WANTED HER

SONYA

PAST

My first memory of my mom’s house was police cars.

I was just coming home from school. I think I was twelve or thirteen, it didn’t matter. The air was that heavy, damp kind of cold that soaked right through my jacket. My backpack felt like it was full of stones.

I was at the corner of my street, one foot already lifting to step off the curb, when I froze. The whole block was pulsing red and blue. Two cop cars, an ambulance, their doors gaping open. My throat went tight.

I shrank back behind the brick wall of the corner store, peeking out. Mr. Henderson from two doors down was talking to a cop, his hands chopping the air. He looked pale, nervous. And then I saw it—a gurney being wheeled down our cracked front path. A shape on it, under a sheet. But a hand slipped out, dangling. I knew that chipped red nail polish. I had just seen it that morning.

The wind carried pieces of Mr. Henderson’s voice. “...don’t know much, but she’s got a kid. A girl. I think she goes to school near here. I don’t know her name.”

That took it.

I ran.

I just ran. My backpack slammed against my spine, my lungs burned. The image of that dangling hand was stamped on the back of my eyes. I didn’t think, I just knew. She had OD’d again. And I knew, with a cold, clear certainty, where I couldn’t go. Not to that gurney, not to those questions, not to the system I’d seen looming at the edges of our life for years.

I knew a place.

Serena.

My older sister. She lived with her boyfriend, Mark, in a walk-up near the train. It wasn’t home, but it was a door. I ran until the sirens were just a faint echo, and then I kept running.

The next memory was when I knocked at their door and he answered.

He.

Mark.

He never cared about not showing himself, about not dressing up. He would answer the door in a faded t-shirt and sweatpants, his hair a mess. He wasn’t violent. Never with me. Never with Serena, that I ever saw. He was always just… lingering around. He had a job, some kind of delivery thing. And so did Serena, waitressing at the all-night diner.

He let me in, when I knocked. Didn’t look all that surprised, just stepped aside with a grunt. The apartment was warm and smelled like old pizza and cigarette smoke.

He offered me a glass of water in a chipped mug. And he was nice. Not warm, not like family, but decent. He didn’t ask a single question.

And I told him—no, I asked him. If I could stay. I said I didn’t want to go into the system. I didn’t want to end up on the streets neither. My voice was small and shaky.

My sister, Serena, she loved me. I knew that. She cried when she saw me, hugged me so tight it hurt. She kept saying, “My baby sister, my baby sister,” into my hair.

And Mark? I would like to think he tolerated me. That was enough.

So he let me stay in their place. In a spare bedroom that was really just a storage room with a fold-out cot. It was cramped and boxes were piled in the corner, but it had a door.

And the cops never found me. Because Mom was never listed as a parent to Serena, not even on her birth certificate. Only her dad was, and he was long gone. There was no trail that led from my mother to my sister’s door.

So I stayed in there. For about two years

Another memory.

I think it was a year later. I’d just turned fourteen.

It was night, and I was trying to sleep. But the sounds from the next room wouldn’t let me. The wall was thin, just plaster and cheap wood. The moaning was loud, urgent. My stomach was a tight, cold knot. I pulled my blanket over my head, but it didn’t help.

I was pretty sure the man in the next room wasn’t Mark. His voice was different, higher. There was a laugh I didn’t recognize.

An hour later, I was correct, because Mark came home.

I heard the front door slam. Heard his heavy footsteps in the hall. Then, silence. A terrible, thick silence that seemed to suck all the air out of the apartment. It only lasted a few seconds.

Then I heard it.

Mark’s voice, a low, guttural roar that wasn’t a word, just pure sound. The other man’s voice, sharp with panic. Serena’s cry, “Mark, wait—!”

And then the beating.

It wasn’t just fists. It was a crash against the wall that shook my own. A sickening thud of something heavy meeting something soft. Grunts, choked screams, the sound of breaking glass. It wasn’t a fight; it was a storm happening just on the other side of my door. I huddled on my cot, my knees drawn to my chest, my hands pressed over my ears. But I couldn’t block it out. I just sat there in the dark, counting each horrible impact, waiting for it to stop.

