When I was little,  I feared our basement more than anything. As I descended down the stairs, now at nineteen, I noticed it still looked exactly the same as it did ten, fifteen years ago. The air was still musty, light still barely fought its was through the thick layer of grime on the small windows at the top of the far wall. I crossed the pebble-flooring to our extra fridge, the one that was upstairs two years ago when I left. The old fridge that sat here, the smaller one the size of my sister, became too old. In the last twenty-four months before her passing, my mother bought a new fridge. She never even realized she was wasting away her limited time on replacing insignificant machines. Makes you think.
One of the reasons I was terrified of the basement was that I always imagined a dead body inside of the cold metal prison. Frozen and blue, its mouth still in the shape of a scream. My brain was too dramatic as a child, but it was probably a character from a scary story my cousin told me, or from a horror movie I was too young to watch. I grimaced as the image popped back in my head, but as I pulled on the door, the only thing inside of the old machine were the beers my dad asked for and a bag of lettuce. So much for healthy eating.
At the top of the stairs again, I briefly turned back to face the rickety staircase I’d climbed, and shut off the lights with one foot back into the house. Closing the basement door softly and placing the bottles my father asked for on the counter, I decided I’d participated enough in the festivities. Hayley came into the room right as I pushed open the back door to escape. She didn’t stop me though. Only shook her blonde head that matched my father’s when he still had hair, and watched the black threads hanging down to my shoulders dart out of the house.  Replicas of the ones in the coffin earlier,

“What’re you staring at?”
The woods behind my parents’ house used to be my safe haven, and by fourteen, I would run out of the house and into the trees whenever I needed an escape. A bridge went over a dip in the ground, arching over the lower forest floor. I came to that dip in the ground and turned the corner. There, standing below the bridge in the middle of the path, stood a girl no older than fifteen. The leaves padded beneath my feet as I walked up to her, an amused look on my face. She didn’t look up at me, but smiled softly when I asked her the question.
“I like the way your hair swings from side to side when you walk.”
She completely ignored my curiosity, but I was used to it by now; Ben frequently ignored me during one of his rants. “Sorry about your mother. It’s hard to lose people, no matter how terrible they are to you.”
My heart stopped for a moment and I forced my lungs open. The eased look fell off for a second, but I quickly regained my naturally slack expression.
“Yeah,” I paused to laugh, thinking of the absurdity of this situation, “she wasn’t exactly the ‘World’s Best Mom.’”
The girl c***ed her head at me, curious. I saw red above her left eyebrow as her head angled. It was a deep gash.
“Your mom do that to you?” My voice got surprisingly quiet and my throat tightened. Don’t think about it now. Don’t be sorry now.
“No,” her voice was airy, “my stepdad. My mam died four hours after I was born, and my birth father was halfway to Washington State. My stepdad married my mam six months into the relationship, seven months into her pregnancy.”
“You think she made the wrong choice? Marrying him ‘n all that?”
“Yes.” I smiled sadly at her, but she didn’t see, as her gaze was still pointed at the underside of the bridge. “Don’t get me wrong, ‘m ecstatic to not be inna orphanage, but Scott was so determined to name his li’l boy Timmy that when I was born he named me it anyways. My mam’s last wish on her deathbed shouldn’t’ve been to replace a ‘Y’ with an ‘IE.’”
She was fascinating. Timmie clearly had a bad habit of oversharing with strangers she met in the woods, but she seemed incredibly kind despite her upbringing. Whenever Jax mentioned my ‘bad attitude,’ I tended to remind him of my father’s own ‘bad attitude’ and he’d let it drop.
“Why’re you telling me this?” I meant to ask why she was out here, but the words slipped through my lips.
Looking at me earnestly, Timmie’s eyes--the same color as the oak tree behind her--twinkled in the dark light. “Because I need to go with you.”
Before I had a chance to process what she said, a man pushed down the trodden path, opposite the way I came, and Timmie ducked behind a support beam forthe bridge, two feet wider than her on each side.
“You!” The man cried out incredulously as though I’d murdered his brother. “You seen a li’l girl here? Around yay high? Blonde hair?” He stopped on the edge of the dip and held his hand out, parallel to the ground, at the height where his chubby neck separated from his thick chest. I shook my head in response, giving him a remorseful look.
My right index finger began tapping the outside of my thigh.
“No sir,” I called out, “I haven’t seen anybody else except for you out here.”
I would’ve expected his look of shock from our neighborhood drunk if our convenience store stopped selling whiskey, not a broad-shouldered, 6-foot-four-inches stepfather. He didn’t believe what I said and took a few steps closer, as if to threaten me.
“No? Haven’ seen no little girl out here? Blonde hair?” He repeated himself and glanced around the clearing as if expecting Timmie to jump out. “Listen, if I hear you’re.. You’re protectin’ that girl or somethin’--”
His southern drawl made him unable to finish his words apparently. “Protecting her from what?” I asked, voice clear but a little too high for my liking.
The man open and closed his mouth before saying, “You sure you ain’t seen--”
“Yes sir, I’m sure. I’ve been here for half-an-hour and there hasn’t been any fifteen-year-old girls come through.” My breath paused as I hoped Timmie’s stepfather was too dense to realize he hadn’t mentioned her age.
“You watchin’ for ‘em? You prey on little girls?” When I didn’t respond, he kept talking nervously, getting faster as he went, grasping at straws to assert dominance. My mother did a similar thing when she was alive, only her accusations were correct and something she held over our heads. “Or-- You don’t like girls very much. Yeah, that’s it! You play for the other team, dontcha? With that hair, and- and I know your old man was sick uhv ya by the time you left. He said- said he never had a son, he did. Nearly sent your mother to an early grave.” He had gotten progressively closer again, and now had a finger jabbed into my chest. Spit flew out of his mouth as he spoke and I watched his eyes bug out.
“In case you hadn’t realized--” I desperately clung to staying calm, “--my mother’s funeral was today.” The tapping of my finger paused. It was the first truth I’d told during the entire conversation.
“Oh. Oh, I’m… Well, I should be, er, getting back…” It seemed to pain him to give his condolences. He took a few steps back, fiddling with his fingers and holding his own hands. He muttered something else into the evening air and gave in, turning back and hurrying off the way he came. The man’s stepdaughter appeared from her hiding spot, grinning.
“Perfect! Now I can come witchya.”

