Ginger could hear them talking on the other side of the door.
“Hi, honey, I’m home.” That was Dad. He was coming in from work, which meant it was about half past five. He shut the front door behind him.
“Oh hi.” That was Mom. She was standing in the opening that separated the kitchen from the living room. “You’re home a little early.”
“Yeah, I got my report done, and I figured I’d sneak out before I got dragged into the Haberman project. That thing is falling apart.”
His voice was loud now, immediately on the other side of the door. Ginger curled up deeper into the darkness and held her breath.
The door handle rattled, then stopped.
“Put your coat on the chair,” Mom said. Ginger could tell she was completely in the living room now. “You can hang it up later.”
“Ginger’s still in there?”
“She had a rough day at school. There was bullying involved. It’s all right, the kids have gotten suspensions, but Ginger needed longer to decompress.”
Dad sighed heavily enough that Ginger could hear it through the door. “I don’t think we should keep humoring her like this.”
“Doctor Hampton said it’s fine. Let her be, she’ll grow out of it. You know that.”
Ginger adjusted herself in the darkness, and pressed herself harder against the back wall of the closet.
She knew that Mom didn’t really understand, but at least she accepted. That was more than Dad could do. It’s just that the outside world could get so loud sometimes, so bright, so much of everything, and this closet was the only space that Ginger had found at home where all that noise quieted down. No light except the crack under the door. The chaos of her siblings was muted by the walls. It was cool, not cold, and it was just the right amount of room for her to curl up on the floor, like she was now, and let all the screaming inside her brain drip out through her fingertips.
Nearly every school day, she’d have to sit in here for a little while. Most days, though, it was only a little bit of time.
Today, though, was rough. Those other girls had been so cruel. It wasn’t Ginger’s fault she was weird like this. Why couldn’t she just be herself?
That’s the thing that her teachers had said so many times in elementary school: Be yourself, and people will like you for you.
That doesn’t work when who you are is a weirdo. And now that she was in middle school, she was learning how cruel other people could be to weirdos.
And now, she felt trapped. The anxiety that had been subsiding was rising up again, with her father just inches away from violating her sanction, and now she’d have to face him at some point. He’d have that look on his face, that look of disappointment. Why couldn’t she be like her sisters? Heather was so well-adjusted in high school. She had friends. She had sports. She got good grades without working hard.
Why couldn’t Ginger be like Heather?
Even Margrette, in fourth grade, was doing fine, especially now that Ginger wasn’t in the school anymore to cause Margrette’s friends to wonder.
Why couldn’t Ginger be like Margrette?
On the other side of the door, Mom had convinced Dad, through words and apparently through gestures, to just let it go this time. He had disappeared into his den, and she back into the kitchen, and quiet descended again on Ginger in her closet.
She put her hands, palms flat, on the floor and let the new anxiety slip out of her fingertips, joining the silent screams that she’d already released.
It would be okay, eventually. But right now, it still wasn’t.