Back in the kitchen, Anne pulls a Folger’s can from the freezer. Takes from it a cold wad of twenties. Drops the roll in her JanSport pack.

“The fuck you doing with Dad’s coffee can?” Mitch, her brother, startles her.

“Nothing. Mind your own.”

His freckled skin is like uncooked bratwurst, clashing with cinnamon hair and a woolly-worm unibrow. Fifteen and a half with a naturally muscular build, he is bullheaded and cocky. “I don’t think so. You’re fucking stealing from Dad.”

He starts coming at her, but they are separated by the table. “Fuck off!” she hollers. Flinging her pack over left shoulder, she grabs a bacon-greased plate and Frisbees it at his head. Missing him, it smashes on the tile floor, adding its shards to those of the Jim Beam bottle.

“You’re so fucking dead!” he growls through gritted teeth. Anne turns to run; Mitch grabs at her, catches her pack, and spins her violently around. She spits in his face. Now Mitch is possessed. Gripping Anne’s arms, he drives his forehead between her eyes. Her head and everything in it vibrates. Her eyes tear up. Released, she stumbles backward, vision blurry, head spinning. Her left hand stabilizes her against the counter. Mitch comes at her as an unfocused outline. Anne fumbles for a skillet handle, wraps her hand around it, and parts the air. Before Mitch knows what happened, Anne gashes his temple with a thud of cast iron.

Anne doesn’t know what hits the ceramic floor tiles first: Mitch or the skillet. But next thing, Anne bangs her palm against the aluminum door to open it before she cuts to the side yard of dead grass. Her mother pulls up beneath the rusted carport. Running, Anne jumps over the charcoal grill that lay on its side. Ashes and half-burnt briquettes lay clumped like gray vomit. The car door slams. Chest heaving, she glances back at their home: siding stained the color of nicotine, missing shingles, rusted swing set, windows with torn screens. She had spent many hot summers, icy winters, and tornadic springs in that house. Anne just wanted a family—parents who didn’t replace affection with abuse, who didn’t drink and swear and scream and break shit as a means of bonding. And siblings who didn’t accept this lower level of existence as normal. She is the eldest daughter, the one who wants something more. Then come her mother’s screams from the house. Anne turns away, her feet digging into the ground. Hoping she didn’t kill Mitch, the middle son, she zigzags from one neighbor’s yard to the next. Screams become distant as she lengthens her stride, putting distance between the life she had always known and the one she wanted, whatever and wherever that was.