Pencil scratched on paper. Her headphones were on with music playing and the tiny television on the corner of her desk had a show on that was probably meant for older kids. There was violence and fighting, so she tried to not pay attention to it.

“Love me, love me, you know you wanna love me…” the music on her headphones pumped, the tune happy and poppy. The girls in her class had been talking about it. She liked most things so she used that sort of thing to decide what she listened to, on the off chance she could talk to them about it.

It was good. Normally she would have sang along to it, but she was distracted.

There was safety in numbers. The pencil scratched on paper, finishing another long division problem. She moved on to the next, because as long as she was doing this, she wasn’t being a pain, and she could mostly ignore the feeling in her belly.

She could smell dinner.

It was harder to not be a pain and stay out of the way when she had to go to the dinner table.

Pencil to paper, tongue pressed between her lips. The seven didn’t go into the one, but it went into the fourteen… she counted, eyes going to the ceiling. Her head bobbed with the sound of the music, even though she wasn’t paying attention to the words.

Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. The seven went into fourteen twice.

The door to her room opened. Dad leaned in and said something, and she hurried to pull her headphones down, hands wrapped around them, with fingers covering the parts where the sound came out.

Dad looked annoyed.

“Dinner is in a few minutes,” he said.

She nodded.

“You’re doing homework?”

She nodded again.

He stepped into the room, and she looked down, sliding the book across her desk.

“Division. Do I need to check your work?”

She shook her head.

“Speak up, Kanzi. You have a voice. Use it.”

“No. I did today’s homework already. I was doing some work from later in the book.”

“Wash your hands and get ready for dinner.”

She nodded.

He went back toward the kitchen, and his movement was marked by a waft of cigarette smoke, pungent. It smelled better than dinner.

More bad feelings squirmed through her belly.