Same Roof

The refrigerator kicked on at 2:14 AM and Riley McCullough woke up listening to it the way you wake up listening to your own breathing — not because you chose to but because your body knows the difference between normal and not-normal.

She lay on the couch in the living room of the two-bedroom apartment on East State Street, under a blanket that didn't quite reach her feet, and stared at the ceiling. The apartment smelled like someone had tried to cover up a spill and succeeded in covering up nothing. Gary was asleep on the other end of the couch, his breathing uneven in the particular way it was when he'd had more than two beers and then pretended he hadn't.

Riley got up quietly and went to the kitchen. She made herself a peanut butter sandwich because hunger doesn't care what time it is and neither does peanut butter. The bread was from the dollar store and the peanut butter was from the brand her mother didn't buy but Gary did because it was on sale and sales are hard to resist when you're a man who works at the auto plant and knows the difference between a good price and a great price.

Kaylee's door was closed. It was usually closed — Kaylee's door was rarely open, which made it the most mysterious door in an apartment full of them. Kaylee was seventeen, Gary's daughter from the previous relationship, and she had dropped out of school last spring. Riley had heard the story in fragments — a boy named Travis who existed in conversation but not on any official document, a pregnancy that was announced at a dinner table and then treated like something that had happened to someone else.

Riley took her sandwich to the kitchen table and sat down with her English worksheet. Ms. Patterson had assigned an essay: "Write about a place that changed you." Riley had been staring at the blank page for twenty minutes.

She wrote: The apartment on State Street didn't change me. It just is.

She crossed it out.

She wrote: The thing about sharing a roof is that you can hear everyone breathing and you can't tell whose breathing is worse.

She stared at that for a while. It was honest. Honest things were rare in this apartment, which was both its strength and its weakness.

Upstairs, somebody's television was on. The couple below them were fighting in whispers — the kind of fighting that happens when you live close enough to hear each other's secrets but far enough that you pretend you don't.

Riley went back to the couch and fell asleep with the worksheet on her chest and the pen rolling between her fingers.

She woke up at 6:47 AM to the sound of Sharon's alarm and the smell of instant coffee and the knowledge that her mother was working a double at the diner again. Sharon worked doubles because doubles paid more and more was what they needed, and more was what they always needed, which was the particular tragedy of their situation — needing more in a life that had taught them how to want things without teaching them how to get them.

Riley got up and showered in three minutes, the way you shower when you know exactly how many minutes you have and you've optimized your body to use exactly that many. She put on the same clothes she'd worn yesterday because laundry was something that happened on Sundays and Sundays were for rest and rest was something you couldn't afford to take seriously.

School was fluorescent lights and the smell of bleach that never quite covered whatever else it was trying to cover up. Ms. Patterson handed back the essays from last week. Riley got a B-minus with a note: Good observations. Try to develop your voice further — you have one, I can hear it under the restraint.

Riley folded the essay and put it in her bag. Her voice. She wasn't sure she had one that worked in contexts other than silence.

At lunch, she sat with three kids from her homeroom and ate a sandwich that tasted like the bread from the dollar store and talked about nothing. The kind of talk that was not idle because nothing is never idle when you're sixteen and every moment is either building something or erasing something.

"Did you hear about Megan Marsh?" Denise said. "Her mom's dating someone. Older guy. Plantation owner or something."

"Plantation?" Riley said. "Like, actually a plantation?"

"Farm, I guess. But big. Has land. People say he's got money and problems."

Riley thought about Thornfield. She hadn't been there but she knew the shape of things like this — men with money and problems who found women with money and problems and the two of them combined into a problem that was bigger than the sum.

After school, Riley came home to find Gary sitting at the kitchen table with a six-pack and his head in his hands. Not drunk-drunk. Tired-drunk. The kind of drunk that comes from a day at the plant where the press broke and nobody knew how to fix it and the supervisor was yelling and Gary remembered he was thirty-eight and not twenty-five and that twenty-five couldn't fix a hydraulic press.

"Rough night?" Riley asked.

"Rough week," Gary said. He picked up the beer and put it back down. "Plant's cutting shifts next month. Might be permanent."

Riley nodded. She made herself another peanut butter sandwich and ate it standing up.

Kaylee's door was closed. Sharon's door was closed. The apartment was quiet in the particular way that apartments are quiet when people are calculating — how much money is left, how many shifts can be worked, how many things can be endured before the endurance itself becomes the problem.

Riley went to her room and picked up the English worksheet. She looked at the blank page and thought about what Ms. Patterson had written: you have a voice.

She wrote: Kaylee's door is closed. Sharon's door is closed. Gary's beer is on the table. My door is the one I can close and open at will, which is the one thing I have that nobody else in this apartment has, and I'm not sure it's enough.

She closed the notebook. She went to the couch and lay down next to Gary, who was now asleep with his mouth open and his breathing even, and pulled the blanket up as far as it would go and slept anyway.

---

OTMES V2 Objective Code

OTMES-V2: M1=3.0,M2=1.0,M4=2.0,M9=2.0; N1=0.50,N2=0.50; K1=0.90,K2=0.10; V=0.3,I=0.5,C=0.6,S=0.3,R=0.0; TI=35.0; theta=180 deg; T4

Classification: T4 遗憾级 | Style: Dirty Realism | Direction: 180 deg