Archive of Our Own

“You deserve better than this place.”

Angela’s head snaps up at the sound of Sylvia. “What?”

They’re in the kitchen of the Shepard house, with its water and smoke-stained walls pressing in on them. Angela’s working on her homework, while Sylvia just has her feet kicked up on the table.

Sylvia sighs and lights up a cigarette. “You’re a good kid. You deserve out.”

Angela shrugs. “I’m fine with livin’ here.”

“Well, I ain’t. You deserve better than all this social game, rich-assholes, stupid shit.”

Angela doesn’t do anything to refute it. “Y’know, maybe one day we can leave together.”

Sylvia lets out a short laugh. She’s twelve years old, but she knows who she is. She’s Tulsa trash.

Her face is caked with too-heavy makeup and she’d taken in more cigarette smoke, liquor, and creepy touches than she has kindness.

Angela, on the other hand, lives up to her name. She does well in school (more than just in English class, unlike Sylvia. She can do fractions and long division like no one’s business. She’s smart as a whip with the type of ruthlessness that’ll bring her far in the world.)

“Keep thinking like that and the world’ll chew you up and spit you out. There ain’t hope in everyone.”

Angela bites her lip slightly. “I know that. You’re the one who told me. But you ain’t one of them dumb girls with nothing but their looks or a guy who doesn’t know how to live without bustin’ some heads.”

“Careful, that’s your brother your talking about there.”

Angela laughs and Sylvia smiles at the sound. It’s rare for her to hear that kind of laughter.

Don’t get her wrong, Angela’s seen some shit. Some real bad shit. She’s a Shepard, for Christ’s sake. But she’s also the kind of ‘untainted by stepfathers and men in candy stores and life and death’ type of good that Sylvia can’t be anymore.

She’s smart, with a sharp glint in her eyes that says she knows to punch low and bite.

But she’s also good enough to hide it under layers of wide-eyed innocence and a damn near perfect innocent girl routine that Sylvia can’t help but envy.

It’s hard to see anything but her age in her laugh, though. The type of laughter that moves her whole body, making her shoulders shake and head fly back.

For a moment she hears something like hope in Angela’s laugh, but she’d learned years ago the only thing hope does is get squished. She focuses on the smoke filling up her (probably too young for it) lungs. The pleasant burn that doesn’t leave any room for hope.

She almost stops, if only so the smoke doesn’t infect Angela.

Angela’s a good kid, and she deserves out.

Sylvia will never amount to anything more than another girl who lives and dies on the east side, putting all her effort into surviving and none into living for more than a few seconds at a time.

She doesn’t have softness in her. She certainly doesn’t radiate it in the way some of the Soc girls at school do.

She’s not someone’s future wife.

She’s Sylvia Alvarez. She’ll never amount to anything more. And she loves it.

The atmosphere of Angela’s room is electric.

They’re celebrating her tenth birthday, and Sylvia is finally making good on her promise of teaching Angela how to do makeup.

They’re sitting in front of a mirror on the floor. It’s slightly cracked at the top, but it’s barely noticeable from all the way down on the rug.

Angela is sitting in between Sylvia’s legs, basically buzzing with excitement.

“Stop moving, you’re gonna mess me up.” Sylvia says, jerking her leg sharply.

Her fingers move deftly through Angela’s hair, putting it in two long braids.

“How do you think I’d look with short hair?”

Sylvia looks up sharply, her eyes meeting mirror-her’s, before they flick down to Angela.

“What’s bringing this on?”

Angela shrugs halfway before dropping her shoulders down, remembering not to move. “One of my friends got a short haircut and it looks good on her.”

“What friend is this?” Sylvia asks.

“Sarah.”

Sylvia sighs, tying the braid she’d been working on with a small, green elastic before motioning for Angela to scoot up.

“Sarah may look good with her hair, but I’ve seen her. And she’s also a white girl with pin straight hair that’ll have grown way down to her mid-back by June.”

Angela pouts in a way she’s too old for. “Pout all you want, Angel. I’m not cutting your hair short.”

Sylvia reaches to the side, pulling a black, shiny makeup bag into Angela lap and unzipping it.

It’s full of shitty drugstore makeup, half of it stolen and the other half gotten for dirt cheap when it went on sale.

