Jessica Perot, November 21st, 2018, Laurel, Montana
The Perot kitchen smelled like cinnamon and burnt sugar, because Gina had attempted a pie three hours early "for practice" and the first one had not been edible to anyone but Dani. The second sat cooling on the windowsill, golden and intact, while Gina banished herself to the living room to "let it cool," which meant she was watching a cooking competition with the volume too low and pretending not to listen through the wall.
Which left the three of them at the kitchen table.
Jess sat with her back to the window, a mug of cocoa going cold between her hands. Dani was sprawled in the chair across from her, boots up on a third chair, lip ring catching the overhead light, a forkful of the ruined practice pie halfway to her mouth. And Laurel sat between them, on the bench against the wall, her knees drawn up, wearing the cashmere sweater Ana had bought her with the sleeves pulled over her hands.
Nobody had said the thing yet.
They'd said everything around the thing. They'd talked about the stairwell. Jess had recounted it to Dani in breathless fragments.
But the thing sat at the table with them anyway. Patient. Waiting.
"So we're doing this," Dani said finally, setting down her fork. She said it the way she said everything, no warm-up. "The three of us. We're a thing."
"We're a thing," Laurel echoed, quiet.
Jess felt her heart do something complicated in her chest. "I've never— I don't actually know how this works. Logistically. Like, are there rules? Do we—" She gestured vaguely between the three of them, hands fluttering. "Is there a guide or something?"
"There's no manual," Dani said. "I told Laurel that yesterday. We'll have to figure it out ourselves."
"That's a deeply unsatisfying answer for a person who likes schedules."
"I know it is. That's why I'm enjoying it." Dani grinned, but it softened almost immediately, the bravado peeling back to show something more careful underneath. "Look. I'm not gonna pretend I've done this before either. I haven't. I just know that I love her—" a nod at Laurel "—and I'm pretty sure I'm falling for you, Perot, God help me, and the only thing that's ever blown up in my life is when I pretend I don't feel things. So... I'm not pretending."
The kitchen went quiet. Through the wall, a TV chef screamed about underseasoning.
Laurel reached out from inside her sweater-sleeves and found both of their hands at once, Dani's rough knuckles, Jess's cold fingers, and held them on the table between the three of them, a small triangle of skin and warmth.
"Okay," Laurel said. "Then I want to say something, and I need you both to not interrupt, because I've gotten really good at saying hard things this week and I don't want to lose the streak."
"The streak," Dani said.
"Dani." Laurel shot her a look.
"Sorry. Going. Quiet."
Laurel breathed in. Jess watched her gather herself, watched the way her jaw set with the particular stubbornness that meant she was about to be braver than she felt.
"I'm leaving," Laurel said. "After January. After I turn eighteen. I'm going back to California with Dani. That's the plan. I can't stay here, in this town, in that house, with him. I'll die here. I mean that literally." Her voice didn't shake, which was somehow worse than if it had. "And I want that. I want California and the ocean and a life where I get to be a person. I want it with Dani."
Jess's stomach dropped through the floor. She knew this. Of course she knew this. She'd known it since the night Dani showed up at the library, had filed it away under things I will deal with later, and now later was sitting at the kitchen table looking at her with brown eyes full of apology.
"And I want you," Laurel said, turning to Jess. "I want you too. And I don't know how those two things fit together. I don't have a plan for it. You have your mom here, and your senior year, and your life, and I'm not going to ask you to torch all of it to follow me across the country for some—"
"Don't," Jess said. The word came out rougher than she meant it. "Don't do the thing where you decide what I'd want before I get to want it. You did that for three weeks and look how that went."
Laurel's mouth closed.
Jess looked down at their joined hands. At Dani's, at Laurel's, at her own. The thing she'd been avoiding, the thing she'd known was coming, was finally here, and it turned out the inside of it was softer than she'd feared and harder at the same time.
"I don't know what happens in January either," Jess said slowly. "I don't know if I follow you, or if I stay and we do the long-distance disaster, or if this whole thing falls apart the second there's two thousand miles in it. I genuinely don't know." She lifted her eyes. "But I know I'd rather have you both now, even knowing it has an expiration date I can't see yet, than spend the next six weeks protecting myself from a goodbye that might not even hurt the way I think it will. I'm done protecting myself out of things.”
