Annie feels like she’s in The Wizard of Oz most of the time, like once she leaves the giant house, the acres of land, her world is suddenly gray again, dingy, nicked and dinged up. She comes home to her family and the air is different, stifling, distended. Her siblings’ faces are creased with smirks, pocked with the kind of casual cruelty that comes from boredom. They run wild when she’s not there to watch them, her father, an ex-cop on disability benefits since being shot in the spine, sunk into the couch all day, his sweat staining the cushions.

It hadn’t always been like this for Annie, for her family. When her mother was alive, things were functional. They were even good sometimes. Annie’s mom was a hairdresser, and sometimes Annie can still feel her gentle fingers running shampoo through her scalp, pressing tenderly at the nape of her neck, combing out those long red tendrils before bed.

Her mother was kind. Kinder, even, when she drank, her eyes moist with gratitude, her words slurred, but filled with petals of encouragement. Annie’s mother loved her. Loved her weird, different, friendless eldest daughter, the one she knew was teased at school, whose moods and introspection turned the other kids off.

She taught Annie how to make so many recipes, passed down from her own Italian mother. She told Annie that her imagination, that vivid, dynamic thing, would be her saving grace. That Annie would always possess the good her mind did, the glowing, vibrant ideas it produced, even on the days during which Annie would feel displaced, not embodied, an inexplicable sadness overwhelming her.

On the night when Annie’s dad, always prone to rages, would shake the house with his voice, Annie’s mother would put Etta James on the portable stereo, gather her children in her bedroom and brush their hair, even the boys. When her husband would inevitably come and find her, she’d simply turn the volume up, give the brush to Annie, and pad out of the room, locking her children inside. Beyond the door was a void Annie didn’t dare enter, swallowed up entirely by the deafening roar of her father, the thwack of flesh. Sometimes a scream, a sob.

But it was the silence, the creeping, stilted stillness that was always the worst.

Annie would play Etta until all four of her siblings fell asleep, tucked into their parents’ queen-sized bed. Then she would lie on the floor, the stereo next to her ear, feel its vibrations, and go into her head to talk to her friends, colorful, amorphous creatures who made her laugh, danced with her, sang with Etta until Annie herself was asleep.