LITMIR.BIZ

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enough,” she said as she slipped the white-socked foot into the shoe. There was no point in trying to explain to Laura. Rose would prefer her sister feel angry than afraid of whoever had chosen her for that strange present.

      She held Laura’s ankles in her hands and carefully slid her out from under the bed. Laura ignored what was happening and stared at the ceiling, her cheeks blotchy and red from all the angry crying, her eyelashes still wet.

      Rose took her under her arms and, pulling her up onto her feet, kissed her on the top of her head. “Off you go, then.”

      The twins banged and skidded out of the house, Laura trotting quietly behind them. Rose often felt sad watching her siblings walk to school. Laura was always left lagging behind. Like Rose herself. She closed the door against the heat and noise, and the house went totally silent except for the low hum of the refrigerator.

      Rose padded across the carpet to her bedroom. Standing in the doorway, she didn’t enter. Her suitcase was in the corner of her room. It was open, her best clothes folded inside. She’d packed. Actually packed. That was how sure she’d been about the cadetship. She was such an idiot.

      There was no point in unpacking. Cadetship or not, her mother and Rob had told her she had to move out by the time Rob came home from his latest haul. That was in just one week. Part of her thought that maybe if she told her mum what had happened, if she asked for a bit more time, her mother would relent.

      Really, though, she’d long stopped thinking of this place as her home. She had to start looking for a rental, but even the idea of it made her exhausted. Her sleep had been hollow, never dipping far from the surface of consciousness. Frank had promised he’d come over first thing the next morning when she’d called him in a panic from Mia’s car last night. When she did get home she had quietly pulled the doll out of Laura’s sleeping fingers and put it on the highest shelf, its glass eyes staring at her. The strangeness of it, her own inability to understand what the implications were, meant that no matter how tired her bones felt, her mind had whirred on. She had listened to her mother get up at 5:00 a.m. to go to work. Heard her soft footsteps down the hall, her sigh, barely audible, from the dark kitchen. She hadn’t moved. She’d remained motionless in her clammy sheets, listening as her mother’s car backed out of the driveway, the headlights illuminating her bedroom. Then her thoughts turned to dreams and she was asleep without even knowing it. Soon after she had awoken sharply to Laura’s screams.

      Jumping out of bed, she’d realized the screams were out of anger, not fear. Laura had found the doll eventually and was almost crushed in the process by climbing up the bookcase. She only had the thing for about fifteen minutes when Frank and Bazza had pulled up.

      Rose was still hovering in her doorway when the home phone rang. She ran back into the kitchen and snatched it up.

      “Rose?” It was her mother, sounding breathless. “I just got your message. The police were at the house? Is everyone okay?”

      “Yep, but everything’s fine. They just came because someone left Laura a doll.”

      There was silence down the line, and Rose braced herself.

      “You called the police because of a toy?” The panic was totally gone from her voice now.

      “The police were worried, Mum. They say that there’s been a whole bunch of kids getting dolls and—”

      “Rose.” Her mum’s voice was quieter then. Rose imagined her in the break room at the poultry factory, her hairnet still on, her body turned away from the rest of the workers’ pricked ears. “We’ll discuss this when I get home.”

      The line went dead. Rose slammed the phone back onto the cradle. Her mum never listened to her anymore. Rose ignored the peanut butter smeared across the counter and went back to her room, diving onto the bed. Turning away from the suitcase, she squeezed her eyes shut. The sheets beneath her felt sticky from her restless night.

      Rose knew the conversation that was going to happen with her mother when she got home. She knew the way her mum would look at her too, like she was an inconvenience, like she was just another frustration on an already-long list. It hadn’t always been like that.

      It was less than a month after the rumor began that the Auster Automotive Factory would close that her mother had started seeing Rob. He was a long-range trucker, and looked the part. Rob was someone her mother would never have fancied before. But when a steady wage became a rarity in the town, Rob became a catch. Back then, Rose didn’t even care. She didn’t care when he moved in, or even when they announced that her mother was pregnant with twins. Rose was seventeen, almost finished high school and stupid enough to be excited about the future. The idea that she would fail to get a scholarship, and what with no savings and no financial support wouldn’t be moving out of town anytime soon, hadn’t even crossed her mind. Ever since then she’d been living on borrowed time.

      She pulled her curtains shut and put on the fan. She could smell the ripe stink of her own sweat and it made her even more frustrated. She had been totally right to call the police, and now her mum was angry with her.

      Again, the memory of the last time she’d seen Rob surfaced. She’d come out of her bedroom, where she basically lived these days, and her mother and Rob had been sitting in the living room. They’d asked her to sit down. Rob had actually said the words our home, when he’d told her it was time for her to get her own place. Rose was no longer part of the “our,” even though she’d lived in the house for seventeen years longer than he had. Her mother had said nothing, but she’d nodded along with him and hadn’t looked Rose in the eye.

      The fan whirred, blowing cold air onto her sweaty neck and making her hair flutter around her face. The pillow felt soft against her cheek. She closed her eyes, relishing the silence and the dark, trying to let herself dissolve into it. To forget her life, just for a moment. But she couldn’t. Every time her mind felt clear, she’d see that porcelain face. Or Will’s expression when he’d caught her crying. Or, worst of all, she’d see herself, staking a claim to some earth near the fossickers. She opened her eyes. It was too stuffy for this. Sitting up, she pulled the window ajar, letting some air in. Fuck it. Just because her life was depressing didn’t mean she had to be. She was going to figure this out. Besides, it wasn’t like she even had a choice. She had to do something.

      She slipped on some sandals and put her phone and notebook in her pocket. She left the house, banging the screen door shut behind her. The air was heavy with humidity. Listening to the slap of her shoes against the road, she walked briskly down the street. The tiredness lifted off her like a blanket. It was good to get outside. The morning was getting hot, but at least there was movement in the air. Sitting at home in the house where she grew up, but where she no longer felt welcome, was hardly comforting. From a distance, she heard the echoes of children squealing and laughing. They must have been stragglers, late to school, or perhaps playing truant. She and Mia used to do that sometimes, she remembered, back when there was a high school in Colmstock. Things were so different then, it was hard to believe it was the same place. They’d had a whole group of friends. All of them, except for Rose, had their futures mapped out perfectly. They’d graduate high school and then go to work at Auster’s. It wasn’t a bad job, and the pay was good. High school had felt like their last chance for freedom.

      Walking past the football oval, Rose remembered what it used to look like. It had been perfectly green, and one night, they’d done doughnuts with one of their fathers’ pickup trucks. Rose and Mia had lost touch with their friends very quickly after their final year. Two of them had married each other and were on to their third kid, Mia’s boyfriend had killed himself, and one of them, Lucie, had moved out of town for three years only to come back to Colmstock pregnant and alone. Rose had tried calling her, but she’d never called her back and so that was that. Looking out over the field, where the dead yellow grass was coming up in clumps, it seemed incredible that it could be the same place. The stands were covered in graffiti, and the seats were broken. But she could almost still feel the wind in her hair, still hear Mia’s and Lucie’s squeals of delight echoing in her ears.

      Colmstock had once thrived as a farming area, but in World War I, more than two-thirds

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