Chapter 8: Just Like Kids

“YOU STUPID BITCH!”

I jerked from a dead sleep as something punched the air from my lungs. Someone was on top of me, shaking my shoulders like I owed them money. The weight holding me down felt like knees on my chest.

“How could you not come get me!”

A bottle-blond raged an inch from my face, but I didn’t have enough breath to answer her. She jumped up and down on me so I couldn’t catch my breath to fight back.

“Trixy, quit picking on your cousin,” Gia said, passing through the hallway with a box in her hands. “Just like when they were little,” she mumbled with a shake of her head.

She ignored her mother and beat the shit out of me with a pillow. Years of instinct kicked in and I kicked her to the floor. I rolled on top of her and pinned her arms under my legs. I smacked her face like a cat teasing a kitten and gasped as she pulled up and kneed me in the stomach.

“Cunt!” was all I could get out.

“Mallory, language!” Stella said, following behind her twin.

Holly looked on from the kitchen, terrified and confused.

“Don’t worry about those two, dove,” Sissy said. She waved a spoon in our general direction. “They’re just happy to see each other.”

I pinned her arms to the floor. “Still throwing that pussy at anyone who’ll catch it?”

“Yeah!” She pulled an arm loose and pushed me back by my face. “I’d ask if you’re still a hopeless dyke, but the thrift shop grunge and blunt scissor hack job tell me all I need to know!”

“Your tits look fake!”

“Good! I didn’t pay for them to look lopsided like yours!”

“Whore!”

“Skank!”

Danny called down the stairs. “Ladies, I could use some help up here.”

“Coming!” we yelled in unison.

We untangled ourselves and thundered up the stairs, pushing and tripping the whole way. One door was open in the hall and Trix shoved me through. She made to throw me into a headlock but stopped short when I didn’t move.

Danny made the bed with the same old purple sheets, the ones that Jinx insisted on when she was a kid. The tattered rug covered most of the floor, but they turned it so the wine stain was under the bed instead of the corner near the closet where she hid her booze. It didn’t reach the window where burn marks scarred the wood from whatever she smoked on any given night. The curtains still hung with cheap black lace, though they looked ready to disintegrate at a touch. I wondered if the craft shop she bought the fabric from was still around and if they knew the pattern she sewed them from.

Danny saw my face and apologized. “I’m sorry, Mal.” He dropped the sheets on the bed and looked around for a way to make the place anything other than hers. “You always stayed in her room as a kid and I just thought . . .”

I picked up a picture of her from the drawers. She glared back at me like her teenage self knew what I’d done to her before I’d even been conceived. I swallowed.

“Never was a smiler, was she?”

“Mal. . .” Danny’s voice was quiet but strained as he wrung his hands around the bedpost, like he didn’t want to ask but had to know all the same. “Is she . . . ?”

The air felt thick with the suggestion, but I was used to the thought of my mother’s death. They had gone so long without holding a mirror to her unconscious mouth that they’d forgotten the inevitability of it.

“She’s still breathing. Much as she tries to stop.” I returned the frame to the drawers.

“How come you never came back till now?” Trix demanded, ignoring a look from Danny.

Good old Trix, never the one to tiptoe.

“Tried to. She said she couldn’t stop me after I turned eighteen but I wouldn’t leave Holly. Not to that. Not without knowing she had a family she could . . .” I shrugged. “Tried running off with her a couple of times. Never got far. Jinx was like a bloodhound. She always found us and what came after was worse than not leaving at all. I couldn’t put Holly through it once she was old enough to remember.”