I’m sure my face is red. It feels red, and it feels even more so when tears race over my cheek. I wish I wouldn’t cry; I’m not a baby. But I’m so angry and this is what happens. So I scrub my eyes for what must be the fifth time.

Fidgety, I sigh and jiggle my foot. Mommom does that too whenever she’s angry at Mommy and Brian and when I don’t want to take a nap. While I do this, I keep an eye on Brian and Irene, only to look away when they glance back. Irene wasn’t someone I could ever like too much. She was ugly and mean. She looked like Aunt Janine, but Aunt Janine had a lot of cats instead of a son and she lived in an apartment whereas Irene had moved into Brian’s house right after Mommy, Morgan, and I left. She brought Alex with her.

“What’re you drawing, Alex?” Irene asked, moving around the living room-slash-dining room-slash-kitchen in an inside out white shirt and holey black yoga pants. Mommy dresses like that too at home.

Whatever Alex say, I don’t hear because I’m too busy staring at the coloring station he was using. It was once Morgan’s, red and yellow with blue stubby legs, but she doesn’t use it anymore because it was given to Alex. Now, Morgan sits on a pile of everyone’s shoes, sketchers flickering from her weight, her back pressed against the fish tank as some stranger plays with her toys. I don’t think she notices but I do and I get angry again, but Brian is watching and I know better.

I figure I don’t know better, really, when I keep looking from the white wall at my left to her face across the room. She’s staring fearfully, and with too much concentration, at the television. It’s on commercial break, a shatteringly silent commercial break given the circumstances. She’s all coulicked bangs and blue eyes – and so small.

I curl my fingers under the carpeted step I sit on and lower my head. It’s too familiar, these steps, and that’s because Mommom has the same carpet in the back part of this house. This house was split in two by the landlord and Mommom lives in the back. I can’t see her when I’m here.

Finally, after fidgeting for decades, I get too angry to stay here anymore. I keep my eyes on those light up shoes when I get up and cross the room. No one stops me and I’m surprised, but I keep going and grab my coat and shoes, putting them on.

“Morgan,” I hiss, struggling from my nerve, “C’mon! Grab your shoes.”

She stares at me. And she keeps staring, not moving. I hold her sketchers to her. “C’mon!”

Still, so still. I get angry at her too, for not cooperating, for not realizing Mommom was a quick walk away and she wouldn’t get hit there and Mommy could come get us. Ignoring Brian’s cigarette voice mixed with Irene’s laugh, I walk out the front door, slamming the screen, and running for the steps. It’s so cold, and dark too, for only seven.

The iciness of the steps doesn’t deter me because I’m sure my anger could melt it away. I stop at the bottom, standing on an ice patch in a too large brown coat, bare legs, and shoes on the wrong foot. The door is a bright spot in a dark night and both Morgan and Brian are standing in the way. She’s crying and he’s yelling for me to come back, but I stay still, waiting for Morgan. She has her coat now. Brian yanks her back and marches across the porch and down the steps for me.

My heart rate quickens and I react, my mind screaming. I try to run down the street, to the alleyway that leads to Mommom. Nights of bruised backs, laying on air mattresses and staring at glowy ceilings; dinners of awful food being thrown away at my defiance; meaty hands and grating voices. All I could think about was pain and what was more to come. I get all the more afraid when his arms reach around me and drag me into the house and I look up at the sky, struggling against him, and realize…I can’t see the stars here.