“Pick a product, any product.” Sylvia says with the fake-magician cadence that always makes Angela roll her eyes but laugh all the same.

Angela picks up a tube of lipstick. It’s the one Sylvia always has on, and she smiles. “This is lipstick.”

The cheap shiny gold decal had long since wiped off, the sticker also missing. “Can’t tell you the brand, but it’s the shade scarlet.”

Angela nods excitedly. “I know how to put this one on. It’s just like chapstick.”

Sylvia smiles. “You got it, hun.”

Angela carefully applies the lipstick, leaning so far forward she’s almost touching the mirror.

“I ever tell you about Christian?” she doesn’t know why she asks it.

Maybe it’s because Angela had gotten her period last month, and as soon as she starts wearing a bra, boys are going to look at her different. Sylvia wants Angela to be prepared.

For the dangerous stepfather that lurks in the corners and the man who swoops in to save you.

Angela rolls her eyes. “You mean that good-for-nothing boyfriend of yours?”

Sylvia feels her jaw drop as she sits up straighter. Angela’s finished applying lipstick. The shade looks a little different on her slightly lighter skin tone, but still good.

“He is not a good-for-nothing. He’s a good guy and he has a job.”

Angela looks straight into mirror-Sylvia’s eyes and says. “He is, too. You can’t see it over the goo goo eyes he always makes at you.”

It must be the mirror making her a lot bolder, and Sylvia cuffs her lightly on the back of the head.

“Please, girlie. You don’t know a thing about ‘im.”

“I know enough to know he’s the kind guy you’d tell me to poison with some soup.”

“Yeah, well, I’m older than you, it’s different. And he treats me like I’m older. He treats me real good.”

She has no doubt Angela knows exactly what she’s talking about, what with all those issues of Playboy her stepdad has laying about. But she isn’t gonna spell it out for the kid.

“Pass me the blush thing you’re touching right now.”

Angela passes the palette with three shades of blush back wordlessly, and Sylvia gets to work, picking the only one dark enough it’ll show up on Angela’s skin.

She’d stolen this one before she realized none of it would work on her.

“‘Sides, it ain’t like he’s the worst guy who’s ever wanted me. Only difference is he got me. Not every guy can be Romeo all the time. Especially not for girls like us.”

Angela snorts. “Yeah, right. That’s a nice way of putting it. It ain’t fair.”

She lifts her leg a little before kicking it out, almost making the mirror fall on them.

A single drawn Santa Claus decoration falls from the top of the mirror, fluttering to the floor.

Angela’d had it up ever since Halloween and she wouldn’t take it down until Valentine’s Day.

Sylvia sighs. “It ain’t. But it’s what we got. And it’s gotta be enough”

By the time she finishes the makeup on Angela, Sylvia wants nothing more than to wipe it off.

Angela looks just a little bit too much like Sylvia did when she broke into her grandmother’s makeup bag when she was nine.

Lipstick and powders and eyeshadow so thick it makes her look like one of the girls Sylvia sees at Buck’s bar. It would’ve made her want to sit down if they weren’t on the floor already.

She feels a pit of dread pool in her stomach but she smiles.

A smile highlighted by her scarlet lipstick, the powders that make the space under her eyes look brighter and gray eyeshadow, black eyeliner that helps show off the spark in her eye.

“You look pretty.” She says, wiping a bit of the lipstick from the edge of Angela’s mouth, accidentally smearing it a tiny bit.

Angela smiles and gets up, turning this way and that, leaning in to look at her face more closely in the mirror.

“I look like you.”

Sylvia’s stomach twists.

She does.

There’s a pounding knock on the door, and Sylvia knows who it is long before she gets up and looks through the window.

She knows she’ll just see Angela’s face there. With some new pre-teenager type of problem that’ll seem like the end of the world to her.

At least until Friday.

But she’s been blowing off Angela for a couple weeks now, and it isn’t fair to the kid. So she gets up off her ass and opens the door.

“Hey, Ang.”

Angela nails her with a hard look that an 11 year old really shouldn’t be able to pull off.

She pushes past Sylvia and into the house, looking around with something like approval in her eye. But there’s disgust on the rest of her face.

“Sickeningly sweet and suburban, huh?”

Sylvia rolls her eyes. “C’mon, he works as an electrician and he comes from our side of town. This is the closest to high society I’ll ever get.”

