Chapter 1: lockdown blues
The silence in the house was the loudest thing Evie had ever heard.
Not the good kind of silence—not the peaceful, Sunday-morning, coffee-and-a-book kind. This was the dead air of a house that had suddenly lost its purpose, the hollow echo of hallways that expected footsteps and found none. Three days into the lockdown, and Evie had already memorized the exact number of floorboards between her bedroom door and the bathroom. Fourteen. She counted them every time she shuffled down the hall, her bare feet slapping against the worn wood that had creaked under her childhood footsteps since she was six years old.
College had been ripped out from under her like a rug, and she'd landed hard on the familiarity of her childhood bedroom. The same pale blue walls she'd painted when she was fourteen, convinced that lavender would change her life. The same string lights draped above her window, now gathering dust. The same twin bed that felt too small now, too narrow for the person she'd become at nineteen, with her grown-up opinions and her grown-up hungers and her grown-up need to be anywhere but here.
Her phone glowed in the dark. The screen lit up her face as she scrolled, thumb moving on autopilot.
There was Jess, posting a photo of her and her boyfriend on the couch. "Quarantine cuddles with this one ❤️" Evie's jaw tightened. There was Marcus, doing a TikTok dance in his kitchen with his little sister. There was Chloe, who Evie had never particularly liked, showing off her newly dyed pink hair in her bathroom mirror.
Everyone was making the best of it. Everyone was thriving in isolation.
Evie threw her phone onto the bed beside her and stared at the ceiling. A water stain in the corner had been there since she was twelve. She wondered if it had grown bigger since she'd left. The thought felt deeply profound, and then deeply stupid, and she groaned and rolled onto her stomach.
Day one had been fine. She'd unpacked, called her friends, eaten her mom's lasagna like it was the last meal on earth.
Day two had been okay, in that hollow, disoriented way where she kept reaching for her keys before remembering she had nowhere to go.
Day three—today—had been a slow crawl through molasses. She'd woken up at eleven, scrolled through Instagram for an hour, watched three episodes of a show she'd already seen twice, and then scrolled through Twitter until her eyes crossed.
She was going to lose her mind.
"Evie!" Her dad's voice echoed from the hallway, muffled through the door. "You want lunch?"
She considered staying silent. If she didn't answer, maybe he'd just assume she'd starved to death quietly, and that would be the end of it. But her stomach rumbled at the thought of food, because even her body was betraying her with its mundane needs.
"Yeah," she called back, hating how small her voice sounded in the empty space. "Be there in a minute."
She pulled on an oversized hoodie over her bikini—a compromise, because changing into actual clothes felt too optimistic. The house was quiet as she walked to the kitchen. The TV was on in the living room, tuned to news she didn't want to watch. Her father stood at the counter, making sandwiches with the methodical precision of a man who had nowhere else to be.
"You've been out in the sun," he said, glancing at her face. "Good. Vitamin D."
Evie made a sound that could have been agreement or dissent. She honestly wasn't sure which.
Her dad was handling this better than she was. But then again, her dad worked from home now, hunched over his laptop in his home office from nine to five. He had things that needed doing, deadlines to meet, purpose. Evie had nothing. She was floating through her days untethered, drifting from pool to bedroom to fridge and back again.
"Your mom called," her dad said, sliding a plate across the counter. The sandwich was turkey and cheese, exactly how she'd liked it since she was a kid. She hadn't told him she was kind of over turkey and cheese now, that she'd discovered the magic of avocado toast and açai bowls and things he'd never heard of. She felt guilty eating it, like she was lying to him somehow.
"She doing okay?" Evie asked, taking a bite.
"Worried about the hospitals. You know your mom." He leaned against the counter, crossing his arms. "She says she might come home early if this gets worse."
Evie's mom was a nurse at a hospital two hours away, in a city that was starting to get bad. She'd been living in a rental near her work for the past six months, an arrangement her parents had agreed on when her mom got the promotion. Evie missed her, missed the way her mom would laugh at her own jokes and leave encouraging sticky notes on the bathroom mirror, but there was something too real about her mom's job right now. Too close to the darkness that everyone was trying to scroll past on their phones.
"That's good," Evie lied.
She took her sandwich back to her room and closed the door.
——
The pool had always been her favorite part of this house.
Even when she was little, she'd spend entire summer days in the water, swimming laps until her fingers pruned and her shoulders ached. It was the one thing she'd missed when she was at college, where the only water was the chlorinated nightmare of the campus pool that always seemed to have at least one floating band-aid in it.