Laurel laughed, helplessly.
"That's grim," Dani said, "but I respect it."
"So that's the plan," Jess said. "The plan is there's no plan. The plan is we have this, for however long this gets to be this, and we don't waste it being scared of the part we can't control."
"We're going to need a better motto than that," Dani said.
"It's a work in progress."
Laurel took a slow breath and pulled both their hands up and pressed them to her lips, Dani's, then Jess's.
"Okay," Laurel whispered. "No plan. I can do no plan.”
Ana Yankowski, Laurel, Montana, October 30th, 2015
The house was at its worst when it was empty.
People who saw the Yankowski compound from the road assumed the opposite. They assumed a house that size would be unbearable when it was full, when Olivia was holding court in the dining room with donors who laughed too loud at her jokes, when Jared was working a room with his hand on every shoulder, when the caterers were clattering in the kitchen and the foyer smelled like flowers and wealth. They assumed the silence would be a relief from it all.
It wasn't. The silence was the worst part. Because in the silence, the house stopped pretending to be anything other than what it was, and so did she.
Ana was sitting on the floor of her bedroom with her back against the bed frame, knees drawn up, still in her cheer practice clothes from that afternoon. She hadn't turned on the overhead light. The only illumination came from the desk lamp and the blue wash of dusk through the window, and it made the pale blue walls look faded and grey.
Olivia was in Helena. Jared was at the Elks Lodge, or said he was. And Felisity had just left.
Felisity had not left quietly.
She had stood in the doorway twenty minutes ago in her ripped jeans and her hoodie with the sleeves shoved up, and she had looked right through every line of defense Ana had ever put up.
You ruined her, Felisity had said. Do you even get that? You took Jess… Jess, who would've walked into traffic for you… and you fed her to the wolves so you wouldn't have to be looked at for who you are for even a single second. And you didn't even flinch.
You're turning into them, Felisity had said, then Felisity had left to go to Jake's, because Felisity always left to go to Jake's now, and the front door had echoed through the foyer, and the house had gone back to being empty, and Ana had slid down to the floor and stayed there.
She kept waiting to feel it. The thing Felisity wanted her to feel. The guilt that was supposed to arrive like a tide and pull her under and drown her into a better person.
It wasn't coming.
And that was the part she couldn't say to Felisity, because Felisity wanted her to be sorry, and she wasn't sorry, she was something worse than sorry. She was relieved. She had taken the one true thing she had ever felt and she had set it on fire to keep herself warm, and she would do it a hundred more times, and she knew that about herself now the way you knew the color of your own eyes.
Ana pulled her knees in tighter.
There was a part of her, a small part, a childish part, that understood she was standing at a crossroads. That she could still, right now, walk into school tomorrow and tell the truth. I kissed her. It was me. Let them say what they want. Let it cost what it costs. She could be honest and ruined, or dishonest and safe, and she had until morning to choose which kind of person she was going to be for the rest of her life.
She thought about her father's hands on her.
She thought about the way he taught her, without ever saying it out loud, that the only power a girl had in a house like this was the power to be wanted and to make wanting work for her. That softness got you eaten. That honesty was a luxury for people who could afford it. That you got what you needed by managing what other people felt, by being the thing they wanted to see, by giving a little of the surface so they never went looking for the rest.
He had taught her that the body was a currency and the heart was a liability. He had taught her in the dark and she had learned it so thoroughly that she could no longer remember a version of herself that hadn't known it.
So when she searched for the guilt and found nothing, maybe that was why. Maybe the guilt had been spent already, years ago, on something else, and there was none left over for Jess.
Ana stood up. Her legs were stiff from the uncomfortable floor. She crossed to the mirror over her dresser and turned on the light beside it and looked at herself.
I'm sorry, Jess, she thought, watching the stranger in the mirror who had her face. I'm sorry that I'm not sorry.
"Okay," Ana said to her reflection, out loud, in the empty house.
The reflection smiled back with all its teeth, and didn't flinch, and Ana turned off the light.
