Chapter One
Mia’s POV
The lights went out at 7:14 p.m. Mia knew the exact time because she was staring at the microwave clock when it happened, watching the numbers count down the seconds until her mother would notice.
"Mia." Her mother's voice came from the couch, thick and slow. "Mia, why is it dark."
"Because you didn't pay the bill, Mama."
"I paid the bill."
"You paid the bar."
Her mother didn't answer that. Mia heard the couch springs creak, heard the soft clink of a bottle finding the floor instead of the coffee table, and she didn't move from where she stood in the kitchen doorway. She was twelve years old. She had learned by then that the worst thing she could do was walk toward the noise.
"There's candles under the sink," her mother said finally. "Your grandmother's candles. Get them."
Mia got them. She always got them. She lit two on the kitchen counter and one on the table by the couch, close enough that her mother could reach her cigarettes without groping around in the dark, and then she sat on the floor with her math homework and did it by candlelight because that was simply what Tuesday nights looked like in their house.
"You know what your problem is," her mother said, not really talking to Mia so much as talking near her. "You look at me like I'm the one who ruined things. Like your daddy didn't walk out that door and leave me with nothing but a baby and a stack of bills he didn't feel like being a man about."
"I don't look at you like anything, Mama."
"You do. I see it. Same look he used to give me right before he left."
Mia kept her eyes on her math homework. Fractions. She was good at fractions, better than good, she could do them faster than anyone in her class, and there was something almost peaceful about numbers that always behaved the way they were supposed to. Numbers didn't drink. Numbers didn't disappear.
"I'm going to bed," Mia said.
"It's seven thirty."
"I have school."
Her mother laughed, a low, tired sound. "You're always going somewhere, aren't you. Little girl always got one foot out the door already."
Mia didn't answer that either. She blew out the candle on the table, left the two on the counter burning low, and went to the room she shared with nothing but a mattress and a milk crate for a nightstand, and she lay there in the dark listening to her mother talk to no one until the talking finally stopped.
She thought about her father sometimes, in the way you think about a stranger you've been told stories about. She had no memory of his face. She had a memory of a smell, maybe, cigarettes and something like pine, but she couldn't be sure if that was a real memory or one she'd built out of wanting there to be something. Her mother said he left before Mia turned two. Her mother said a lot of things.
What Mia understood clearly, even at twelve, even before she had the words for it, was that money was the wall. It wasn't a metaphor to her. It was as real and as solid as the concrete steps outside their building, the ones with the c***k running through the third one that nobody ever fixed. Money was the reason the lights went out. Money was the reason her mother drank the way she did, or at least that was the excuse her mother gave herself. Money was the reason there was never quite enough of anything, not food, not warmth, not attention that wasn't laced with something bitter underneath it.
She promised herself, lying there in the dark with her homework folder pressed against her chest like it might protect her from something, that she would find a way over that wall one day. She didn't know how yet. She was twelve. But she knew the wall was real, and she knew she hated it, and that was enough for now.
Down the hall, she heard the front door open.
That wasn't right. Her mother hadn't gotten up. Mia sat up slowly, listening. Footsteps, unfamiliar ones, crossing the living room floor where the candles still burned low.
"Who's there," her mother's voice called out, slurred and unafraid in the way only people who don't understand danger yet can afford to be.
Mia's heart started pounding. She reached for the door of her room, easing it open just a c***k, just enough to see a shape moving through the candlelight toward the kitchen, toward the drawer where her mother kept the grocery money.
And then the shape stopped. Turned. Looked directly down the hallway at the sliver of light coming from Mia's door.