But it didn’t.

So I tiptoed out. First, I put my ear to my door. I heard nothing. A deep, ringing kind of silence that was somehow worse than the noise. I opened it a crack.

A roar tore through the quiet—a different voice, raw and furious.

Not Mark’s.

It was followed by a crash, like furniture splintering. Then silence again. A thick, final silence.

Only Serena’s hiccupping sobs were heard, ragged and broken.

I tiptoed further, my bare feet cold on the linoleum. The door to their bedroom was wide open.

I saw Mark first. He was on his back on the floor, lying in a dark, spreading pool that wasn’t quite black in the dim light. His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. He wasn’t moving.

Serena was on the bed, clutching a torn bedsheet to her chest, trying to cover herself. She was shaking violently.

And the guy… he stood naked above Mark’s body, his chest heaving. He held something—a heavy, glass ashtray, smeared dark. He looked at me. His eyes were wild, empty. Then he looked at Serena.

Serena’s gaze snapped to me in the doorway. Her face was a mask of tear-streaked mascara and pure terror. “Sonya,” she whispered, her voice a shredded thread of sound. “Go back to your room.”

I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My eyes were stuck on Mark, on the stillness of him.

She said it a little louder, a desperate plea. “Now. Please.”

I just took off. I turned and fled back down the short hall, back into my little room, and shut the door. I didn’t lock it. I just stood there, my back against it, breathing in sharp, silent gasps.

The first body. The first dead body I ever saw. Mark was gone. Just like that. The man who had tolerated me, who had given me water and a room.

And I? I think something died in me at the same time I saw him there, lying in that silence. Something about safety, about doors being a refuge, about the world having any kind of order. It just bled out on that floor with him.

After that night, everything just snowballed into chaos.

A heavy, unnatural quiet had settled over the apartment for about two days.

Then, Mark was just… gone. No cops showed up. No knock on the door. No missing person reports on the news. It was as if he had never existed, his absence a void filled only by the lingering metallic scent of bleach Serena had used to scrub the floor. The stain was gone, but a faint, darker shadow remained on the old wood, a ghost in the grain.

And Serena?

She didn’t mourn. She didn’t break down. She just… changed gears. The scared, sobbing woman from that night vanished, replaced by someone harder, sharper, fueled by a desperate, manic energy. She continued with her not-so-domestic life, but the volume was cranked to a deafening level. The waitressing job became sporadic, then stopped altogether. Money, which had always been tight, became a constant, silent scream. The solution arrived in the form of men.

It started slowly.

A guy from the bar would come over, his laughter too loud, his eyes scanning the apartment with a cold appraisal. Then he’d be gone in the morning, and a few twenty-dollar bills would be left on the kitchen counter. Serena would use them to buy groceries—the kind we never got before, like frozen pizzas and name-brand soda—and a new bottle of vodka.

But it didn’t stay slow. It accelerated like a car with cut brakes hurtling downhill.

Within a month, our apartment was no longer a place to live. It was a revolving door. The din of it invaded my little storage-room sanctuary. The thump of bass from a cheap stereo, the clink of bottles, the rough, unfamiliar laughter of multiple voices. Night after night.

She started to party.

Not the fun, teenage kind of party. This was a darker, grittier ritual. The living room would fill with smoke and strangers. Men with leather jackets and vacant eyes. Men who looked at me differently when I crept out to use the bathroom—a look that made my skin crawl and sent me scurrying back to my room to push my dresser against the door. I started sleeping during the day, when the apartment was usually empty and hungover, and staying awake, vigilant, through the nights.

She started to be like mom used to be. That was what scared me to death. It wasn’t just the drugs—the pills, the powders laid out on glass tables—it was the hollow look in her eyes when she was sober, which was rare. It was the way her laughter sounded like shattering glass. It was the neglect that wasn’t malicious, just total; she forgot to buy toilet paper, to pay the electric bill until they shut it off, to ask me if I’d gone to school. I hadn’t. Not since Mark died. Who would notice?

