The knock I deliver is too soft for the urgency coursing through me, a contradiction born from years of balancing between protection and suffocation. I wait, counting each inhale and exhale. No response comes.
Six thirty-five. Ten minutes until we need to leave for the bus stop.
The system is failing. The routine is crumbling. And beneath my exhaustion and irritation burns the ever-present pilot light of fear that never extinguishes, no matter how stable our lives appear.
Something is wrong.
“Lena!” I call, loud enough to penetrate sleep.
The persistent silence from her room becomes deliberate now, not the oversight of a teenager running late. I knock again, louder this time. “Lena, we’re running late.”
Still nothing.
I rap my knuckles on the door with more force, the wood vibrating under the impact. The sound echoes in the narrow hallway, cutting through the quiet apartment.
“Bus leaves in eight minutes,” I say. “You need to get moving now.”
The silence stretches before her response drifts through the door. “I don’t feel good. I think I’m sick.” My hand freezes mid-knock, suspended in the air as I process what I’m hearing.
Lena is never sick, not for tests, not for presentations, not even when she had the actual flu last winter, and I found her trying to get dressed while running a temperature of a-hundred-and-two.
“What kind of sick?” I ask, keeping my tone neutral.
“Stomach.” Her answer comes too fast, with no pause to consider symptoms. “I was up all night. Must’ve been something I ate.”
A lie. I prepare her school lunch, dinner leftovers, and breakfast from the diner. Nothing thatwould cause food poisoning without affecting me, too.
I inhale, catching the faint scent of her strawberry shampoo lingering in the hallway from her shower yesterday morning. No hint of sickness, no acrid tang of vomit, no bitter note of fever sweat.
I try the handle and find it locked, which means she got up to lock it after I checked on her last night.
“Open this door right now, Lena.” Not a request.
“Can’t I just rest?” A sniffle drifts through the cracks. “I’ll email my teachers for the assignments.”
I flatten my palm on the door. “Either you open this door in the next ten seconds, or I do.” A rustling sound comes from inside the room, but the door remains closed.
She knows I mean it. I don’t bluff, I don’t threaten, and I don’t posture. When I say ten seconds, I mean ten seconds.
The lock doesn’t click. The door doesn’t open.
My hands move to my pocket, extracting the key ring, and I separate the correct key from the others by touch alone, my fingers knowing its weight and ridges.
I try hard to respect Lena’s boundaries as a young woman, but we have rules in this house, and she’s breaking one of them right now.
The key slides into the lock, and I push the door open.
The first breath of air from her room brings me up short as the wrongness from last night now burns my nostrils.
Beneath the strawberry shampoo, the vanilla body spray, and the sweetness of Lena’s pheromones threads a foreign scent.
Lena doesn’t bolt upright in surprise or pull the covers higher in embarrassment, the way a teenager might when a parent enters unannounced. She remains still, only her eyes tracking me as I step into the room.
“You’re not sick,” I say, certainty locking into place.
Her hands grip the blanket, knuckles white with tension. The comforter rises to her chin, held there like a shield. Beneath the covers, I can see the outline of her rigid body. This isn’t the loose-limbed sprawl of a teenager sleeping in, nor the curled protection of genuine illness.
“I just need to rest today,” she whispers, her bottom lip trembling.
