a man makes his move first.

He looks like he’s well over 20, and he’s got a clean shirt on. He doesn’t look like a Soc, but he looks close enough to one that he should be enough for her. She uncrosses her legs and leans in with an interested gleam in her eye.

He rubs the back of his neck awkwardly and the party isn’t over when she leaves for the night, a new man secured.

She sits in the front seat of his car on the way back to his house, and he brings her to a neighborhood that looked a lot like the one her grandmother had brought her up in. It’s east side, but it’s just Socy enough to get by.

He brings her in the house, throwing his jacket down on the floor and suddenly they’re a flurry of movement. Indistinguishable bodies and she can’t find it in herself to enjoy any part of it.

But still, she says and does all the right things, and when they’re done he pulls her flush against his chest.

When it’s all over and done with, she may not be the proudest she’s ever been. But she has a place to sleep for the night.  

Sylvia learns true loss for the first time when she’s 14.

It's the guy she met at the bar’s baby. Christian.

He’d turned out to be an asshole just like any other man. But he has a soft bed and she can’t work yet, so she stays.

She stays through it all until a month passes by and her period hadn’t come around yet.

Her cycle is a well-tuned machine. She’d doesn’t miss days.

That’s not something that happens to her. This isn’t something that happens to her.

She doesn’t have children. She doesn’t want children.

Until she thinks back on Angela and that girl with strawberry blond hair and some of her face.

Then, she might want some.

But she doesn’t want to be some creep’s housewife. That isn’t a life for her.

She locks herself in the bathroom with a half-empty bottle of Bowmore and a pack of cigarettes.

She drinks. She drinks until she can’t think straight and then she cracks the box of cigarettes and take one out, lighting it up and taking a long drag.

She can barely stand by the time she’s finished the bottle and the pack. Too drunk for her own good and sick from the cigs.

There’s a stirring in her stomach but she can’t get up in time to sit on the toilet. She can barely peel the clothes off her sweat-soaked body.

It hurts and it’s not happening fast enough, so Sylvia hits her stomach. Over and over.

A message to the unwelcome resident.

She falls asleep eventually, her stomach and her heart feeling a lot emptier.

She wakes up the next morning, on the hard tile of the bathroom floor, stomach hurting, a bout of nausea coming along so powerful it would knock her off her feet, had she been standing.

She gets up in time to crawl over to the toilet. She throws up, a pounding headache that doesn’t get any better with the clinical white lighting above head.

When she’s finally okay enough to rest her head, she looks over to where she’d woken up.

The tell-tale red stain.

A pang of sadness goes through her. But it’s not just a pang. It’s a full body jolt.

It’s a clap of a church bell, making her vibrate with it.

She almost throws up from the force.

She crawls over to the mess, picking it up with one hand.

Because she can do that. It’s barely the size of a quarter and she can do that.

“Hello.” She whispers to it, a sob breaking her voice. She tries cooing at it but it doesn’t respond. It can’t respond.

“I’m sorry.” She says, holding it to her chest, rocking back and forth and shaking with the force of her sobs. It isn’t like the sadness she felt with her grandma died. It’s something else entirely.

Like someone had ripped every organ in her body out and beat them up before stuffing them all back in.

But they’d left a hole where her heart would go.

She doesn’t come out of the bathroom for three days. She has a sink for water whenever she needs it to replenish her tear supply. She spends those days curled around the last remnant of herself.

She knows she’s someone new now.

It’s the hardest thing she ever does, but three nights after she originally locked herself in the bathroom, she dropped it in the toilet and flushed.

There’s a still a stain on the bathroom tile, one that will never come out.

She walks through the house, quiet as anything, avoiding all the creaky boards as she gets to the room she shares with Christian. She edges around the room, grabbing a jacket from the closet and slipping into high heels, some of the only shoes she owns.

She walks out of the house and goes straight back to Buck’s.

He pats her hand sympathetically but doesn’t give her anything to drink, even when she begs.

That night, she meets Dallas Winston.

He’s dangerous and she must look pathetic. She isn’t the unbreakable Sylvia right now.

She’s a scared 14-year-old girl. Still, somehow he sits down next to her, and there’s something to his gaze beyond curiosity.

Sylvia gets her first apartment at 16.

It isn’t the fullest apartment in the world, but everything there is something she likes.

The counter in the bathroom is overflowing with lotions and perfumes and cosmetics that she used every time she wanted to stand out.

She had bright clothes she never wore strewn around her room from every time she tried them on and they didn’t fit. All her dark and skimpy clothing is either neatly packed away in a drawer or hung up in her tiny closet.

Because the thing about Sylvia,  appearances are everything.

Every time she leaves the house, she’s dolled up with makeup and the right clothing and all the right accessories and everything that will make boys drool when they look at her.

The kind of look that makes Angela’s gaze fill with admiration as she begs to look at Sylvia’s closet.

But Angela is still 13. She doesn’t need to wear the kind of clothes that Sylvia does.

Even though she still puts on short dresses to go out and party, it never gets too out of hand. Sylvia makes sure of that.

She fought more than a couple guys for Angela, pressing her nails into his cheek whenever he decided to get up and get a drink.

She was basically a ghost, following the girl around.

But she also has her own life. Kinda.

She hates to say it, but it does kind of revolve around Dallas. If they’re broken up, if they’re together, if he’s in the cooler.

It determines what she does.

How she acts.

If she goes out and kisses some random guys at a party to make him jealous or if she goes to Buck’s and hangs out in his room above the bar.

If he’s in the cooler, she fucks around with some other guys to send a message.

‘You don’t control my life.’

And it works. Because he’ll get out and he’ll take back his necklace and his ring.

But that necklace will be right back on her neck and that ring right back on her finger in a few weeks.

