Page 14 of The Intruder

BEFORE

ELLA

I need money.

I need money so I can buy school lunch. I need money so that I can lug my clothes over to the laundromat and get them clean. Unfortunately, my mother doesn’t give me an allowance. She says I won’t be responsible with it, whatever that means.

As I walk home from school, I stop off at the house at the end of my block.

Mrs. Fleming lives there. She’s, like, a million years old, and in the past, she’s paid me for doing chores around her place, like washing dishes or taking out the garbage.

I like cleaning things—it makes me feel better to make things tidy and organized.

Anyway, maybe today she has something for me to do. I’ll take pretty much anything.

Mrs. Fleming has a ramp going to her front door, because like I said, she is super old. I walk up the ramp and knock on her door. She always takes forever to answer, but after a few minutes, I hear her shuffling footsteps behind the door. I knew she’d be home. She never leaves.

She opens the door, and as usual, she’s wearing a nightgown with a flimsy housecoat over it—I’ve never seen her wearing clothing that isn’t a nightgown.

But her white hair is neatly combed. She is pretty skinny and only about as tall as I am, which is really tiny for an adult.

I’m one of the shortest kids in my grade.

“Hi, Mrs. Fleming,” I say cheerfully. “I was wondering if you have any chores for me to do.”

She narrows her eyes at me for a moment; then finally, she nods. “You can take out the garbage for me.”

“I’ve raised my rates a little bit,” I tell her. “It’s three dollars now to take out the garbage.” As if this is some kind of business I’m running and other people besides her are willing to hire me.

Mrs. Fleming nods again and moves aside for me to come in.

Her house is exactly the same layout as mine, but it looks completely different on the inside.

Everything is very tidy, and her furniture is old, like they are antiques.

She has an ancient-looking couch that definitely isn’t just two mattresses propped up together, but I don’t know if it’s that much more comfortable.

Her whole house has this weird, sharp smell, kind of like mothballs.

But it’s still better than the smoke in my house.

Mrs. Fleming tags along after me as I locate the garbage in her kitchen.

It’s pretty full, and then she has a second bag next to it that she hasn’t taken out yet.

I know it sounds weird, but I like throwing out the trash.

It feels productive. And it’s nice to just be able to throw out the garbage without Mom coming over to me and giving me the third degree about what I’m tossing out because I can’t do it without her approval.

I swap out the trash bag for a brand-new one, and I even change the smaller wastebasket in her living room. Mrs. Fleming continues to follow me as I take the two garbage bags out of her house and put them in the bins.

“That will be three dollars,” I tell her as I wipe my hands on my jeans.

Mrs. Fleming purses her wrinkled lips. “I don’t think so.”

I frown, confused. Was there more garbage she wanted me to take out? “I don’t understand.”

“I think you got quite enough payment last time,” Mrs. Fleming says, “when you stole money from my purse.”

My mouth drops open. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t lie to me, young lady,” she snaps. “I saw you going through my purse, and then after you left, I noticed money missing.”

My heart sinks. “That’s not true, Mrs. Fleming. I would never steal from you.”

“Your mother told me about how you are always getting sent to the principal’s office.” She folds her bony arms across her chest, a look of satisfaction on her face as she relays my mother’s extremely unfair character assassination. “Not that she’s any better.”

So does this mean she’s not going to pay me? At all?

Great.

Mrs. Fleming wags her finger in my face. “I should call the Board of Health about the two of you. Get you both kicked out.”

“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?”

“I had detention.”

“Of course. It would be too much to ask for you to keep from getting in trouble.” She rolls her eyes. “Anyway, I’m going out tonight.”

Going out? That must mean my mother has a date, which is her first date in practically a year. That explains why she is all dressed up and wearing so much makeup.

I’m glad my mom has a date. Even though she is really pretty, she almost never goes out, maybe for the same reason I don’t have any friends—we are both scared to bring somebody back home with us.

But she’s happier when she has a boyfriend.

When I was younger, this guy named Chip used to live with us, and things were better then.

The house was a little cluttered, but not like it is now, especially because Chip used to pick up after her.

He even used to cook, and we made a game of all doing the dishes together right after instead of letting the plates and pans soak in the sink for days.

Also, she didn’t worry as much about money because he paid for stuff like groceries and gas.

After he left when I was about seven or eight, that’s when things got bad.

She was always anxious about running out of money, so she refused to get rid of stuff, because what if we needed a new one and couldn’t afford it?

“When are you going?” I ask her.

She checks her watch. “I’m meeting him in about twenty minutes. I should leave soon.”

She’s looking at me, and I don’t know why at first, but then I realize what she wants me to do.

Oh no. No.