Ana Yankowski, Laurel, Montana, April 9th, 2017
She found Felisity in the kitchen at eleven on a Sunday morning, which was a small miracle, because Felisity was almost never in the house anymore. She had a duffel bag on the counter and was packing it with the contents of the fridge—not snacks, food, real food, the rotisserie chicken Olivia's housekeeper had bought, a block of cheese, half a loaf of bread, two yogurts—with the furtive efficiency of someone stealing supplies for a siege.
"Are you… robbing us?" Ana said, leaning in the doorway.
Felisity didn't look up. "Jake's between paychecks."
"Jake is twenty-five."
"And?"
"And he should be able to buy his own food."
Felisity zipped the bag with a violence that ended the topic. She was seventeen now and she had stopped dyeing her hair entirely, so the bottle-blonde had grown out into a long, dark, neglected ombré, and she had gotten thinner in the way that didn't look on purpose.
"Stay for the afternoon," Ana said, and she heard how it came out, too fast, too bare, the kid voice leaking through the bitch voice, and she hated it. "Mom's not home. Dad's golfing. We could just—I don't know. Watch your stupid game. The one you've beaten nine times."
"Ana."
"I'll watch it for a tenth. Stay."
For a second something flickered in Felisity's face. For a second Ana thought she'd won.
Then Felisity's phone buzzed on the counter, and she looked at it, and her whole body did the thing Ana had watched it do for two years now, the small recalibration, the dimming, the way a plant turns toward a light even when the light is killing it.
"I have to go," Felisity said. "Jake gets weird when I'm gone too long."
"Then let him get weird."
"Ana."
"I never see you anymore." It came out as an accusation because Ana didn't know how to make it come out as anything else; she had filed down all her other tools years ago. "You're in this house, what, four nights a month? And when you are here you're packing a bag to leave again. He's got you on a leash, Lis. You know that, right? You're smart enough to—"
"Don't." Felisity's voice cracked like a branch. "Don't you dare lecture me about leashes. You. While you're still on dad's. "
"That's not the same."
"It's exactly the same." Felisity slung the duffel over her shoulder. "You found a way to survive and I found a way to survive. Mine has a pulse, at least. Mine listens to me. When I talk to Jake, he actually… He looks at me. Do you understand that? He looks at me like I'm a person. Nobody in this house has looked at me like I'm a person since I was eight."
The since I was eight landed in the kitchen and sat there, radioactive, and they both stepped around it the way they had learned to step around everything.
"He hurts you," Ana said quietly.
Felisity laughed, a horrible little exhale with no joy in it. "Everybody hurts me, A. At least Jake feels bad about it after." She adjusted the bag's strap. "That's more than I can say for this place."
Ana wanted to say so many things. She wanted to say I miss you, which was true and useless. She wanted to say you were the only person who ever defended me and now you won't even stay for an afternoon.
She wanted to say I know why you let a controlling man way older than you take you away. I know exactly why. Because it felt like a choice. Because at least Jake's cage you walked into yourself.
But she had spent two years turning herself into a person who couldn't say true things in the open, and the skill, it turned out, didn't switch off when you wanted it to. She had built the armor so well that she had welded it shut.
So instead she said, "Take the yogurts, then. The good ones are in the back."
Felisity paused. Looked at her sister for a long moment, and in that look there was everything they couldn't say, the whole shared catastrophe of being Yankowski girls, the way they'd been raised to be assets and abused into silence and then left to figure out, alone and separately, how to keep breathing inside the machine.
"You should get out, A," Felisity said softly. "When you can. Eighteen. Whatever it takes. Don't—" Her voice wavered. "Don't end up needing a Jake. Don't end up needing anyone the way I need him. It's not love, not all the time, at least. It's just— it's the first door I could find."
"Then find a better door."
"There aren't better doors. Not for girls like us." Felisity smiled, and for one second it was the old smile.
Then she was gone, through the foyer, out the front door, and into a beat-up car that idled at the bottom of the long gravel drive. Ana stood alone in the enormous kitchen with the half-empty refrigerator and listened to the house go quiet again.
She put the good yogurts back in the front, where Felisity could've reached them, even though Felisity was already gone.
