Page 18 of The Intruder

“But, Mrs. Fleming—”

“Get off my property, Ella.” She stands there rigidly as she glares at me. “Or I’ll call the police.”

I know Mrs. Fleming well enough to know this is not a bluff. So even though she is the one who owes me three dollars, I get off her property so I don’t get in trouble with the police. Not to say I’m not steaming mad, but what am I supposed to do? Grab her purse and make a run for it? She knows where I live.

Instead, I trudge the rest of the way home. Maybe there is somebody else in our neighborhood that I could ask to pay me for chores. Except everyone knows who we are and thinks my mom is nuts. So I don’t think I’m going to have any more luck.

Next time though, I’ll get paid in advance.

When I open the door to our house, I hear this hollow crashing sound and freeze. Slowly, slowly, I push the door open just enough to slip my head inside. When I look at our floor, I discover that my mother has stacked a whole bunch of empty plastic bottles back there, and now they have all toppled over and are in a big pile, making it nearly impossible to open the door all the way.

My right hand balls into a fist. I don’t get why my mother leaves things here. How are we supposed to get inside? Like, what is the point of having a house when you can’t even get into it? Or does she want us to be locked inside with all her junk?

She isn’t in the living room, so I stomp into the kitchen and yank open the pantry closet. It is kind of dangerous, because everything is stacked up so much that if you try to grab one thing, everything might fall. But I have to risk it. I need a garbage bag.

Weirdly enough, we actually have, like, three unopened boxes filled with one hundred garbage bags each. It’s weird because my mom never throws anything out, yet she has so many garbage bags. I grab one of the boxes, and a bunch of containers of macaroni and cheese fall onto the floor. After I yank one of the garbage bags from the box, I throw the macaroni and cheese inside. I don’t even check the expiration date, since we have, like, ten zillion of them anyway. I just want them gone. I want all of it gone.

Then I march out to the hallway and start shoving plastic bottles and crumpled papers into the garbage bag without even looking at what they are. I have to be fast about it though and get rid of everything before she gets back. I’ll need to put the garbage bag in someone else’s trash. If she sees it by our curb, she’ll just bring it back in the house, and it’ll all be for nothing.

It feels so good to do this. I liked taking out Mrs. Fleming’s trash, but this is much more satisfying. The trash bag is almost full when I hear a voice that makes my heart sink.

“Ella! What are you doing?”

It’s my mother. Oh no. I didn’t even realize she was home.

She is coming down the stairs as quickly as she can in her high heels, considering the path down the stairs is so narrow. For a moment, she slips on one of the papers, and I secretly wish that she would fall the rest of the way down the stairs and break her neck. If that happened, I could throw these trash bags away without getting yelled at. I could throw anything I want away. Then a second later, I get freaked out that I even thought that. I don’t really want my mom to get hurt or die. I love her. Also, she’s all I have, and I don’t want to be in one of those awful foster homes. I’ve heard terrible stories about those places.

Anyway, she catches herself and makes it the rest of the way down the stairs. Disaster averted.

“Ella!” Her voice is high and screechy, almost panicked. “What’s in that bag? What are you doing?”

“There were a bunch of bottles all over the floor—”

My mom clip-clops over to me in her heels and yanks the garbage bag out of my hand. I should have gotten out of here with it while I had a chance instead of trying to get more garbage. I got greedy.

“This is not garbage.” Her brown eyes flash at me. I have blue eyes, and I learned in life sciences, which I got an A-minus in, that since hers are brown, it must mean my father has blue eyes. I asked her once, and she said she couldn’t remember. “I was saving these bottles.”

“For what?”

“For lots of things,” she shoots back. “I even rinsed them out because I wanted to save them. I can’t believe you were about to throw them out!”

As my mom rifles around inside the garbage bag, I notice she is wearing makeup. Like, more than usual. And actually, she’s kind of dressed up. Usually she just keeps on her uniform from the grocery store, but now she’s wearing skintight blue jeans and a clingy top.

“Oh my God, Ella!” she shrieks as she pulls out one of the boxes of macaroni and cheese. “I can’t believe you threw this away. This is perfectly good!”

I don’t know what to say. We have more macaroni and cheese in the pantry than any human could eat in a lifetime. Plus, the stove is so covered in junk, we can’t cook it, so it’s useless. “It’s expired. For more than a year.”

“Macaroni and cheese doesn’t expire!” Nothing expires, according to her. Even if it’s growing mold. “Those dates are just the way they trick you into spending money to replace food that’s perfectly good.”

It wouldn’t help to tell her that based on personal experience, macaroni and cheese absolutely does expire. Eventually, the powdered cheese turns into one rock-hard block.

“Do you think I’m made of money, Ella?” She shakes the expired box of food in my face. “If you are too good to eat this—if you’re throwing out perfectly good food—then maybe you shouldn’t get to have dinner at all.”

I cringe at the hollow feeling in my stomach. I barely had any lunch today, because the turkey in the fridge had turned a greenish color, and I couldn’t make myself eat it. So I just had bread for lunch.

“I’m sorry,” I say softly. “I threw it out by accident.”

“By accident?” she bursts out. “Ella, I am so sick of your lies. Why are you so late getting home?”