That one had been practiced for years.
When Aaron shoved me down the back steps at ten, Dad told me I had always been dramatic.
When Aaron locked me outside in winter at fourteen, Dad said I must have mouthed off.
When my mother once saw marks on my arm and started to cry, Dad cut her off before she could ask the right question.
“Madison exaggerates,” he said then.
He said it with the same bored confidence that night.
Aaron wanted an apology, though neither of us knew for what.
That was how our house worked.
My
guilt arrived first, and the accusation was invented later.
“Say you’re sorry,” Aaron hissed close to my face.
I asked, “For what?”
He answered by dragging me toward the living room.
My hip struck the coffee table, and a small black shape slid off the glass and landed near my hand.
My phone.
For a second, the whole room held still around it.
Aaron saw it too.
His grin widened, ugly and confident.
“Call someone,” he said. “Let’s see who believes you this time.”
That was the cruelest part of him.
He did not think I had no way out because the doors were locked.
He thought I had no way out because every adult in my life had helped him build the wall.
My fingers closed around the phone anyway.
I could barely focus on the screen.
My hand was shaking so hard that the numbers looked like they
were floating.
9.
1.
1.
The call connected.
“911, what is your emergency?”
The operator’s voice was steady in a way that made me want to cry.
It sounded like a world where rules still existed.
“My brother is attacking me,” I gasped.
Aaron’s face changed before I finished the sentence.
He grabbed for my wrist, and the phone flew from my hand, skidding under the coffee table with the line still open.
The operator kept speaking.
I heard her ask if I could get away.
I heard my father laugh again, then say clearly enough for the room and the phone to catch it, “She always does this for attention.”
