The carpet muffled her footsteps, a familiar purple splotch near the foot of the bed catching her eye as she perched on the edge of the mattress. She’d spilled nail polish there when she was fifteen and had cried when her mom had noticed it and grounded her for the whole month, making her miss the party of the summer hosted by Jake Hopman.
April sighed. The only things that were different in the room were her and the bedspread. Once, the hot-pink walls and posters of her favorite cities and boy bands had seemedsoher. She wasn’t sure when she’d substituted color for beige and her dreams for being the perfect almost-wife.
Desperate to shut her brain off, she shed her dye-stained clothes and rummaged in the large drawers for some PJs to wear. Coming up empty, she decided to sleep nude, when her phone vibrated from thenightstand, reminding her to take her meds. Luckily, she kept them on her, otherwise they’d have been left with the rest of her belongings in New York after her hasty exit, and that was a headache she didn’t need.
She tied a too-short robe around herself and quietly slipped down the stairs to grab a glass of water, the sleeves fluttering in the air where they stopped mid-forearm instead of at her wrists like they used to do. The all-over daisy print was cute, though, and buoyed her mood slightly.
Water retrieved, April had just turned toward the stairs again when a tingling spread over the back of her neck. She paused and allowed her curiosity to take over as she moved quietly away from the stairs and toward the living room.
The lights were still off, the TV screen black, and her mom was asleep on the couch. It might have seemed innocent, impromptu, if not for the pillow and comforter that she slept with, completely at odds with the tidy sophistication of the rest of the room.
Maybe April wasn’t the only one struggling.
She snuck back out of the room and up the stairs, deciding an interrogation could wait till morning. For now, her childhood bed was calling.
Something about the haze of the morning just made everything seembetter. Or maybe that was just the smell of blueberry pancakes wafting into her bedroom.
They were her mom’s staple dish, one of the very fewthings she could cook. It was a shortcoming that had been passed down to April, too. Her dad had been the cook in the family. Now that he was gone …
April frowned as she forced open her eyes and pushed away the thought. Her mom could take care of herself. She wasn’t going to starve just because Dad wasn’t there to do the cooking anymore.
… Right?
For several heartbeats, April stared up at the ceiling. Stuck to the paint were the remnants of glow-in-the-dark stars, glue gone gray with dirt and fluff where the stars had slowly fallen down. It felt annoyingly apt to her, and it was then that she realized she had reverted back to being an angsty sixteen-year-old. Strange how heartbreak didn’t hurt any less once you were an adult, but the fallout was often more complex.
Like, say, running away from the city she’d called home without any of her clothes or things and now finding herself stuck in a dilemma. There was the tiny daisy-print robe she’d worn last night, or she could attempt to find something in her drawers now that she had daylight on her side. Still, she wasn’t hopeful.
In the end, April managed to scrounge up a cropped blue t-shirt with the phraseFlower Poweremblazoned on the front in bright pink. She vaguely remembered buying it. If she was right, she’d been seventeen and had just gotten her belly button pierced, so ofcourseshe’d needed new clothes to show off the piercing.
Bottoms were a little harder to source, given that her ass was three times bigger now than it had been as a teen. She settled on a pair of cut-off shorts that really only fit because the frayed hems rested on her upper thighs and let a healthy amount of butt cheek show. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Yawning widely, April padded down the stairs and ran a hand through her hair, fluffing it up. It still gave her a jolt whenever she caught sight of it and remembered she’d dyed it.
Her mom was in the kitchen, already seated at the rectangular dining table that spanned the length of the back wall. The bench against the wall was typically where April and Noah had sat, with their parents on the wooden bench opposite at family dinner during the week. She could almost hear the bickering of past her and Noah as she paused in the doorway before entering and gravitating to the fresh coffee still in the pot.
“Morning,” she rasped after she’d had her first sip. Typically, she preferred tea—herbal or flavored, ideally—but she could make do until she managed to get to the large grocery store in town.
Kathy looked up quickly from her paper with a smile and then did a double take. “You—Did you know your hair is green?”
“Teal,” April corrected, leaning against the kitchen counter and wincing when the stovetop dial dug into her spine. “And yes. I did it yesterday.”
“Yesterday,” her mom said faintly and April nodded,glancing over her shoulder as she found the still-warm stack of pancakes on a plate inside the microwave. “Before you left?”
April shook her head. “In the gas station bathroom. Are these for me?” She lifted the plate into the air and her mom nodded, her eyes flicking to the plate and then back to April’s hair.
“There’s blackberry jam in the fridge,” Kathy said and then opened and closed her mouth as if deciding what else to say. April let her stew over it as she went to grab the jam—her mom couldn’t cook, but shedidmake a damn good jam. Plus, if she was still picking blackberries then things couldn’t be all bad, could they? “Why, um, did you choose that color?”
April’s cheer faded slightly as she lifted the jar and saw the date on the label. July last year. Before Dad had died.
“April?”
She blinked, shutting the fridge door gently and turning around with the jam jar clasped tightly in her hand. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“I asked about the color choice. Is everything OK?”
What—a girl couldn’t dye her hair green without something being wrong? “It was supposed to be sky blue,” she said dryly, scooping out some jam with her knife and plopping it onto her plate before returning the jar to the fridge. “It just seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Kathy watched her intently as April swung a leg overthe bench closest to the kitchen. Her mom was sitting in April’s usual spot and, given what she’d seen last night, it wasn’t the only change in the house.