Dreamland by Robert L. Anderson

off at the insurance office—and the rumor had spread quickly. It was a small town.
    Miriam opened her mouth, then closed it again. Her whole face was like a scar: pinched and white. “Go to your room,” she said, forcing the words out. Dea was grateful for the excuse. She couldn’t stand to look at her mom anymore.
    Upstairs, Dea tried once again to slam the door, to make a big statement, but the house was old and its joints swollen and instead she had to lean into the door just to get it to close. Toby looked up, blinking, from his position right in the middle of her pillow.
    She lay down on the bed and let herself cry, feeling sorry for herself about everything, even the fact that Toby didn’t move or lick her face, and instead just sat there purring like a motor on her pillow.
    Practically, she knew it changed nothing. She’d never had a dad. But at least she’d been able to pretend. She had studied his image and cut-and-pasted it into memories so he was there, inthe background, watching her tootle along on her three-wheeler in a cul-de-sac in Georgia; beaming from the front row when she won a spelling bee in second grade in Virginia; nodding with approval while she flew down a soccer field in New Jersey, the one and only time she had been stupid enough to join a sports team. She’d been Photoshopping her past, tweaking it, aligning it just a little more closely with normalcy.
    Why would her mom lie—why would her mom spend years lying—unless her real father was horrible, a criminal or a drug addict or someone who trafficked kiddie porn? Unless Miriam didn’t know herself. Dea had never seen her mom with a guy except for in Georgia, but that didn’t mean anything. She remembered plenty of nights she’d woken, thinking she heard the muffled sound of the front door closing, as though her mom had been out and just reentered. And her mom spent hours out of the house every day, working shit jobs, and would still show up sometimes with wads of cash, take Dea on a shopping spree to the local mall, spend three, four hundred bucks, like it was nothing.
    She felt cold and her head hurt, as it always did when she cried, like she’d somehow snotted out her brains. She shook her bag out on her comforter—bad idea, it was full of old coins and petrified pieces of gum, lint balls and crumpled receipts and, mysteriously, some sand—looking for a pack of tissues her mom always stole from drug stores while they were waiting to pay. (That was another thing about Miriam—Dea didn’t feel like thinking of her as Mom anymore—she stole. Stupid things, little things, but still.)
    Connor’s iPhone had somehow ended up in her bag. She must have grabbed it and shoved it automatically into her bagwhen they’d stopped at the rummage sale. She reached for it slowly, as if it were a grasshopper that might bound away if startled. Phones made great doors. Pictures, texts, music—all of it was personal . Using his phone to walk would be like opening up his brain.
    She knew she should go over to his house right away to return it, but she also knew she wouldn’t be able to face him. Not yet. For the first time, she realized how shitty she’d been to him on the drive home. He was the first person who’d been nice to her in forever, and she’d totally screwed it up.
    She swept the junk from her bed back into her bag, slapping the comforter to shake off some of the dirt. She shoved Toby over and he got up, yawning, before settling down again six inches from where he’d last been sitting. Then she turned off the lights and got under the covers, shorts and T-shirt and bra still on, not even bothering to wash her face or brush her teeth. She couldn’t face going out into the hall, in case her mom decided to come upstairs. And she definitely wasn’t going to eat dinner, even though she was starving. She hadn’t eaten anything since the milkshake