Free All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown Page A

apartment, in the dark, listening to the traffic below. She can hear the Hernandez family in the studio apartment next door, their three children bickering, their Spanish soap opera so loud that she can make out the individual words: ¡Soy así que perdido—el amor de mi vida ha funcionado lejos con mi hermana gemela! The night air in her apartment is hot and stale and smells like decaying cheese. The louvered blinds leak thin bars of sulfurous yellow light from the streetlamps outside.
    She tries the light switch in the kitchen. Nothing. Margaret can’t even muster the energy to cry. She sits down abruptly on the kitchen linoleum, which is sticky and worn, and then crumples back and stares at her ceiling from a prone position on the floor. In the dark, the cottage-cheese ceiling of her apartment looks oppressively close, an optical illusion as if the apartment above her is coming down to smother her.
    It’s all over, she thinks. The magazine, Bart—everything. She is about to be homeless, in debt, and jobless, and the thought of starting over—of sleeping in Josephine’s spare bedroom, starting at zero in a new career, trying to date again—is too awful to bear. Maybe she can just run away, she thinks. Hide somewhere, far from the credit card companies, far from Bart, far from her friends and family and anyone else who might see how lost she’s become. She wants to be anywhere but here.
    The cell phone in the purse, still hooked over her shoulder, begins to ring, and the first three bars of that goddamn Chopin étude are the final straw that turn Margaret’s stupor into fury. She sits up with a jerk, grabs the phone out of her purse, and is about to hurl it across the room and against the wall so that it never rings again—they’re going to turn the damn thing off tomorrow anyway—when she notices the caller ID. LIZZIE, it says. LIZZIE. LIZZIE.
    She stares at it for a minute, wondering if this is some kind of cosmic message. But of course it’s just her sister. Still, Margaret is so relieved by the sight of her sister’s name—so grateful that, for once, it’s not someone demanding her money—that despite her dismal mood, she flips the phone open.
    “Lizzie?” she says.
    “Margaret!” Her sister’s voice on the end of the line is high-pitched and childish. “It’s Lizzie.”
    “I know,” says Margaret, smiling despite herself. “I just said your name, remember?”
    “Oh,” says Lizzie. “Hey. Have you talked to Mom?”
    “No…” says Margaret, confused by the intensity of Lizzie’s question.
    Lizzie sighs, a heavy whoosh of breath, as if the weight of the world perched on her shoulders is crushing her flat. It is the kind of dramatic sound that fourteen-year-old girls often make when they consider the tragedy of their small lives, but for some reason it gives Margaret pause. The sigh sounds real. “Yeah, well. Mom needs you to come home,” Lizzie continues. “Actually she didn’t say that, but I think it’s probably a good idea because Dad’s gone and she’s, like, freaking out? Did you know Dad left? I guess you don’t if you haven’t talked to her. She’s, like, freaking out. Anyway, do you think you could come home?”
    In the sweltering dark, on the filthy kitchen floor, Margaret smiles.

 
three
    by the time margaret’s car turns up the driveway, at dusk on Monday, Lizzie has been sitting in the living room window, waiting, for nearly three hours. During that time, she has worked her way through eleven rice cakes smeared with peanut butter, two trashy magazines, a liter of lemonade, and one forbidden Snickers bar stealthily purchased that afternoon from the local 7-Eleven, which she wolfed down only when she was 100 percent sure that her mother, upstairs cleaning Margaret’s room for the second time today, wouldn’t catch her eating it. When Margaret’s Honda finally crunches through the gravel and ticks to a stop, Lizzie is so giddy with sugar and anticipation that she