Angela snorts. “I think you’re getting pretty close by becoming his fuckin’ trophy wife.”

“Mouth.” Sylvia chides lightly.

Angela ignores her. “What’s that smell?”

Sylvia smiles. “Either the cochinito on the counter or the snicker-doodles in the oven.”

“Trophy wife.”

“What was that?”

“Oh, come on, Sylvia! You’re making’ this guy snicker-doodles, for Christ’s sake.”

Sylvia feels her shoulders raise defensively, hunching in on herself. “He’s Irish, he doesn’t like cochinito!”

“It’s sweet bread. I just— I don’t want you to be married off to this guy before you hit sixteen because that means I’ll lose you.” Angela bursts, and Sylvia takes her in, then. All of her.

From the slightly frizzy hair to the acne-ridden forehead. The way the training bra straps (which she can only see because that shirt really is perilously low for a pre-teen) is digging into her shoulder tightly.

The way sh looks awkward, all long limbs with a torso that hasn’t caught up yet and bony arms and legs.

Sylvia sighs and she wants to come out and say everything right there, but she grabs Angela by her (much too skinny) wrist, and pulls her into the kitchen.

“Angie.” She says, seriously.

“Sylv.”

She bites her lip with the weight of the confession weighing on her shoulders.

“I’m pregnant.”

Angela’s mouth hangs open with shock and she leans back, resting her weight on the table as she scrubs her face with one hand.

“So you’ve gotta marry him?”

Sylvia wants very badly to say yes. She wants it so much it hurts, to be able to say she’s getting married and finally getting a place of her own.

But she doesn’t want to be a mother. She doesn’t want to be a woman, stuck in between cochinito and snicker-doodles.

“No. He doesn’t know yet.”

“Just wait until the first couple months go by. You’re gonna be shocked when you find out it gets pretty damn noticeable.” Angela says, still seemingly reeling.

Sylvia almost chokes on the next words. “There are… ways to get rid of the problem.”

Angela eyes widen in shock and her throat bobs. “So, you’re gonna do it? You’re gonna… get rid of it? What’s Christian gonna think?”

Sylvia shrugs. “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

There’s the chime of an alarm somewhere in the kitchen. It only beeps twice, but Sylvia grabs the two tea towels from where they sit on the counter, bringing the tray of cookies out of the oven.

The smell of it reminds her of homemaking, and it doesn’t get her in the mood for any sweets.

She drops them on top of the stove and goes over to the cochinito, grabbing one easily from their plate and pressing it into Angela’s hand.

“Go home. I have everything under control.”

Angela nods, but she seems doubtful, like she’s not 100% convinced. “Okay. If you need a place to stay… Tim will always let you crash on our couch. And Curly doesn’t get a say.”

Sylvia laughs, brushing a piece of hair behind Angela’s ear, kissing her temple before sending her through the door.

Right before she starts her walk home, Angela turns, “And if you chicken out, I think I’d make a pretty good auntie.”

The second the door is closed and Sylvia can be sure Angela is at least down the street, she turns back to the kitchen.

Not to get any desserts, though.

She beelines straight for the cupboard, resting her fingers on the knob that will solve all her problems for just a few beats too long. Thinking of Angela.

Of the great auntie.

Of the life she could have.

She swings open the cupboard and grabs a bottle of Bowmore and a pack of Marlboros with a heavy resolve.

She’s gonna get rid of this thing.

That same heavy resolve carries her up to the bathroom where she sits on the floor, locking the door easily.

She catches a look at herself in the amber liquid of the Bowmore.

The scent of cinnamon and melted sugar reaches even up to the inside of the bathroom, thickening the air with a sweetness so cloying it almost makes her choke.

It almost makes her chicken out.

For just a second, she reaches for the faucet of the tub.

But she redirects, popping open the bottle and taking long sip. The scent of cinnamon sugar is easily forgotten among the squirming feeling in her stomach.

Sylvia can’t take the pitying stares of everyone she knows when she tells them of Dallas Winston.

She can’t take people clicking their tongues and saying “poor girl” as soon as she walks away from the conversation.

Like it’s a death sentence, to be in love with Dallas.

The only person who doesn’t judge her is Angela. Sweet Angela. Only twelve, and already standing in front of that same old cracked mirror, doing her makeup with a dress that cuts off above her mid thighs and dips below her collar bones.