A N A
This is the part she cannot date.
This sits outside the calendar. This is not a memory the way the others are memories; it is more like a smell that gets into the walls, that you stop noticing until a certain heat brings it back, and then it is everywhere, and then it is the only thing.
It is cologne, cologne mixed with aftershave. It is always, first, the cologne—woodsy and expensive and applied in a quantity that means a room smells like him before he is in it, that means you have a few seconds of warning if you are paying attention. The cologne is the first thing and the worst thing because the cologne is the part that comes for her now, years later and rooms away, on a stranger in a store, in the soap aisle, in the back of a car—the cologne arrives and her body leaves before her mind can stop it.
That is the other thing she cannot explain to anyone: how she learned to leave.
She was small. She knows she was small because in the memory the ceiling is very far away and the light fixture has a particular shape she has not seen since they remodeled, which would make her—what, eight? nine?—but it cannot only be then, because there is also a version where she is bigger, where she understands more, where the leaving is a practiced thing she does on purpose instead of a thing that happens to her. So it is not one memory. It is a smear of them, laid over each other like transparencies, all the same and none of them dateable, a single endless afternoon that happened on a hundred different afternoons.
She learned to take herself out of her body. That is how she would describe it if she ever described it, which she never will. There is the body, down there, doing what the body does, being what it is for, being the only currency a girl has in a house like this—and there is Ana, up by the light fixture, watching, far away, because if she watched enough she could learn the rules, and if she learned the rules she could manage it.
That is where she learned the smile. Up by the ceiling. She learned that if her face did the right thing, it ended faster.
She learned that if she made the wanting easy, made herself pleasant, made herself the thing he wanted to see, then there was less of the other part, the part with the silences and the corrections. She learned that vulnerability got you eaten and performance got you through, and she learned it from the only teacher she had, in the only classroom that mattered, and she was such a good student. She was always such a good student.
Afterward there was a routine. There was always, afterward, the gentleness, which was worse than all of it. The arm around the shoulder. The voice that called her baby girl and his good girl and said you're my favorite, you know that, you're the only one who understands me, like she had chosen this, like they were partners in something, like she was complicit. The candy or the new phone or the trip, later. The buying. She understood the buying so completely that when she walked into a store with her mother's Amex and put expensive things in other people's hands, some part of her up by the ceiling always whispered: you know what this is. You know exactly what this is. You learned it here.
She does not remember when because there is no when. There is only the cologne and the ceiling and the smile and the buying, repeating, a loop with no beginning, a thing that simply is the texture of her, the way another person might have a happy childhood as their texture, as the thing underneath everything else.
Felisity got it too. She knows that the way you know a thing you have never been told—from the bruises and the door of Felisity's room that locked from the inside. And their mother. Their mother got it longest of all, which is the only explanation Ana has ever found for Olivia Yankowski, for the coldness, for the way she looks at her daughters like liabilities, like evidence, like things that know too much. Their mother survived it by deciding never to be a girl again, by becoming a fortress, by building a brand of family values around the very house where the family was being eaten, and standing in front of cameras and pointing at people like Jess, like Laurel, and calling them the danger.
Their mother survived by becoming a wall. Felisity survived by walking into a smaller cage that at least pretended to like her. And Ana survived by going up to the ceiling and learning the smile and turning her whole self into a thing that could not be reached because there was nobody home, because the girl who lived in Ana's body had moved out years ago and left only a very competent, very pretty manager behind.
This is why she cannot be sorry, she thinks, on the nights the cologne finds her. This is why the guilt comes up empty when she pats her pockets for it. You cannot feel the right amount of anything when you spent it all, when you were eight, up by the light fixture, learning that love is the bait in the trap.
She does not know when it happened.
She knows it is still happening. She knows it has never really stopped.
Ana Yankowski, Laurel, Montana, November 22nd, 2018
Thanksgiving at the Yankowski compound was a performance with a small, exhausted cast.