Because every night there was another guy. Then two. Then more. It wasn’t just transactional anymore; it was a frenzied, self-destructive carnival. I’d hear them, a chorus of grunts and her forced, theatrical cries through the wall.

Sometimes it was quiet, just the whisper of paper money changing hands. Other times it was violent—curses, the sound of a slap, Serena weeping, followed by the slam of the door and her own furious, sobbing screams into a pillow.

She was turning into a whore.

There was no kinder word for it in my fourteen-year-old mind. The sweet, tired sister who’d hugged me so tightly, who called me ‘baby sister,’ who worked double shifts to buy me a birthday cake, was being erased, pixel by pixel, by this stranger with smeared lipstick and track marks on her arms.

I didn’t recognize her.

The core of her, the Serena I knew, felt like it was buried under layers of addiction and despair, screaming silently from somewhere deep inside.

All I wanted was to get my sister back. That desire became my sole purpose, a fragile life raft in the sea of chaos. I tried in small, clumsy ways. I’d clean the apartment while she was passed out, scrubbing the ashtrays and beer rings off the table, hoping order might spark something in her.

I’d make her toast and weak tea, leaving it by her bed. Once, I even tried to talk to her. It was a rare, quiet afternoon. She was on the couch, staring at the ceiling, shivering though it was warm.

“Serena?” I’d whispered, sitting on the floor near her feet.She didn’t look at me. “What, Sonya?”

“I… I’m scared.”A long pause. A tear traced a path through her foundation down to her temple. “Yeah,” she breathed, the word almost inaudible. “Me too.” For a second, I saw her. Just a glimpse. My sister, drowning. My heart leapt. “We could… we could go. Maybe. Somewhere.” She turned her head then, and looked at me. But the moment was gone. Her eyes hardened, glazing over with a defensive film of anger. “Go where? With what? This is it, Sonya. This is the world. Just shut up and stay in your room, okay?”

The door slammed shut again, harder than before.

I tried other tactics. I’d hide her drugs, flushing little bags of white powder down the toilet. She’d tear the apartment apart, raging, calling me a little bitch, before finding a stash I’d missed. I once threw a full bottle of vodka into the dumpster behind the building. She backhanded me for that, the sharp crack echoing in the sudden silence. We both froze, stunned. Her hand flew to her mouth, her eyes wide with horror. “Sonya, I’m—” she started.

But I just turned and walked to my room, my cheek burning. She didn’t follow. The apology died in the air. The next day, there were two new bottles on the counter.

The men got worse. Mark’s absence was a license. The rules were gone. One night, a man with cold, fish-like eyes and knuckles tattooed with spiderwebs tried my door. The knob rattled. “Little girl in here?” he slurred on the other side. I was pressed against the wall, holding my breath, a rusty nail I’d pulled from the baseboard clenched in my fist. Serena screamed from the living room, “Leave that door alone, you creep! That’s my sister!” There was a argument, muffled, and then the sound of him leaving. Serena never came to check on me.

The chaos wasn’t just inside the apartment. It began leaking out. Eviction notices piled up under the door. The landlord, a weary man named Mr. Petrov, came by. Serena met him in a silk robe, swaying, offering him a drink, her voice a sloppy purr. He left, red-faced and angry, muttering in Russian. The notices kept coming.

I started venturing out during the days, stealing food from the corner store—bags of rolls, packets of cheese. I’d see other kids my age, backpacks slung over their shoulders, laughing. They felt like creatures from another planet. My world had shrunk to these few filthy rooms and the terrifying, endless night.

I thought about running. But where? The system was a vast, hungry mouth. The streets were a colder version of this apartment. And beneath the fear and disgust, a stubborn, childlike thread of hope persisted: if I stayed, I could save her.

I had to.

She was all I had.

We were all each other had.