Now, the pool felt like both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because it was beautiful, and warm, and the water rippled and sparkled in the California sun. A curse, because Evie had nothing else to do, and so she spent her days floating in it, feeling the sun bake her skin, feeling her own body respond to the heat in ways that made her feel desperate and restless.
She was wearing her smallest bikini—a triangle top in a bright coral that she'd bought on a whim at a mall in her college town. She'd worn it exactly once, to a party where she'd spent most of the night dancing with a boy named Tyler who had kissable lips and a laugh that made her stomach flip. Tyler, who she'd made out with on a balcony, who'd pressed her against the railing and made her feel electric and alive and wanted.
Tyler, who had gone home to his parents' house in Sacramento, and who had sent her exactly one text since the lockdown started: "u quarantining?"
She'd responded "yeah u?" and he'd responded "yeah this sucks" and they'd reached the natural end of their conversation, like two streams running into a dry riverbed.
She thought about him sometimes, floating in the pool, watching clouds drift across the too-blue sky. She thought about his hands, and his mouth, and the way he'd looked at her through the smoky party air like she was the only girl in the room.
She wondered if he was thinking about her too. Probably not. Probably he was thinking about Chloe, or Emily, or whatever other girl he'd charmed into his orbit before the world shut down.
A burst of frustration made her kick her legs, churning up the water around her. She sank beneath the surface, letting the silence swallow her whole. The water was cool against her overheated skin, and for one brief moment, she felt peaceful.
Then she surfaced, gasping, and the sun was too bright and her life was too boring and she wanted to scream.
——
By day five, she'd started talking to herself.
Not full conversations, not anything that would make her seem actually crazy. Just little mutterings, observations, complaints. She'd walk through the house and narrate her own existence like she was on a reality show that no one was watching.
"Okay, so I'm opening the fridge now," she'd say, swinging the door open. "Annnd we have... leftover pasta. Cool. Great. Love that for me."
Her dad heard her once and gave her a look. She'd shrugged and said she was practicing for a voiceover audition she'd heard about online. It was a lie. She hadn't left her room enough to check her email in a day and a half.
Her friends from college had a group chat that pinged constantly, a cacophony of memes and complaints and shared misery. Evie read it obsessively, but rarely responded. What was there to say? She was fine. She wasn't going to die. She was just losing her grip on sanity, one lonely hour at a time.
Priya posted: "Day 4 and I've already watched the entirety of Tiger King. I now know more about big cat politics than I know about myself."
Maya responded: "Just finished a puzzle of the Colosseum. It's been 3 days. I have no idea what to do with my hands."
Someone else posted: "Whoever said quarantine would be a good time to get fit was a liar. I've eaten my body weight in sour cream and onion chips."
Evie typed out a response, then deleted it. She typed another, deleted that too. Eventually she just sent a single thumbs-up emoji, which somehow felt both dismissive and like too much effort.
She missed them. God, she missed them all so much it made her chest hurt. She missed sitting in Priya's dorm room, painting each other's nails and gossiping about the girls on their floor. She missed Maya's dramatic sighs and eye rolls. She missed boys, she missed parties, she missed the electric hum of a crowded room where anything could happen.
College had been the first time Evie had felt truly alive. Away from her childhood bedroom, away from the house that held too many memories, she'd been able to become someone new. Someone who wore crop tops and drank tequila and let boys buy her drinks and pulled them into empty dorm rooms without thinking twice.
She missed that girl. The lockdown had stripped her away, leaving behind the same high school kid who'd been too shy to ask her prom date to slow dance.
——
The pool was the only thing that made sense anymore.
Day six. She'd stopped counting people she knew who posted quarantine content. Stopped caring about the news updates that her dad watched every night at six. Stopped pretending she was fine when she wasn't.
She sprawled on one of the pool chairs, her skin slick with sunscreen, her body humming with a restless energy she couldn't shake. The sun was warm on her stomach, on her thighs, on all the places that hadn't seen sunlight since she'd come home. She wore the coral bikini again, because she wanted to feel pretty even if no one was looking, even if the only person who would ever see her was her dad, who was inside on a conference call.
When she closed her eyes, she could almost pretend she was somewhere else. A beach. A resort. A party where the music was loud and the drinks were strong and a boy was about to approach her, his eyes dark and interested.
But when she opened them, all she saw was the same backyard she'd grown up in. The same fence, the same lemon tree in the corner, the same grey patio stones she'd burned her feet on a hundred times as a kid.
She should go inside. She should do something productive, something that would make her parents proud, something that would justify the cost of her tuition.
Instead, she slid her hand down her stomach, over the smooth fabric of her bikini bottoms.
