MY STEPMOTHER MADE ME GIVE MY HALLOWEEN COSTUME TO HER DAUGHTER—AND MY OWN FATHER CALLED ME SELFISH FOR WANTING TO KEEP IT

The Austin bus dropped us off at the corner of Escarpment and Slaughter at three-fifteen.

Ava tried to walk next to me on the asphalt sidewalk, her lavender jacket rustling in the dry breeze that blew dust from the new housing development across the street.

"Lily," she started, her voice small. "I didn't tell my mom to call your dad about Chloe. My mom just saw what Chloe commented on my picture and got really mad. She said Chloe was a bad influence and that she was trying to create drama between us."

I kept my eyes on the white concrete curb.

"Lily, please. Can we just talk about it?"

"Where's the dress, Ava?" I asked.

She blinked. "It's... it's in the laundry room. Mom said she was going to take it to the dry cleaner to see if they could fix the armpit seam."

"She's not going to take it to the dry cleaner," I said. "Dry cleaning costs fifteen dollars. She’s going to stuff it into the bottom of the donation bin behind the Walgreens so she doesn't have to look at it anymore."

"She wouldn't do that!"

"She did it with Mom’s blue crockpot," I said, turning the corner onto our street. The row of brick-and-siding two-story houses looked identical under the flat November sun—neat little lawns of dormant St. Augustine grass, two crape myrtles per yard, two-car garages facing the road like closed mouths. "She told Dad it had lead in the glaze. Two days later, I saw her buy a white ceramic one from Williams Sonoma with Dad’s debit card."

"My mom has her own money," Ava said defensively.

"Your mom hasn't worked since June, Ava. Dad pays the mortgage. Dad pays the car notes. Dad pays for your private clarinet lessons that you quit after three weeks."

Ava stopped walking. We were three houses down from ours—number 4412, the one with the black wrought-iron bench on the porch that my mother had painted with rust-proof enamel the summer before she got sick.

"Why do you hate us so much?" Ava’s voice cracked. She wasn't faking the tears now; they spilled over her lower lids and ran down her nose, leaving dark spots on the lapel of her new lavender jacket. "We didn't ask to move here! My mom wanted to stay in Dallas! I had to leave all my friends behind, and every time I walk into that house, you look at me like I stole your bed!"

"You didn't steal my bed," I said, stopping on the sidewalk and facing her. "You stole my Halloween. And then you let your mom make me look like a monster for caring about sixty-five dollars."

"It's just sixty-five dollars!" she screamed, her voice echoing off the brick garages of our neighbors' houses. "Why does everything have to be a big deal with you? It's just stupid money!"

"Because nobody gave it to me, Ava!" I yelled back, my voice louder than I had ever heard it outside. A man walking an Australian Shepherd two doors down paused on his lawn to look at us. "Nobody bought it for me! Nobody felt sorry for me because my parents got divorced! I earned it! Every single hour of it!"

I turned and ran up our driveway.

The front door was unlocked. Karen’s silver Lexus was parked in the street, which meant she was probably at the neighborhood clubhouse or having her nails done at the strip mall behind the H-E-B.

I dropped my backpack on the entryway tile and headed straight for the garage.

The garage smelled of old lawnmower gas, dry fertilizer, and the cedar shavings Dad used to keep the crickets out of the water heater closet. In the far corner, tucked behind the industrial metal shelving units Dad had brought home from his warehouse, was a stack of five clear plastic storage bins with yellow lids.

They were Mom’s boxes.

When Karen had moved in fourteen months ago, Dad had promised me that Mom’s things would stay in the guest bedroom closet. *“We’ll go through them together, Lily-bug,”* he’d said, his hand warm on my shoulder. *“Just her yearbooks, her quilts, and the photo albums from when we lived in Colorado. We’ll make a cedar chest for your room.”*

Three months later, the guest bedroom had become Karen’s "craft and planning studio." The yellow-lidded bins had been moved to the garage attic. Then, during the July heatwave, Dad had brought them down to the concrete floor behind the weed trimmer because the attic heat was supposedly "ruining the plastic."

I climbed over two bags of potting soil to reach the stack.

The top bin had Mom’s holiday decorations: the ceramic Nativity set with the missing donkey, the tin stars from Santa Fe, the woolen stockings with our names embroidered across the cuffs.

The second bin was supposed to have her scrapbooks.

I pulled the yellow lid off the second bin.

It was half-empty.

The leather-bound album from 2018—the one with the gold foil lettering that said *OUR FIRST DECADE*—was sitting on top. But beneath it, the cardboard box where Mom had kept her high school journals and the silver-plated jewelry box her grandmother had given her for her confirmation was gone.

In its place was a white plastic trash bag, tied in a loose knot at the top.

My heart began to hammer against my ribs like a trapped bird.

I reached in and pulled the trash bag out onto the concrete. I untied the plastic handles with shaking fingers.

Inside were four items:

1. A framed five-by-seven photograph of Mom and me at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the glass cracked in the lower left corner.

2. Mom’s old denim gardening apron, smelling faintly of dried lavender and soil.

3. Three vintage copper cookie cutters in the shapes of oak leaves.

4. A sticky note in Karen’s curly, looping handwriting: *“Garage sale – $5 for lot or donate to Goodwill.”*

I sat back on my heels on the cold, oil-stained concrete of the garage floor.

From the hallway inside the house, I heard the heavy thud of the front door closing, followed by the high, rhythmic click of Karen’s heels on the ceramic tile.

"Ava?" Karen’s voice called out, musical and bright. "Sweetheart, are you home? Look what I found at the bakery—they had those cinnamon scones you like!"

I looked down at the five-dollar sticky note stuck to my mother’s gardening apron.

The garage door was shut. The small rectangular window at the top of the roll-up door showed only a strip of pale, empty Texas sky.

I didn't cry. The tears that had been burning behind my eyelids all day seemed to evaporate, leaving behind something cold, heavy, and extremely clear.

I folded the gardening apron carefully, took the cracked picture frame out of the bag, and slid both of them beneath the bottom shelf of Dad’s tool cabinet, behind a gallon jug of motor oil where no one had looked since 2024.