We didn’t shake hands or say anything dramatic, but something shifted between us in that dirty hallway. I moved a little closer, so our shoulders brushed, and she didn’t move away. That was enough.
That night, I dragged my blanket down the hall after lights-out and curled up on the floor outside her bedroom door. Like a loyal stray dog guarding the only person who’d offered him anything that wasn’t cruelty or indifference.
It became routine.
Every night after that, once the house quieted and the lights went out, I slipped from my bunk and took my place outside her door. She never invited me in, but little by little I moved closer. Until one night there was a mattress on the floor beside her bed, she didn't tell me to stay, she didn't have to.
Meredith wasn't very talkative, but when she did speak up, I memorized every word.
“Don’t talk to Tony. He likes hurting people.”
“Never eat anything that’s already open.”
“Keep your back to the wall when you sleep.”
“Don’t trust anyone who smiles all the time.”
Her survival rules, delivered in that blunt, quiet voice. Thirteen going on thirty. Razor-edged, cautious, and miles wiser than me.
I watched her like other kids watched superheroes. Every move she made, I watched. Every line she drew, I stepped behind it.
She never really smiled, not for real. Sometimes she wore this empty, mean kind of grin when she wanted to scare someone off, but it didn’t touch her eyes. She didn’t let anyone touch her either. If a kid bumped into her or a one of the parents tried to put a hand on her shoulder, she’d jerk away like she’d been burned.
The only person she ever allowed near was me, and I wore that like armor.
One night—Christmas Eve, I think—I was hiding in the laundry room, avoiding the chaos in the living room. The foster parents had dragged out a plastic tree that was missing half its lights and were trying to pretend we were some normal family. The noise made my skin crawl.
I slipped into the laundry room and sank onto the cold tile floor between baskets of other people’s clothes. The washing machine rattled like it was about to fall apart. I had a little broken music box I’d dug out of the trash earlier that week cradled in my hands. Cheap, chipped ballerina inside, paint peeling off the sides, but the lid was covered in tiny silver stars.
It made me think of her. Of us. Maybe because we lived in dark corners of that house, and the stars felt like a promise that somewhere else had to exist.
The door creaked open and Meredith came in. She didn’t say anything, just slid down the opposite wall until she was sitting next to me, close enough that our shoulders almost touched. My heart stuttered like it didn’t know how to beat properly anymore.
I watched her out of the corner of my eye, chewing my lip. Before I could chicken out, I nudged the music box toward her. “It’s for you,” I mumbled.
She turned it over in her hands, thumbs tracing the chipped edges. The thing didn’t play music anymore; it was junk, really. But she studied it like it might bite. My stomach twisted while I waited for her reaction.
“You’re weird,” she said finally, but the words came out softer than I expected.
I tried to shrug like it didn’t matter, even though my pulse was racing. “It, uh…it reminded me of you.”
Her eyes snapped to mine. Dark, sharp, suspicious. For a second I thought she was going to throw it back at me or throw it at the wall like the spoon.
Instead, she carefully pushed the music box back into my hands. “Don’t give me anything,” she said quietly. “That’s how people get hurt. They think it means something. Then it gets taken away.”
The way she said it told me it was something she learned from experience.
I didn’t understand all of it then, not really. I just knew my chest ached as I curled my fingers back around the box.
“People like us don’t get happy endings, Nick,” she added after a moment, staring straight ahead at the humming dryer. “We get what we get and we don't get upset. That’s it.”
I wanted to argue, tell her she was wrong, that I’d make it different somehow. But I was just a scrawny kid with a stolen blanket and a broken toy. What the hell did I know about endings?
So I kept the music box. I still have it.
A few weeks later, she was gone.
“New placement,” I heard the caseworker tell Greta in the kitchen. Some private agency, some fancy program that would “give her a real chance.” College at some point, maybe. Therapy. A future. They said it like it erased everything that came before.