Not that Sylvia really has any moral high ground, her outfit is worse.

But it’s weird, seeing Angela act like a grown woman.

She sure doesn’t look like one. Not even with those stilts she puts on her feet, wobbling around.

“Sylvia? Why’re you in love with Dallas?”

She’s caught off guard by the question, and finds herself shocked that she doesn’t immediately have an answer. It’s not that she doesn’t know, she just can’t put it into words.

“Dunno. Just the feeling, I guess.”

Angela hums as she dips her brush into the tin of blush Sylvia had gotten her for her last birthday. “What type of feeling? A good one or a bad one or just a real muddled-up one?”

Sylvia can’t answer. It’s euphoric, in short. But it also rips her apart.

“Why’re you askin’ me all this anyway?”

Angela doesn’t have to apply blush, the skin of her neck gets darker and Sylvia smiles the shark’s smile that usually gets people to screw off.

Angela tried to replicate it, first time she saw Sylvia do it.

“Nothin’, I just… I think I might be in love.”

Sylvia squeals and gets up, almost tripping in her haste to go over to Angela, standing behind her with one hand on each shoulder.

“I knew it.”

Angela just leans in, applying mascara, but she’s got this big, goofy smirk that says Sylvia’s right.

“Who?”

Angela sighs and turns towards Sylvia, her lashes highlighted and giving her this nice, doe-eyed look that would make any man fall head over heels.

“Davy Collins.”

Sylvia’s smile drops slightly. “As in like, David Collins? David Collins who’s dad owns a successful tire business David Collins?”

Angela seems oblivious to Sylvia’s revelation, just continuing on with a short shriek, hitting Sylvia’s shoulders lightly. “I know. He’s got this whole business to his name and he’s focused on me. Angela Shepard. I almost couldn’t believe it at first, it was like... I dunno.”

“Too good to be true.” Sylvia finishes, and Angela snaps her fingers.

“Yes!” she seems like she’s about to keep talking about it, if the smirk that hasn’t worn off is any indication. “Sylvia, are you okay?”

Sylvia nods, sitting back down on the bed, knowing Angela will follow her. “Yeah, hun, I’m fine. It’s just that I’ve dated a lot of Davy Collins’ in my time. There was that Fletcher boy, and that Joshua Greenwood and Matthew Armani. It never ends well.”

Angela’s brow slowly grows more furrowed. “But those are all Soc boys. Davy ain’t a Soc.”

“He’s toeing the line, babe.”

Her face slowly shifts down towards a frown and she presses her lips together to spread the lipstick. A nervous habit she’d picked up from Sylvia.

“So? That doesn’t mean anything. He likes me. I know he does because he acts like it.”

Sylvia smiles. “That’s how they getcha.”

Angela’s eyes turn from the cold, considering look to the furious spark so fast it almost surprises Sylvia.

She stand up in a flash and turns on Sylvia.

“No. He likes me. You’re not gonna ruin this for me by telling me he doesn’t. Just because none of the guys you’ve ever dated before this one have liked you doesn’t mean the same is true for me.” She pokes a finger into Sylvia’s chest and she’s quick to slap it away. It takes all her self-restraint not to slap Angela next.

“We’re gonna go on a date and I’m gonna be happy and you’re not gonna ruin it with your paranoid horror stories! You don’t know who you’re talking about. You don’t even know what you’re talking about!”

Sylvia can’t even muster up any words after that display, sitting on the bed as Angela stomps away. Her heels echo loudly through the halls—obnoxious, sharp, perfect.

The daze only lasts a few seconds before Sylvia is up and storming to the doorway. “Angela!” she calls and she hears the clicking footsteps get faster.

She curses under her breath and basically runs down the hall, throwing open the door just in time to see what was supposed to be her and Angela’s ride to the party drive away with Angela in the front, giggling with a smirking Davy Collins.

Sylvia has half a mind to let her figure it out for herself, the hard way.

But there’s always been this annoying sense of responsibility that comes with Angela. Makes it damn near impossible to detach herself.

She storms over to Tim’s car, knowing he won’t mind too much if she says he was chasing after his sister towards a party.

She breaks more than a couple traffic laws on the way there, but Davy must break more, because by the time she gets to Buck’s bar, Angela is sitting on his lap, twirling her hair and giggling.

