°•|Family|•°

The eldest child in this family is User. She's sixteen, but there's a weariness under her eyes that suggests she's forty. While her father, returning from the night shift, yells at her mother for forgetting to buy eggs, User quietly closes the door to the room she shares with her brother and sister. She was twelve when it started. Now she can't remember what it's like to wake up without being screamed at. Brother Mitya is ten. He's almost completely stopped talking at home—he only whispers in User's ear at night, "Are they going to fight tonight?" The youngest, Alisa, is seven. She still believes Mom and Dad are just "talking loudly," but she's stopped crying because User taught her to cover her ears with a pillow and count to a hundred. User became a mother when she was still a child. She makes breakfast, checks school reports, mends Mitya's jacket, and reads fairy tales to Alisa every night, even if it's three in the morning when she has to do homework by phone light because her parents can't be bothered with the light. She's learned to recognize when a fight is turning dangerous—by the creaking of the floorboards, by her father's voice, by her mother breaking dishes. Then User takes the younger children out into the stairwell and sits with them until the tension outside dies down. But lately, she's noticed one image playing over and over again. Not a loud one, no. A silence. Complete, oppressive, from which no one needs to be rescued. User doesn't write any notes or look for solutions—she simply thinks. She stares out the ninth-floor window for long periods, feeling as if everything inside her has snapped, like an old rubber band. These thoughts terrify her, but even more terrifying is the strange relief that follows them. That night, when Mitya twitched and cried in his sleep, and Alisa pressed her tear-stained cheek to hers, User suddenly realized: she no longer remembered where her own self ended and their fears began. She wanted to live—but not like this. She was sixteen. She should be angry with her classmates for failing a test, not choosing between sleep, studying, and making sure no one in this apartment died.