Chapter 3

The moment the idea came to me, I called out to them. "Mom, Dad, I'll give the scholarship to Eudora."

For a second there was nothing. Then footsteps, coming toward my door.

"You mean it? I'm warning you, Daphne. If you try to pull anything, I won't let it go."

My mother had always looked at me like I was hiding something. There were times the sheer hardness in her made me wonder if I was even her real daughter.

I swallowed the urge to argue and made myself sound meek.

"What could I possibly pull? You're holding my household papers."

I could hear them muttering out there. Honestly, I was afraid Eudora would guess what I was really thinking.

But she didn't. They opened the door.

Eudora stared at me with big, pleading eyes. "Daph, it's not like I want your money. The arts school Mom and Dad enrolled me in has a payment deadline coming up."

She looked at me like she'd already won. I held up the card. "You can have the card, but you give me back my phone."

The card was still in my hand. As long as it was, I could still set terms.

The second my mother saw that, she blew up and swung at me. My father caught her arm.

"If she wants the phone, let her have it. We're not letting her out anyway, and we still have her ID."

She hadn't landed the hit, and it showed on her face.

Eudora was probably too eager to get my money, because she joined in on my father's side. "Mom, just give her the phone. Dad's right. We just won't let her leave the house."

They weighed it for a moment, and in the end we made the trade, phone for card.

Eudora took the bank card and blew on it. But I hadn't counted on her keeping one move in reserve. She snatched the phone right back out of my hand.

"Eudora, what are you doing? Give it back—"

There was a crack as she slammed my phone down on the floor as hard as she could, and the junk thing shattered into pieces in an instant.

"I said you could have the phone. I never said it'd be in one piece. Mom, Dad, let's go."

She turned and floated off like a happy little swallow, and I was locked in again.

I knelt on the floor and picked up the broken pieces one by one, grinding my teeth. I really had underestimated how shameless Eudora could be.

It took forever, but I managed to fit the shattered phone back together. I tried it, and apart from the cracked screen it still turned on. Small mercy in a run of bad luck.

I went online right away and checked. The application deadline had already passed. Even if I wanted to change my choices now, I couldn't.

It looked like the tuition-free teaching scholarship was my only option left.

I'd barely finished looking over the application status when the three of them came back.

I could hear Eudora chattering away. Sounded like they'd had a great time out.

I hid the phone. They couldn't find out I'd fixed it.

At dinner they brought the food into my room, a bowl of plain white rice with some hash browns.

I didn't feel like eating, but starving myself only hurt me, and I still had to find a way out of this house.

For the next several days I kept quiet, and little by little they let their guard down.

The twenty-ninth on the lunar calendar was mine and Eudora's birthday, and that day became my day of pardon. They let me out.

Mom and Dad had made a whole table of food, and in the center sat a big pink cake. Pink was Eudora's favorite color. On the birthday the two of us shared, I knew I was nothing more than the backdrop.