There’s a knock at my door, and I hold my breath because for the briefest of moments I think it’s Dad. I read the line again. Dad died of a heart attack on September 21. Remind myself that he is forever gone and try to ignore the worn-out stickiness under my eyelids.

I pull on sweatpants and a T-shirt and make my way to my desk. I check the dry-erase calendar. Nothing planned for today or for yesterday. My hair clings, limp and greasy, to my face, and hunger pains suggest I haven’t eaten in a while. I move with a sluggish reluctance.

I look through the peephole and pull back at the face I see because I’m surprised to see her . . . but also I’m not. It’s written on my whiteboard that my mother lives here now.

“Mom,” I say when I open the door. She stands tall—older, her face more rounded, a healthy pallor to her skin. Sober. And here in Whittier. Yet a thick layer surrounds my heart, making it impossible to feel anything but suspicion and disappointment, and for the first time—or for all I know, the hundredth time—I wish I could feel something more for her. “I don’t want to see you.”

“I’m coming in, Claire.”

“Why?”

“You’ve been holed up in there for weeks now and it’s not healthy. I’m making you breakfast, and I’m going to cut your hair. You look like a shaggy dog.”

I touch my hair; the ends brush long against the sides of my neck. I feel like a shaggy dog, can smell a staleness that tells me I haven’t showered, and I don’t know if it’s that or the weakness that runs through me when I read Dad died of a heart attack on September 21, but I open the door all the way. “Okay,” I say.

She arches her eyebrows, surprised—I can guess—that I’m letting her in, and walks past me with a cloth bag slung over her shoulder and a pink-and-white polka-dot carrying case held in her arms. I recognize the case. It held her scissors and trimmers and other supplies. When I was eight she let me pull it down from the shelf in the bathroom and open it for the first time. Tate was coming over. I’d told her that his hair had gotten long and had tangles in it that I tried to get out with my fingers at school. His hair smells too. I don’t think his dad makes him shower like you make me, I’d whispered to her like I was telling a secret I shouldn’t, feeling bad because Tate was my friend.

She’d hugged me. It’s not his fault, Claire bear. Some kids have a hard time at home. Things are tough for little Tate.