Timmie didn’t seem to understand the term ‘fugitive’ but I recognized immediately what kind of situation she was in. I knew she’d never be out of it if I didn’t help, because nobody ever came to rescue me. So we trudged through the mud as water began to fall from the heavens, and we made it back to my father’s house without a hitch. I showed her to our shed, the one that housed our lawn furniture on the off-season, and told her to wait there.
Hayley caught up to me as I attempted to sneak food out of the reception. “Where’ve you been?! You’re soaking wet!”
“Well, Hayls,” I paused, drawing out the nickname, “it is raining outside.”
“Well come upstairs then, you’ll catch a cold unless we get you under some wore blanket,” she grumbles under her breath. Her beady eyes narrowed as I smiled nervously.
“About that.. I- I have work in the morning. I work weekends now. Last night was awful, I really can’t stay in this house another night. I left for a reason. And you know how badly Jax sleeps when I’m not there--“
“Who’s Jax?”
Her tone was accusing when she interrupted my rambling and my chest ached, a deep cavern between my ribcage. How would she have known who he was? I had barely seen her in the past two years, choosing instead to have a haphazard life in Boston, while she stayed close to home in Virginia to attend college. “Somebody from the city,” I blankly said, “met him at a coffee shop the first day I’d moved there. He was humming some dumb song I hated and we became roommates.” The story was oversimplified and removed the part about his laugh making my shoulders relax for the first time in ten years, but my monotone voice was enough for Hayley. Ever since I left, I became a passive and relaxed person, much different from when we lived together when I had to protect her. We would meet for coffee once every month or so to catch up, and she’d insist she could barely recognize me. My emotions started to never be too overly complicated. But I lost the ability to process them well. When there were emotions too strong to express, my voice would be flat and my eyes blank as I fought for control to never show weakness.
Hayley sighed, her eyes down at her feet and arms crossed. “How long have you two been seeing each other?”
“Two years.” Idiot, I shouldn’t have told her. A small frown bent her lips.
“Fine,” eventually she threw her hands into the air in surrender, “fine, go back to Boston and leave me and Dad to clean up. Go ignore this like you ignored Mom for the past two years.”
It bothered me that she had begun to use “Mom” again, a nickname I’d lost for the woman years before her death. And I knew leaving would be a bad idea, Hayley wouldn’t forgive me for that, but my brain saw it as an out, and I took it. Swallowing thickly and nodding slowly, I numbly went back outside. The food in my hands confused me when they were finally registered, but then the memory of Timmie in our shed popped back into my head. It’d be a long drive back.

“Ay! Jax! I’m home,” I called out into the dark hallway, the front door shoved open by my shoulder. When I got no response, I turned to Timmie and shrugged. “He’s out.”
“It’s nearly two in the mornin’!”
“He can do what he wants, it’s his house too,” I grumbled, slightly annoyed that I’d been tricked into smuggling a fifteen-year-old to my temporary apartment. “Okay, listen. You can have the couch for the rest of the week, but then our rent’s up and we’re moving over about five blocks. There’s a proper pull-out with that one. No way will Ben be giving up his room, but Addy just might share.”
“Who’re they?”
“Friends,” I shrugged simply. “Roommates.” Addy always joked about how she practically lived at our apartment since we were her best friends. Eventually we gave in and agreed to let her officially pay rent.

