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Max only remembers that day in snippets.
She remembers the stench of alcohol as she stepped through the door. She was already used to it by then. She remembers the specific creaky floorboard she almost stepped on while tip-toeing to her room, holding her shoes so their spot by the door wouldn’t alert Neil that she was home. She remembers it was a Tuesday, and she had an essay for English to put off doing.
She remembers hearing their voices raise—well, mostly she remembers Neal’s voice. Rough and angry and dangerous.
She remembers the sound of the bottle smashing against the wall, and how it made her shrink into herself even though it should have made her go out there.
She doesn’t remember Neil saying he was leaving, but she remembers Susan’s desperate pleading. You know I can’t afford this house, Neil. Please. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. As if she threw the bottle.
She remembers praying the volume on her walkie-talkie was low enough as she joined the channel Steve shared. She doesn’t remember what she said.
She remembers realizing he’d gotten there before he was supposed to—that Neal was still here, and it was too late for her to tell him not to use the key she’d snuck to him.
“Why the fuck do you have a key to my house?”
Max flinched in her room, as though she was the one about to be hit. She’d given him that key, a lifetime beforehand. Neil had been angry enough that she’d lost it.
“I—M’aam, are you alright?”
“Ignore her,” Neil spit it out so vehemently. “Answer me, boy.”
“I was here to return it,” Steve lied quickly. “To Max Mayfield? She’s in one of my classes, she left it at school.”
“I told her what would happen if she lost another goddamn key,” Neil hissed. “Shouldn’t she be home by now? Where is that fucking kid?”
Max never found out if Neil heard her window open. All she remembers is running, faster than she has before, tears burning her face, thoughts spiraling out of control. She wanted to break something. She wanted to hide in a ditch until everything was gone. She wanted to die.
She must’ve run far, because she ended up in the woods staring at the empty pool behind Steve’s house. She had a key too. It was all shiny and new: he’d had it made for her three weeks ago. Be careful, he said firmly when he pressed it into her hands. Never use this if you’re not absolutely certain my parents are gone, okay? They wouldn’t do anything, but I don’t want you to ever have to meet them.
What he meant was, they wouldn’t do anything to you.
She remembers sinking against a tree, clutching her walkie-talkie to her chest as tightly as she could with her shaking arms.
At some point, she knows she told him where she was over the walkie-talkie. She didn’t want to for some reason, but he was starting to sound like Susan begging and she’d rather claw off her ears than hear that again.
She remembers watching his car pull into his driveway at twice the speed limit, and she remembers sobbing into his chest. He held her so tightly, like she was worth keeping safe—like she was worth keeping. He was so steady; she didn’t understand it. Neil made her feel so hollowed out and defenseless.
“He’s not going to hurt you,” Steve told her firmly, holding her face like a child’s. “He’s not going to get near you anymore, okay? He’s gone.”
Max didn’t want to go back, but she didn’t want to stay there without him, so she ended up in the passenger’s seat of his car driving back to the place that wanted to kill her.
She doesn’t remember when she noticed the dark bruise forming on Steve’s jaw, but she remembers how he brushed away her hand when she reached out to touch it.
“I’m okay,” he promised softly.
She remembers that Steve pulled into the parking spot where Neil’s car used to be, and she remembers dimly realizing that they no longer had a car.
Steve carried her over the shards of glass in the living room; she’d left her shoes on her bed next to her backpack and the open window.
He put her down in the hallway with a ruffle of her hair and told her he needed to go talk to her mom for a bit. She hasn’t been “mom” for a while, Max wanted to tell him, but she didn’t.
Instead she went to her room, and stared at her English essay, and listened to the groans of the floorboards and the clatters of glass being sweeped into a dustpan and the hushed voices of Steve and her used-to-be mom.
She remembers that she sat on the side of the table next to Steve when they ate dinner—that he’d managed to turn the remains of their barren cupboards into mac and cheese and garlic toast that warmed Max up from the inside.
Susan had put up her hair. That was important. She was sitting up straight, and her eyes were hollow but focused, and she talked to Steve like an adult.
After dinner, Max helped her set up a bed on the couch for Steve.