Olivia had insisted, the way she insisted on all the family rituals that photographed well and felt like nothing, that they "do it properly this year"—which meant a caterer in the kitchen and the good china and a centerpiece of orange roses and dried wheat that cost more than the meal it surrounded. It meant Olivia at the head of the table in a cream blazer she had not changed out of even at home, because Olivia did not own clothes that weren't also a statement. It meant Jared at the other end, expansive, glowing, holding a glass of wine he refilled too often, performing the warm patriarch for an audience of four.
It meant Felisity, home for the holiday under protest, picking at her plate in a hoodie, present and absent at once, her phone face-down beside her fork and buzzing every few minutes with a vibration they all pretended not to hear.
And it meant Laurel.
Laurel had come as Montana, because there was no other way she could come—dressed in the slim dark jeans and the burgundy henley and the navy peacoat Ana had picked out in Missoula, her hair pulled back, her shoulders dropped into the slouch, her voice tuned low. She had walked up the long gravel drive at four o'clock looking like she was being marched to an execution, and Ana had met her at the door and murmured just survive it, two hours, and Laurel had nodded like a good little soldier.
It had not been survivable. It had been worse than Ana had let herself imagine.
The undermining started before the food. Olivia did it the way she did everything—obliquely, surgically, with a smile.
"Anastasia tells me you're in the marching band," Olivia said, passing the rolls without looking at Laurel. "The flag-spinning. How nice. It's good for young men to have an outlet for the—" a pause, perfectly weighted "—artistic temperament. Before they grow out of it."
"Color guard," Laurel said quietly.
"Mm. With Perot and Vick." Olivia had already turned to Ana. "And you let your status nearly slip this fall. There was an incident at a party. I had to make calls, Anastasia. Do you understand what it costs me to make calls? In an election year? To cover for your ass."
"Sarah assaulted a girl on video, Mother. You used it well."
"Don't be crude." Olivia sipped her wine. "I'm only saying you've been distracted. Boys do that to girls. They make you sloppy." She glanced at Laurel then, just once, a flick of cold assessment that took in the henley, the hair, the cheekbones, the wrongness she couldn't name. "Though I confess I don't entirely see the appeal."
Ana felt Laurel go very still beside her.
That was Olivia's whole technique, and Ana knew it intimately, had been raised inside it: never the knife directly, always the knife by implication, always said with a smile so that if you reacted you were the one being dramatic, you were the one who couldn't take a joke, you were the problem. Ana had spent her childhood being filed down by that smile, and watching it turn on Laurel made something in her chest go hot and useless, because there was nothing she could do. There was never anything you could do. You sat at the table and you ate the food and you let yourself be diminished one comment at a time, because the alternative was a scene, and in this house a scene was the only unforgivable sin.
And then there was Jared, which was worse, because Jared was kind.
That was the thing about her father that everyone who met him for ten minutes understood. He didn't undermine. He glowed. He turned the full warmth of himself onto Laurel like a sunlamp, and it was the most dangerous thing at the table, and Ana was the only one who could see it for what it was.
"Now I think the band thing is great," Jared said, cutting across Olivia, refilling his glass, leaning toward Laurel with his elbows on the good tablecloth. "Don't listen to her. She's all sharp edges, my wife. Comes with the job." He winked, at Laurel, not at Olivia. "Takes guts to get up in front of a crowd. I respect that. You've got— what is it?" He studied Laurel's face with that slow, cataloguing sweep that made Ana want to flip the table, the same look from the pool, the look that stripped. "You've got a real presence, kid. Anybody ever tell you that? You've got a face people watch."
"Jared," Olivia said, not in warning, in boredom.
"I'm complimenting the boy." Jared spread his hands, the picture of innocence, the picture of a generous host. "Can't a man compliment his daughter's young man? Look at him. He's blushing." He laughed, delighted, and the laugh had teeth in it that only Ana could hear. "You should come around more, Montana. Seriously. You're better company than half the people at this table."
Laurel's hands were in her lap, under the tablecloth, and Ana could see by the tension in her shoulders that they were clenched into fists, and by extension, she's sure Jared can too. Laurel said, "Thank you, sir," in a voice scraped down to nothing, and reached for her water glass, and her hand was shaking, and Jared watched her hand shake with an interest that made Ana's whole skin crawl.