She likes flaunting to other girls who want Dallas. Haha, look.

If it’s one of those days there isn’t nothing to do, she’ll go to work.

It’s a wonder she hasn’t been fired yet with how often she doesn’t come in, but for some reason the boss likes her. That reason being the two mounds on her chest and the dark red lipstick she wears every day, but still.

She’s a secretary. It’s real boring, but she gets some of the best gossip in town from the other girls at work.

She only ever comes in when she’s really desperate for money or when there’s genuinely nothing to do.

If she ever really needs money, there’s also the option she takes more often than not. Of dolling herself up to look above 16 and stopping by some of the sleaziest bars in town. She likes seeing if any of the guys who hang around joints like that would be willing to cough up a couple bucks for a good time.

She always makes rent on time.

She’d had to pull out all the stops, her batting eyes and biting lip and innocent crossing of arms that served as the best push up bra in the world, to get the apartment. He hadn’t wanted to rent to a woman.

But now that she has her own place, she’s not going to lose it.

Her and Dallas end up in screaming matches that get her thrown out of the bar most times, but she has somewhere to go to besides a cold park bench in the middle of the night.

She and Dallas aren’t good for each other. But it’s the closest thing she’s got to love.

And she always has a place to fall back on.

Sylvia loses her mind for the first time at 18 years old.

Just barely. She’d been 17 a month ago and everything had gone to shit.

A year and everything had gone and royally fucked itself up.

Because Dallas, her Dallas, had laid dead in the street with bullet wounds in his torso after he’d gone and tried to rob that stupid, stupid store.

Her mother’s was never there, her grandma’s gone, Dallas is gone, and now her mind is slipping away too.

She finds herself reckless. The cabinet in her kitchen that had had only 3 bottles of liquor a couple months ago was now so full she needs a string to keep it closed properly.

Her life was falling apart. She has no man. She’d gotten fired, finally, and now, Angela is showing up with a black eye and a grim face.

Sylvia knows she looks like shit. But she can also see in Angela’s expression that she’s taking it as more of a ‘dangerous beauty’ look.

Her hair is thrown in a bun that’s half falling out, and she hasn’t taken her makeup off in days. She’s got a spaghetti strap top on and no bra. She has a pair of gray shorts that are still needed to not overheat.

She also had a bottle of wine in one hand, but she sets that down easily when she opens the door to find Angela standing there.

Angela, who deserves a better role model than this.

“Sylvia.” Angela whines, and throws herself into the older girl’s arms.

“Hey there, girlie.” she says softly, “What happened?”

Angela had more tears streaming down her face when she says sorry.

Sylvia can hear the tone in her voice. She plays dumb anyway. “Sorry for what, hun?”

The girl is still sobbing, body shaking. “I got pregnant.”

Angela is 14 when she gets pregnant, just like Sylvia had been.

She’s struck with the sudden realization that, all those years ago, when she had told Tim she could be a better sister than he could ever dream of, she might’ve been lying.

“Oh. You stupid, stupid girl.” She says petting Angela’s hair and closing the door with her foot.

She’s gonna make sure Angela doesn’t have to lock herself in the bathroom with a bottle of Bowmore and a pack of Marlboros.

“How far along?” She asks, and Angela sobs.

“I don’t know!”

Sylvia shushes her and puts an arm around her shoulder. “Okay, baby. I’ll help ya.”

Because at least Sylvia can help Angie, even if she can’t help herself.

She gets them both to the kitchen and pulls out all five oranges she has in her fruit bowl, putting them in front of Angela while gathering some cinnamon and water.

“Eat.” she says, and Angela rips into the first orange viciously, her nail breaking through the peel and getting the orange inside, a short squirt of orange juice gets on her hand, which will no doubt be sticky later.

Sylvia sighs and sits at the table with the cinnamon she had mostly mixed into the water, or at least as much as she could with a spice with cinnamon. There’s still quite a bit of it floating around on top, powdery chunks of it.

Sylvia rolls the orange on the table before carefully peeling it and handing it to Angela, who mimics the process with her next orange.

Less than thirty minutes pass and the oranges are gone, just some surprisingly fragrant peels left on the table.

Sylvia mixes the cinnamon water again before handing it to Angela.

“Go slow. I know it tastes bad.”

Angela carefully takes a sip, swallowing before sticking her tongue out in disgust. “Ugh, what is that?”

“Cinnamon.”

Angela curls her lips before taking another sip.

The cinnamon drink takes less time for her to polish off, only a few minutes.

But that’s not enough for Sylvia, she needs to pull out all the stops. So she stands and grabs a bottle of cheap gin from her liquor cabinet and walks them both into the bathroom where she starts running a bath, the hottest the water will go. Which is surprisingly hot for an apartment building.

Once it’s full enough, she guides Angela in, even when she gasps at the temperature, biting her lip to keep the sounds of pain at bay.

Sylvia sits there by Angela’s side, just outside the bathtub, and she pours Angela gin.

She takes Angela’s hand when her stomach starts cramping up too badly to be coincidence and guides her out of the tub.

She has Angela sit on the toilet. She won’t let Angela leave behind a bloody stain. She won’t let Angela leave behind a stain at all.

She doesn’t want Angie locking herself in this bathroom cradling the thing for three days straight.

She squeezes Angela whenever it hurts and she flushes the toilet so Angela doesn’t have to.

Sylvia is there when Angela miscarries.

Sylvia is there when Angela is relieved.

Sylvia is there when Angela regrets.

Sylvia is there when Angela cries.

She’s there through all of it, holding Angela like she’s still a little girl drawing with crayons on the floor of her bedroom.

Because even if she can’t help herself, Sylvia can help Angela.