Sylvia almost goes over and breaks it up right then and there.

But the fear of Angela saying something that won’t leave a surface-level scratch that can be written off as stupidity stops her.

Instead, Sylvia waits.

Dallas isn’t downstairs, moving all about the bar like he could’ve been, which Sylvia finds herself incredibly grateful for. The last thing she needs is to find herself sucked into a conversation with him.

She watches Davy and Angela through the smokescreen of red light and cigarettes, slowly sipping from her glass that has nothing more than Coca Cola in it. She watches the phases of them.

Phase one, where they’re as lovey dovey as they were in the car. Phase two, he becomes a little too disinterested and Angela starts competing for his attention, hard. Phase three, a Soc girl comes up to them, strikes up a conversation.

And finally, phase four. Angela is left on her ass with nothing but a dress too short, a neckline too low, and big doe eyes glancing around the room helplessly.

Sylvia remembers being that girl. Putting on a show for that Fletcher boy and Joshua Greenwood and Matthew Armani. All the while, their eyes were on the girl just behind her, who was wearing a decent-length dress and makeup that isn’t so heavy it should be classed as face paint.

Sylvia slides into Davy’s unoccupied barstool seamlessly, offering Angela the cup of soda.

Angela looks at her miserably. “This got any liquor in it?”

“If it did, I wouldn’t be givin’ it to ya.”

Angela huffs. “Twelve backwards is twenty-one.”

Sylvia snorts. “Yeah, well, you gotta wait for me to slip you some liquor ‘til you’re at least fourteen.”

“Yeah.” Angela sighs. “You were right. O’ sorry. He was just a stupid guy, you tell me about them all the time. Idiots who think their dicks are big enough to make up for it. And I fell for it.”

Sylvia pats her shoulder sympathetically. “Happens to the best of us.”

She looks around, seeing Buck occupied with breaking up a fight over by a pool table and ducks behind the bar for just a second, popping back up with a bottle of beer.

“Hey, I know I said no to liquor, but I never said anything about beer.”

Angela gains a mischievous smirk—a Curly Shepard special she’d lifted right off of him. She holds her hand out and easily pops open the bottle with the swiss army knife Sylvia hands her.

She takes a sip, slowly. Before immediately spitting half of it out and letting the other half drip from her mouth.

“Ugh! People actually like this?”

Sylvia laughs, and nods. “It’s an acquired taste.”

“I don’t think I wanna acquire it.” Angela says, lips still curled in disgust.

“Yeah. You wanna go home?”

Angela nods gratefully and gets up. Right before either of them can go anywhere, though, Sylvia speaks again.

“Oh, and Angela?” She reaches out and grabs Angela’s face, digging her nails in just enough that they’ll leave a red mark but won’t break skin. “Don’t you ever say I don’t know what I’m talking about again, savvy?”

Angela nods frantically and Sylvia lets go with a smile, grabbing Angela’s arm and walking them both back out to Tim’s car.

When she drives, Angela’s eyes are locked in the rearview mirror, smushing her lips together to spread the lipstick.

They leave behind a lot that night. 

Buck’s place, Davy Collins, and the version of Angela who believed in love as anything more than a hoax or a tool.

For the first time in what must be years, Angela and Sylvia are hanging out at Sylvia’s place.

Because, for the first time in what must be years, “Sylvia’s place” isn’t the couch of a friend or a cramped room above a bar she shares with her on and off boyfriend.

It’s like a little housewarming party for just the two of them. Sylvia had had the other girls over an hour or so before Angela. Evie and Sandy and Kathy and Mabel and Priscilla and Daphne.

It had been a proper girl’s night.

But now, it really is night, and Sylvia can relax with just the one other person she trust in this whole world in the house with her.

The twin bed is just big enough to fit the both of them, sharing a bag of chips between them.

“I like your place.” Angela says. For once, she doesn’t have any makeup on.

“I do, too.”

Angela turns to face the ceiling. “Are you gonna break up with Dallas?”

Sylvia snorts. “Why would I?”

She bites her lip, “Well, I just thought you were datin’ him ‘cause you needed a place to stay.”

Sylvia shrugs. “I dunno. I like him. He’s… good to me.”

“So that’s what you call good now, huh? Screaming and him gettin’ himself thrown into the cooler and then cheatin’ ‘til he gets back out?”  