He knows, Ana thought, with the sick lurch she got whenever her father's attention sharpened like that. He doesn't know what she is. But he knows there's something soft there. Something hurt. And softness, to him, is just an invitation.
She had spent her whole life watching her father find the wounded thing in a room and walk toward it. She had been the wounded thing. She had learned to stop being wounded where he could see it, precisely so he would stop walking toward her. And now here was Laurel—visibly, helplessly wounded, unable to armor up because she was already using all her armor just to be Montana for two hours—and Ana watched her father's attention settle on her like a hand on the back of a neck, and there was nothing, nothing, nothing Ana could do.
"Eat something, Anastasia," Olivia said. "You don't need to starve yourself to lose weight."
"I'm not hungry."
"You're never hungry. It's becoming a personality." Olivia turned to Felisity. "And you. Put the phone away. Is it Jake? It's Jake. You know my position on Jake."
"You don't have a position on Jake," Felisity said to her plate. "You have a position on Jake calling during dinner."
"I have a position on a twenty-seven-year-old man dating my teenage—"
"I'm nineteen."
"—when it could so easily become a story. Do you understand? Everything is a story now. Everything you girls do is a story that can be told about me." Olivia set down her fork with a click. "I have given you everything. The least you could do is be unremarkable, until I need you to be remarkable."
Ana looked down the long table at the four of them, her mother the fortress, her father the predator with the beautiful smile, her sister already half-gone into a worse cage, and Laurel, shaking, being slowly carved up by both parents at once. And she thought: this is the table I orchestrated her into. The Missoula clothes. The cover story. The kiss on the porch. I built the road that led her right here, to my father's attention, and I told myself it was protection.
Two hours. It took everything Ana had to get them through two hours.
When the pie came and went and Olivia finally rose to take a call from a donor and Jared retreated to his study with the rest of the wine, he had invited Laurel, Ana had insisted for another time and Felisity vanished outside to call Jake from the cold dark of the driveway, Ana stood up so fast her chair scraped and said, too loud, "We're going upstairs."
Nobody stopped them.
Ana's room was the only room in the house that had ever felt like a held breath instead of a trap. She shut the door, turned the lock, and leaned against it, and across the room Laurel sat down hard on the edge of the bed and put her face in her hands and breathed like she'd surfaced from underwater.
"I'm sorry," Ana said. "I'm so sorry. I forgot how bad he—I should never have let him invite you. I should've talked you out of it."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. He looked at you like—" Ana couldn't finish it. She crossed the room and sat down beside Laurel on the bed, close, their shoulders touching, and she could feel Laurel trembling. "Hey. You're out of there. You did it. It's over."
Laurel lowered her hands. Her eyes were red-rimmed. "Your mom hates me, and she doesn't even know what she's hating. And your dad—" She shuddered. "Ana, your dad is—"
"I know."
"Does he—" Laurel stopped, looked at her, and something in Ana's face must have answered the question before Laurel could finish asking it, because Laurel went pale and didn't finish.
And here was the thing that happened to Ana then, the thing she would replay for a long time afterward and never be able to fully explain.
She was so lonely. That was the bottom of it. She had spent the whole dinner watching the only soft thing in the room get carved up, and she had been unable to protect it, and now they were alone in the one safe space she had, and Laurel was looking at her with eyes full of an understanding nobody had ever offered her, not pity, understanding, the recognition of one hurt thing by another, and Ana did not know what to do with being understood. She had no language for it.
So she leaned in and she put her hand on Laurel's jaw and she kissed her.
Not for Derrick. Not for Hunter. Not for an audience. There was no audience. She kissed Laurel because she wanted to, because she was drowning, because the only way she knew to ask to be held was to offer herself.
Laurel kissed her back for one second—one helpless, human second—and then she pulled away.
She put her hands on Ana's shoulders and held her at arm's length, gently, firmly.
"Ana. Stop."
"Why." It came out small. It came out in the kid voice, the one she hated, the one she could not weld shut fast enough. "We're alone. There's no one to perform for. You don't have to, I want to. I'm choosing it. I never get to choose it."
"I know." Laurel's voice was so kind it was unbearable. "I know. But I can't."
"Why not."
