Free Spoils by Tammar Stein

worthwhile charity and dumping my trust fund in their account. It’s too easy. It’ll need to mean a whole heck of a lot before I turn my back on my family. It needs to be personal.
    It’s past midnight when I shut off my computer, but sleep eludes me. For the second night in a row, I check the clock at five-minute intervals, unable to turn my brain off. I keep replaying the look on my mom’s face. How in God’s name am I supposed to tell her she can’t have the money?
    I slip out of bed and head to the patio at the back of the house.
    Once again, I huddle on one of the faded, musty lounge chairs, staring blindly at the dark water. It doesn’t take long before I catch the flickering blue light of late-night television in my peripheral vision. Eddie, up late, in a waking coma in front of the TV. Out of curiosity, I turn to my parents’ window and sure enough, there’s light glowing around the margins of their heavy lined curtains.
    Two in the morning and every one of us is awake in our Florida mansion.
    Invasive air potato vines and cat claw vine, with its wicked thorns, have officially taken over our yard in the year since my parents stopped the yard service. They wind through every shrub, pulling down saplings. Spanish needles and prickly crabgrass grow freely in the beds, blurring any lines the landscaper originally intended. Add to that the fact that each of us is fighting some private demon, unable to sleep, and it sounds almost familiar. A story told long ago, some fairy tale about an evil curse and a kingdom under a spell.
    The stories always start with a curse. Ours was winning the lottery.
    It doesn’t matter that it’s two in the morning. I have to talk to Natasha.
    Natasha has her own place, a condo in a fancy high-rise on the water near Steeped. It’s a ten-minute bike ride, and at two a.m. on a Friday, there’s no one to do a double take at a girl in pajamas and flip-flops furiously pedaling.
    I key in her security code to enter the building and let myself into her condo with the spare key she keeps at our house.
    Her apartment is dark, naturally. Hoping I don’t scare the living daylights out of her, I carefully open the door to her bedroom.
    The plan is to gently shake her awake and let her know I’m not budging until she tells me the full story. But Natasha is already awake. She sits on her bed, hugging her knees, the identical pose I was in a few minutes ago on the patio. She looks up when the door swings open like she’s been waiting for someone to come, like she’s barely holding on.
    “I’m scared, Leni,” she says in a small, high voice. Goose bumps spread across my skin.
    “Why?”
    “I’ve done something awful.” Her chin quivers. “Something really, really awful. And I’m scared that I can never be forgiven.” She begins weeping in hopeless sobs and I freeze at the sight of my confident, sensual older sister reduced to this mess. Not that my last encounter with her was exactly normal, but this verges on a true crisis, a dial-911, hand-this-over-to-the-professionals sort of situation. I could call Mom, but instinctively I know she’d be helpless here. I could dial 911, but the imaginary conversation where I tell the operator that my emergency is my older sister weeping in bed because she had someone rig the lottery doesn’t play well in my head. When I catch a whiff of ripe body odor, at least I know where to start.
    “Come on.” I tug on Natasha’s arm, almost encircling her upper arm with my fingers. “There’s no point crying in bed. You need a shower. You smell.”
    Pulling and prodding, I get her out of bed and into the shower. Hers is all sleek and modern, with cold glass tile and chrome fixtures. Her clothes stink of sweat and cigarette smoke. Once she’s undressed, the vertebrae in her spine stick out like LEGOs and her ribs are starkly exposed; hip bones jut out. Her hands are chapped and red, her fingernails raw and bleeding where she’s bitten them to the