The Room With No Photos

Bianca must have felt something shift, because the week after Dana's visit, she stopped being careful in the small, deniable ways and started being careful in a colder one.

She took every photo of my mother out of my room — the two left after the confiscated one — and told my dad she was "helping me move forward" by giving me a clean space. She started locking my door from the outside during "quiet time" after school, an hour I spent sitting on the floor of an empty room with nothing of my mother's left in it at all.

"Your mother is not coming back," she told me once, very calmly, through the door before she unlocked it. "And neither is anyone who keeps believing whatever you're telling them."

Three days later, I fell reaching for a book on a high shelf during quiet time — or that's what Bianca told the school nurse when I came in the next morning with a deep bruise along my ribs I couldn't fully explain myself, because some of what happened in that room I still don't like putting into words.

The nurse didn't believe the shelf story. Not fully. She's required to report anything that doesn't add up, and this didn't, so a call went out that afternoon that none of us in the house yet knew about.

That evening, Bianca sat me down at the kitchen table and coached me, gently and patiently, on exactly what to say if anyone from the county ever asked me any questions about how I got hurt.

I listened to every word of it, and understood, for the first time clearly enough to act on it, that agreeing to say her sentences out loud to a stranger might be the only way anyone would ever hear mine.