"Because I'm with someone. Two someones." Laurel's hands stayed steady on Ana's shoulders. "Jess. And Dani. We figured it out. The three of us. It's new, and it's—”
Ana pulled back out of Laurel's hands. She stood up off the bed. She felt the cold come up through her like water filling a basement.
Jess. And Dani.
Of course. Of course it was Jess. Jess who had a mother who cared and a net. Jess who Ana had thrown to the wolves and who had survived it and gone on to be loved, to be captain, to be brave, to build the exact thing Ana had spent her whole life unable to build. Jess had everything Ana sacrificed her for, plus Ana's own first true feeling, plus now this trans girl from California who Ana had outfitted and protected and kissed, who Ana had let herself, for a few stupid weeks, imagine might be hers. The fall from your height was survivable, she had told Jess, weeks ago, in this very room. And the fall from mine was off a cliff. And here was the cosmic accounting: Jess, who fell, had landed in a garden. And Ana, who never let herself fall at all, was standing exactly where she had started… up by the ceiling, alone, watching her own body fail to make someone stay.
"Right," Ana said.
"Ana—"
"No, it's—" The cold reached her face and froze it. She heard her own voice go flat and far away. "It makes sense. Jess deserves it. She always deserved it. And Dani—well." A laugh that had no joy in it, her sister's laugh, her mother's laugh, the family inheritance. "Of course they all love you. Everyone loves you. Dani drove across the country, and Ashton broke up with his girlfriend, and even my idiot father can't stop staring at you. You walk around being broken and sad and trans and everyone falls over themselves to save you." Her voice cracked, just once, and she hated it, and she sealed it back over. "And I do everything right. I'm perfect. I'm careful. I make myself into exactly what every single person needs, and I get nothing. I have never gotten one single thing I actually wanted in my entire life."
"That's not—"
"Get out."
Laurel stood up. "Ana, please, don't—don't do the thing where you—"
"The fake relationship is off." Ana walked to the door and unlocked it and held it open, and she did not look at Laurel, because if she looked at Laurel the manager might lose control of the girl, and the girl might do something unsurvivable, like cry, like beg, like ask out loud to be loved. "You don't need it anyway. You've got your people. Find another reason for Derrick. I'm done. We're done."
"You don't mean that. You're hurt, and you're—"
"Forget about me." Ana finally looked at her then, and made her face do the smile, the big one, the one with all the teeth that meant nothing, the one she had practiced in this room for years, the one that had carried her through everything because there was nobody behind it to break. "It's the kindest thing I can offer you, honestly. Forget I exist. People who get close to me have a bad habit of getting hurt. Ask Jess. Ask my sister. Ask anybody." She gestured at the open door, at the hallway, at the whole rotted beautiful house. "Go home, Laurel. Go back to the people who love you. You're lucky. You don't even know how lucky."
Laurel stood in the doorway. For a moment it looked like she might refuse to go, might stay and force the issue, might be brave and stupid the way the people in her life got to be brave and stupid because they had nets.
But she was seventeen and exhausted and she had a father across town and two girls who were waiting for her and a life that, for once, was worth protecting. So she went. She paused, and she said, "You deserve people too, Ana. You do. You just have to let one of them all the way in," and then she went down the stairs, and Ana heard the front door, and the gravel, and then nothing.
The house went quiet.
Ana shut the door and locked it again and turned off the light beside the mirror and lay down on the bed in her cream dress with her shoes still on, and she stared up at the ceiling, at the spot by the light fixture where she had spent so much of her life, and she did not cry, because she had spent all of that years ago, when she was eight, learning the only lesson this house had ever really taught her.
Love was the bait in the trap.
She had known it her whole life. She kept hoping, in some small welded-shut place, that she might be wrong.
She wasn't. She never was. That was the one thing Ana Yankowski could always count on.
She closed her bedroom door. Locked it. Crossed to her bed and sat down in the exact spot where Laurel had been sitting sixty seconds ago. The sheets still held her warmth. Her weight still shaped the wrinkles in the covers.
Ana pressed her hand flat against the warm spot and held it there.
She did not cry.
She pulled her hand back. Straightened her dress. Fixed her face.
By the time the knock came, she was perfect again.