Sylvia sighs. “You don’t get it, Ang.”

Angela sits up, looking straight ahead to the vanity, which is placed in front of the bed. Sylvia’s grandmother had always preached about not having a mirror face the bed, but there isn’t much else place for it to go in this room.

“You’re gonna end up hurt again.”

Sylvia crosses her legs at the ankle. “I was gonna get hurt the second I fell for him.”

Angela brings her knees up to her chest, effectively transforming herself into a ball of awkward, jutting elbows and knees. “So it’s okay to stay with someone, if you know it’ll hurt when you break up. Because you know?”

Sylvia furrows her brow and slowly starts sitting up. “What’s all this about?”

“I’ve been datin’ this guy. It ain’t love but it’s somethin’ close and I don’t know what to do. It’s gonna end up hurting, but how am I s’posed to throw him away like that?”

Angela isn’t looking at her, she’s staring straight into the vanity mirror. This one doesn’t have any cracks, but it does have a lipstick stain on it that Evie had put there on a dare and thin coat of dark eyeshadow from when the girls screwed around and did makeup. The low light makes them both look like nothing more than shadows from this far, only the right side of Sylvia’s face illuminated at all from the bedroom window.

“You just... do.” Sylvia says lamely.

Angela lets out a huff of laughter. “How can you say that when you can’t even get rid of Dallas?”

Sylvia leans closer to her, staring at them both in the mirror. She really wants a cigarette.

“I don’t want you to find yourself a Dallas, hun. I don’t want you to chase after him so hard your legs hurt only for him to still turn away when you collapse. I don’t want you to two-time him when he gets locked up because it feels like your gettin’ closer to him. I don’t want you sleepin’ in a dirty room above a bar and sittin’ on a hard barstool praying to a God that ain’t there he didn’t get caught up because he doesn’t like you sleepin’ in his room without him. And if you get kicked out, well, that’s the end of the line.”

Angela puts her head on her knees. “I know.”

“You’re too young for that, anyway. Focus on school.”

“You got with Christian when you were my age.” Angela says, and it’s almost an accusation. If not for the fact she doesn’t pick her head up.

“That was different.” Sylvia grabs the bag of chips from between them and rolls it up, leaning to the side to put it on the floor. “I thought he’d make me a wife, back then.”

She catches a glimpse of the mirror when she’s sitting back up. The bedroom window is lighting up the side of Angela’s face now. For a second, it knocks the breath out of her, the way it might as well be littler her, sitting up in bed with Christian laying next to her, his arm thrown over her lap as she holds her head in her hands.

She swallows heavily and leans forward, letting all the light hit her face.

Sylvia pulls Angela into her side, laying them down, Angela’s head resting on her shoulder.

It would get uncomfortable real quick, but she’d move them once Angela is asleep.

Maybe she’d also find another place to put that mirror. A little to the left or on the wall next to the door.

Not that it’ll stop it from reflecting.

When everything comes right down to it, it all comes back to love.

Christian comes back to love and Dallas comes back to love and even those guys she cheated with comes back to love.

It’s always about the one soft, golden part of her she can never fucking stamp out.

She was such a goddamn dreamer it made her want to laugh hysterically.

She’d thought maybe if she made one more batch of cookies, it’d be more than a transaction to Christian. If she made Dal jealous one more time, he’d stay for that little bit longer. If she pretended it was someone else creaking the bed beneath her, maybe it’d be more than rent money to the sleazes she slept with when she was really hard for cash.

And it always burnt her up.

Christian, Dallas, any one of the bastards she’d let stick a hand up her shirt.

So she tried stamping love from Angela before she could gain a weakness.

Because Christian hates her and Dallas is dead and she’s too stricken to do anything but buy some more liquor.

It had been weeks since he died and it seems like everyone forgot she existed. She doesn’t blame them, that Ponyboy kid is a much bigger worry, if she’s being honest.

But the only person that’s even fucking stopped by is Angela.

Sure, if she was walking down the street, people would say their condolences. But it’s like just because they’d been broken up when he died their history meant nothing.

She drowned herself in liquor until the bills came and then she mustered up enough money the only way she knows how.

Keeping her skirt short, her top cut low, her hair tied, and her makeup heavy.

And then she went out on the streets and she prowled.

