Just like my mom did. Just like Dad did, too. And maybe someday, Breanna will understand, like I’m starting to now. “Kyle Hewitt and four other guys from school are blackmailing Breanna with a picture of me and her, and if we don’t stop them, they’re going to torture her and then eventually try to ruin her life. I tried to stop them, but I couldn’t. This...” Is killing my pride. “It’s too big for me and I need your help.”

Dad takes a relieved breath, a lot like the moment I opened my eyes after the bullet. He even rubs his hands over his face like I was raised from the dead. Pigpen claps my arm and smiles at me like he did the night I was patched in. “Welcome back, brother. Now let’s get to work.”

Breanna

I’M SITTING ON the front porch again, my head between my knees. Nausea and dizziness are often caused by the lack of proper blood to the brain. Doing this places the brain at the same level as the heart so the blood doesn’t have to fight gravity to reach the brain. That’s the theory. Personally, it also keeps me from having to bend over too far if I do vomit.

I’m cold and clammy and hot at the same time, yet I’m free.

I lift my head and the autumn breeze feels good against my skin.

Free. I’m officially outside the box. I’m free.

Free is terrifying and open and it’s similar to being a bit lost—but it still feels...free.

My cells vibrates and pings over and over again. Reagan has called twice. Addison three times. My cell sings again with her ringtone. The count is now up to four.

Elsie wanders from the house and plops down beside me. Her black hair is in a ponytail and half of the strands are falling out. She’s in her school clothes and there are Band-Aids over her scraped knees. I put those bandages there last night. I wonder who will do it when I’m gone.

“You look sick,” she says.

“It’s been a rough afternoon. How was your day?”

“Rough.” Elsie straightens, then her eyes wash over me. In a few seconds, she leans forward and rests her combined hands on her legs. A complete mirror image of me.

“What made it rough?” Typically this conversation would happen in the kitchen with me pouring a glass of milk while she and Zac swipe cookies off the plate I have waiting for them.

“Lauren,” she says as if a word could be a scowl.

Lauren. I sigh for her. We all have a Lauren who’s the bane of our existence. While I had two older sisters and two older brothers, Elsie is the product of being a girl with three boys ahead of her. She’s a proud tomboy and Lauren isn’t.

“You shouldn’t let what other people say bother you.” My advice feels hollow.

Elsie flashes me a brief smile. “At least I have you.”

My heart sinks. How many times have I told her that and all this time I had planned on leaving. “You do, but you also have Zac, Paul and Joshua. And you heard Liam last night, he might be moving back in to help.”

“Not the same. Clara and Liam are fighting because you went someplace you weren’t supposed to go again.”

I could lie to Elsie, but she’s smart enough to know the difference. Where I’m built for facts, her little brain reads people very well. “Mom and Dad tell me I should be like you. That I should listen. You aren’t listening anymore and now they’re sending you away. If I don’t listen, will they send me away?”

I shake my head. “I wanted to go away. It took me not listening for them to listen to me. Sometimes people don’t listen until bad things happen. They realize then they should have listened instead of talked. Sometimes people are too busy hearing what they want to hear, seeing what they want to see, and they don’t care what’s real, only what they think is real.”

Elsie shifts away from me. “You want to leave home? But you have another year before you have to leave. Why would you want to do that?”

Another piece of her hair falls and I beckon my youngest sister to sit on the step between my legs. She does and I begin the task of undoing the knot of hair I had put up this morning. “I wanted to fit in someplace, and I thought if I left, I would.”

“You fit in here.”

I brush her hair out with my fingers and then smooth it back up. “I didn’t think I did.”

“Sounds like you were the one not listening.”

The rubber band snaps her hair in place, but it’s the snap inside me that hurts. “What?”

Elsie glances at me from over her shoulder. “Like when I don’t fit in with the other girls, you tell me I have you, which means you have me. And if I have Zac and Paul and Joshua and Liam, then that means you do, too. It sounds to me like you aren’t listening.”

My body goes numb as my mind begins to disseminate the information. Is it possible... No, I mean Clara has always treated me like... But there are eleven people in my family and she’s one. And Liam—he’s willing to give up his dreams of independence because he’s concerned for me.

“If you’re sad because you’re in trouble,” Elsie says, “then don’t be. I get in trouble all the time, and sometimes after I cry, those are the times Mommy hugs me the hardest and you look like you need a hard hug.”

And she does it. Elsie hugs me hard, throwing her entire being, soul and all, into loving me. I hug her back and try to fight the lump hardening in my throat.

“It’s like you said when Daddy forgot to pick me up at ballet. Sometimes these bad things happen to prove you’re strong enough to be a Miller.”

My eyes shut with the wetness forming there. I did tell Elsie that. She was sad. I was sad for her and I made being forgotten in the pickup rotation a badge of honor, and it’s not until this moment that I realize how right she is. This family is messed up, but it’s still my family.