I’m here for the chance to rebuild my life. I’m not here to stare at Jack’s forearms while she mixes semisweet chocolate chips into boiling milk. And I’m definitely not here to rekindle something that only burned me the first time around.

The dough is successfully rolled out in front of me, and I open the Tupperware of cookie cutters in the shape of reindeer and Christmas trees and snowmen. There’s a snowflake cutout at the bottom, and I press the sharp edges of it down into the dough. When I pull away, a perfect cookie snowflake pulls away with it.

“Look at that,” Jack says. She’s at my back again, with her heat and her solidness and her bread smell. She hands me a baking tray, and I lay out my one dough snowflake.

I’m not thinking about Jack with snowflakes in her hair.

Chapter Thirteen

Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Throughout most of my childhood, I responded to my parents’ dysfunction and neglect by turning inward, by becoming quiet and small. My parents would drink too much and scream at each other in the kitchen until at least one of them shattered a glass, and I would hide in my bedroom for hours, disappearing inside my drawings and the fictional world of my art, building a better home inside an imaginary space where people like me triumphed, where we were celebrated, where we were loved.

My dad would take off for weeks at a time, and I would make the honor roll.

My mom would get fired from another job, and I would sign up for another Advanced Placement class.

There wasn’t always food in the refrigerator or an adult at home, but I never misbehaved in class, never got in trouble, and formed unhealthy attachments to all my female English teachers. When I realized my art got me the kind of positive attention I never received at home, I built my entire identity around being Ellie the Art Girl.

For the most part, I was the perfect daughter to the world’s most imperfect parents, but for a brief period of time in the seventh grade, all I wanted to do was yell at my mom. I yelled at her about her constant partying. I yelled at her about the unpaid bills. I yelled at her about the strange men she brought into our house.

And Linds, being Linds, would always yell back. I would stomp and slam doors, but Linds would say the cruelest thing in the most cutting tone. Linds would give me the silent treatment for days on end in our own house, refusing to talk to me as I ate breakfast cereal for dinner or did my own laundry. Sometimes, she just wouldn’t come home for a few nights, and I would be left to wonder if she was ever coming home at all.