The one light has been Angela, the girl stops by pretty much every day to check on her.

She has a key by now, which is why Sylvia sits up so fast when there’s a knock.

It can’t be Angela.

She takes a couple stumbling steps to the door and swings it open.

Angela is standing there. She looks a mess, but Sylvia is sure she looks more so. She ushers Angela, who’s on the edge of tears, into the apartment, setting down her bottle of wine and asking what’s wrong.

Angela is crying and it sets off every alarm bell Sylvia did and didn’t know she possessed.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” She frantically checking for a fever, an injury, an explanation.

“I got pregnant.”

Angela Shepard is 14.

Angela Shepard is pregnant.

And Sylvia Alvarez has failed.

She doesn’t even consider any other option—there is no other option, Sylvia takes Angela by the shoulders and sits her down at the kitchen table and hands her every orange in the place. “Eat.”

She makes makes some cinnamon water that’s a bitch to mix, waiting until Angela is done with the oranges, hands and mouth sticky with the juice.

When Angela takes the first sip, she gags slightly, but Sylvia just holds her hand. “I know.”

Angela lets out a sob.

“Why can’t you just give me some whiskey or push me down the stairs and be done with it?”

Sylvia’s face sets in it’s sadness, and she bites her lip. “Because that’s a real lonely way to go.”

Angela cries, but she drinks the cinnamon water.

And she lets Sylvia guide her into the bath that might as well be scalding, and she lets Sylvia give her gin. She lets herself be taken care of in the way Sylvia wishes she had been.

Angela lets Sylvia sit her on the toilet and when it passes, she sobs. She sobs in such a heart-wrenching way Sylvia feels the loss of her own just as strongly as she did four years ago.

She sobs until she can’t anymore, and then she passes out. Sylvia guides her to the floor. She’s still a little too drunk to be able to carry Angela to the bedroom right now.

She looks down at the girl, who’s curled up on the bath mat, with no bottoms besides a heavy coating of blood and a t-shirt.

Then, she looks at herself. In the bathroom mirror.

Her fingers curl around the edge of the sink as her life passes in flashes.

Grandmother, mother, half-sister, stepfather, Christian, Dallas, baby, baby, blood. Curled up on the floor of Christian’s bathroom, which had no bath mat to keep her off the cold tile.

She grabs the brush she uses to scrub under her nails and she smashes it against the glass.

The mirror shatters, but no more than a couple pieces fall into the sink. She almost lets herself cry, seeing the broken up shards of herself. Each a different age and each the same fucking story.

Love.

She takes in a shuddering breath and wipes at her eyes, ducking down to bring water to her mouth. She drinks water until she can think a little more clearly and then she leans down, with a washcloth and gently wipes away most of the blood from Angela, so it wouldn’t be just another reminder when she wakes up.

She steels herself, slotting her arms under the sleeping form, and lifts.

With a little bit of maneuvering and a couple near-misses with doorframes, Angela is laid on Sylvia’s bed, a blanket tucked around her.

She brushes the hair back from her face, over and over, sitting down at the edge of the bed and combing through it with her fingers.

Just gently enough Angela won’t wake up.

When she’s finally done it enough to take in a breath that isn’t broken up and hurting, she stands.

Pausing at the door, she turns to look at Angela.

Angela, who looks so young in her sleep.

Angela, who almost fucked up her life in such a major way Sylvia can’t help but be mad.

And then, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, perched on the vanity that had long since been moved to the space next to the window.

She swallows down the bile that rises to her throat, walking over and ripping down the curtain rod from the window, haphazardly throwing the sheer purple fabric over the mirror, making sure it doesn’t knock down anything on the vanity.

She doesn’t stop back in the bathroom to clean up the glass. That’s a tomorrow problem.

She makes a beeline straight to her liquor cabinet, throwing it open and damn near throwing up.

The grain of the wooden cabinet scratches her as her throat bobs, taking in the sight before her.

Her.

It’s all her.

Staring back at her. Whether it be to a backdrop of amber or the dark green of a wine bottle, or, when she’s convinced the universe hates her, the clearness of her cheap vodka.

She closes the cabinet without grabbing any, sick to her stomach as she goes to lay down on the couch.

Staring at the one thing that won’t stare back. The ceiling.

Sliding her eyes shut with more effort than going to sleep should take, she prays she doesn’t dream.