Before me stood a girl marveling at the sight of a tiny, practically bare apartment. And she looked happy. It saddened me to remember the expression I had when I walked into Jax’ apartment to room with him. The only thing in my trembling hands at the time was a duffle bag, barely a week’s worth of clothes jammed into it.
“Thanks for not leaving me,” Timmie whispered. The dark pressed on all sides of our bodies and I felt tight, as if breath wouldn’t come easy.
I whispered back to her. “You’re not going back. I promise.” My right index finger stayed resiliently still in my pocket. I smiled at the absence of tapping.

My promise began to prove difficult, though not impossible, to uphold. Timmie was a human. She needed things. Clothes and food and, when the fall finally fell over the city and noses became pink against the wind, eventually she’d need school too. And I couldn’t give enough time to her. Ben, my best friend who had left Virginia with me--although more to rebel against his rich parents than in necessity to get out--lived with us. And he wasn’t too happy about Timmie. And he was loud. Let’s just say, you never didn’t know where you stood with Ben.
“I mean, I didn’t know you and Jax were ready to adopt. Did I miss the wedding?”
“You were too drunk to remember your own best man speech,” Addy snorted. Her thin eyes squeezed shut as she and Jax laughed. I felt the latter’s shoulder shake against mine and I leaned back against the couch, relaxing. Work had been long, and with Timmie living in our ever-changing apartments, money the four of us had earned stretched even thinner. I knew Timmie felt bad, but barely anybody would hire under sixteen. Luckily, she rarely asked for money to spend.
She would leave early in the morning, before Addy and Jax who both were baristas at a coffee shop on Commonwealth Ave., and wander the city all day. Clearly she never bought anything, but one day, before the record store I managed opened, I went with her. She brought me to her favorite stores; the ones that had dogs on the floor or art in the windows. There was the one day I attempted to properly buy something for her, the girl that had become my adopted little sister, but she refused the painting. It was small, barely three inches wide and three tall, and wasn’t more than twenty-five bucks. Yet she shook her head and smiled, blonde hair twitching in the twisted rope of her braid. “I don’t want to be a burden,” she had said. I made sure to go back and buy it for her the next day, leaving it on her pillow for when she came home.
Addy took a liking to Timmie though, showing her the record store after the morning rush at the cafe slowed, and teaching her how to “Properly make stove-top ramen.” This just made Ben b**** and moan louder, insisting that the few noodles that missed the pot would light our apartment on fire and our landlord would murder us in our sleep. At least Ben and I balanced each other out.
Jax didn’t seem to care much about Timmie. Ecstatic wasn’t a word I’d use to express how he felt when he realized she meant I had less time to see him. But Jax and I lived together. He put up with Ben as my baggage, so Timmie seemed easy in comparison. She was easy. Timmie, after so many years of ducking under blows and carefully caring for herself in the middle of the night to never be a problem, was almost entirely self-sufficient. Money and school were the only tight spots, but Jax insisted that since he never graduated from anywhere larger than middle school, she would be just fine becoming a drop out.
“Maybe being a barista for the rest of her life isn’t what she had in mind,” I pointed out to him over dinner, a smirk starting to curl at the ends of my lips.
Jax retaliated, as I knew he would. “Hey! You know I’m trying to open a business… that artist’s workshop?”
“Did you ever pause to think,” Timmie interrupted, “that one can get a degree in just that? Business? It might speed the process up quite a few years to know what you’re doing.”
Her airy tone and batted eyelashes were not mocking Jax, no, Timmie was simply stating how the situation unfolded. But to Ben and Addy, dear Lord above, it was the funniest thing they’d heard in a long time. They were holding onto each other, tears squeezing out of Ben’s tightly shut eyes, and Addy’s head thrown back in laughter. Jax’s face darkened and he stabbed a piece of lettuce with particular ferocity. Timmie too smiled, happy she was making somebody else smiled, but it wasn’t malicious like Ben or Addy’s laughter. It was a look of content.
“Love you assholes too,” Jax grumbled as he shoved another forkful of salad into his mouth.
It was that one, somewhat vulgar, sentence that made me realize something. All my life I’d been searching for a home, a family. What was last weekend all about? A failing, fallen apart family brought only together in times of mourning and grief. And yet, I didn’t need to return to that ever again. I went to my own mother’s funeral under the pretense of change. I went expecting to suddenly embrace my father and cry and connect and bond, but that would never, ever happen. Because we were never a family. And you can’t create a family where no love exists. But I had found my real home two years ago, I was simply too focused on running away from the old one to notice I never needed to go back.
Sitting in front of me, three other mismatched twenty-year-olds and a practically kidnapped teenage girl, I saw a family.