“Steve seems like a very good young man,” she said when they were done, brushing a strand of hair out of Max’s face like she did when Max was little. Then she said more softly: “We’re going to get through this, Maxine. I promise.”
Sometimes Max wonders if Susan remembers that.
Steve wasn’t asleep when Max tip-toed out of her room an hour after Susan went to bed. He was sitting up, and he looked over the second Max stepped into the room.
“Can’t sleep?” she remembers him whispering, and Max nodded, barely hesitating before lifting up the blankets on the couch to burrow herself next to Steve. He wrapped his arm around her as if it was second nature.
“What’s going to happen?” Max asked. She remembers how childish she sounded.
“Well, for the next little while it’s just gonna stay like this,” Steve explained quietly. “I’ll keep sleeping here for a bit, just to be safe, and to help your mom get back on her feet. She’s going to start looking for a job as soon as she can. I’ll make pancakes for dinner tomorrow. And I can drive you to school for the next little bit, if you’d like.”
“We can’t afford this house,” she told him quietly, and he squeezed her shoulder.
“Susan and I are going to start looking for a smaller place for you two once she gets a job. I’ll lend her some money if she needs it. The two of us are going to figure it out, okay? You don’t have to worry about it. We’re the adults.”
“You’ve been an adult for two months,” Max pointed out, finding it hard to speak around the guilt lodged in her throat. “And this is even less your job than mine. You’re not my adult.”
Steve was silent for a minute, and she half-thought he was going to agree and walk out of the door.
“I don’t think I have any family,” Max added, before he could respond. “My dad is so far away, and even if Billy or Neil was my family they’re both gone now, and Susan’s not my mom anymore, she’s just Susan. I don’t know when was the last time I had any family. Maybe when I was ten, before she met him.”
“Me neither,” Steve whispered softly. “Maybe when I was eleven, before their trips got so long.”
Max glanced at him. He didn’t talk about his parents very much, though she’d gathered enough. She knew they weren’t too different from hers, in all the bad ways. She looked back at the ground when he started to look at her. “Do you think we would’ve been friends? When we were ten and eleven?”
“Nah,” Steve huffed a laugh. “I was an asshole. You probably would’ve put me in my place.”
“I would’ve,” Max agreed solemnly. “I was out there verbally destroying skater bros by age ten.”
“Wouldn’t doubt you for a second,” Steve said, ruffling her hair.
“I still wish you were there,” Max said. “I wish Susan married your dad instead of Neil. Well, I guess your dad sucks even worse. Never mind.”
“I don’t know, Neil sucks pretty bad.”
Max bit her lip. “Yeah.”
“Hey,” Steve poked Max. “I didn’t mean to make you feel worse. Why do our shitty dads matter, anyway? A marriage certificate doesn’t make someone suddenly family. You know that.”
Of course Max knew. It still stung—that he didn’t even want her to pretend they could be family.
“I think,” Steve talked slowly, like he was picking out his words carefully. “I think sometimes things get confused, and someone that’s supposed to be your family gets plopped somewhere else, and—and you have to find them, even if it takes forever.”
“Somewhere else?” Max ventured.
“Like… like Michigan. Or, uh, Florida.”
“Or California?”
“Yeah,” Steve said softly. “Maybe.”
It’s not like it was Max’s first time thinking of Steve like family. She’d tested it out in her head so many times since she’d met him: turned it all around, Steve’s little sister Max, my big brother Steve. She’d mouthed the words to herself sometimes, or written them down and then tore the paper into a bunch of little pieces. She’d thought of all the differences between him and Billy a million times, until she got them all confused in her head and needed to ask him to remind her what was real.
“Maybe,” she ventured slowly, “maybe when that happens the world tries to get them back to each other, like, pushes them to the same place when—when they need each other.”
“When one of them is done being an asshole,” Steve suggested lightly.
“Only so he doesn’t get bullied,” Max said. “It would be sad to be bullied by your little sister.”
“Oh, does that mean you’re going to stop bullying me now?” Steve asked with a smile in his voice, and Max could feel herself grinning too. Despite everything.
“Maybe a little bullying is okay. It’s probably developmentally appropriate to bully your brother a little bit.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Probably.”
Even now, even with nothing really left for Max to hold onto, she still thinks about that moment—that second where everything was going to be okay.