Her body remembered the last time she'd been touched, even if her mind was starting to forget. It had been in mid-February, at a frat party with sticky floors and a DJ who kept playing the same Drake song on repeat. She'd found a senior named Lucas who smelled like expensive cologne and cheap beer, and they'd stumbled into a spare bedroom and he'd been rough and fast and entirely forgettable.
She hadn't even texted him after. Hadn't wanted to. Sex had become a thing she did to fill the loneliness, a substitute for actual connection.
But now there was a vacancy where even that used to be, a hollow space that she couldn't fill with her own unsatisfying touches, no matter how hard she tried.
A car engine rumbled in the distance. A bird called from the lemon tree. Evie squeezed her eyes shut and willed her body to calm down, to stop wanting things she couldn't have.
——
On day seven, Evie ran out of episodes of every show she'd ever vaguely wanted to watch.
She stood in front of her bookshelf, cataloging the titles she'd read a hundred times. Some dusty romance novels she'd devoured in junior high. A few mysteries that had seemed so thrilling when she was sixteen and had nothing to compare them to.
She read the back cover of one, then put it back.
"What am I supposed to do with myself?" she said aloud, to no one at all.
Her reflection in the window stared back at her. She'd let her hair grow wild, air-dried and unbrushed. She'd stopped wearing makeup two days ago, barely bothering to look in the mirror anymore. She was a ghost of herself, haunting this house, drifting through rooms that still held the furniture of her childhood.
Her phone buzzed. A new message in the group chat.
Maya: "Okay I know we're all going insane but my neighbor's son is hot and he keeps mowing his lawn shirtless and I've started making excuses to go outside every time I hear the mower start."
Priya: "OMG relate. I've become obsessed with the UPS guy. I ordered 4 packages just so I could see him walk up my driveway."
Evie laughed out loud, the sound startling in her silent room. It was the first genuine laugh she'd had in days.
She looked out the window. Beyond the pool, beyond the fence, she could see the roofs of neighboring houses. Somewhere out there, other people were going through the same thing. Other people were desperate, and lonely, and looking out their windows with the same hungry eyes.
That should have made her feel better. Instead, it just made her feel more alone.
She grabbed her phone and scrolled through her contacts. There were dozens of names in her phone—boys she'd met at parties, girls she'd danced with in clubs, people she'd exchanged numbers with and never spoken to again.
She could text one of them. She could say something casual, something funny, something that might lead somewhere.
But what was the point? Even if she found someone to text, they couldn't see her. Couldn't touch her. Couldn't press her against the wall and make her forget everything else.
She flopped back onto her bed, her body sinking into the mattress. Counting her ceiling tiles. Fourteen. Counting the beats between her heartbeats. She wasn't sure how long she lay there, but the light changed, the shadows growing longer, and she was still staring at nothing, thinking of nothing, waiting for a life that refused to begin.
Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. A car drove past. The world was still turning, even if it had stopped moving.
Evie closed her eyes and dreamed of a boy she hadn't met yet, a touch she hadn't felt. She dreamed of the future, when this would all be over, and she'd walk out into the world as herself again. She dreamed of parties, of pressed bodies against hers, of hands and mouths and the electricity of being wanted.
And in the dream, she was alive.
In the dream, the days had purpose.
In the dream, she wasn't alone.
The dream dissolved like morning fog, leaving behind nothing but the ghost of a feeling. A hand in hers. A voice she couldn't quite remember. The sense that somewhere, someone was waiting for her.
Evie's eyes blinked open to sunlight streaming through her curtains, harsh and accusing. Her phone said 11:47 AM. She'd slept twelve hours, which felt less like rest and more like surrender.
She lay there for a long moment, letting the day wash over her. The ceiling fan clicked in a slow, hypnotic rhythm. Her mouth tasted like copper and bad decisions, even though she hadn't made any.
The house was quiet. Too quiet.
Her dad was always up by nine, clattering around the kitchen, making coffee that smelled like burnt toast. But today there was nothing. No TV murmur. No footsteps. No creaking floorboards announcing movement.
Evie swung her legs out of bed and padded to her door. She pressed her ear against it, listening. Nothing.
She opened it a crack and peered into the hallway. The bathroom door stood open, revealing only pale tile. Her dad's bedroom door at the end of the hall was closed tight, a sliver of light glowing beneath it.
Probably on a conference call. Or reading the news. Or doomscrolling like everyone else.
She shut her door and flopped back onto her bed. Her phone glowed insistently, a constellation of notifications from a world that had moved entirely online. She scrolled through Instagram. Some girl she'd gone to high school with was doing a workout in her living room. Someone else had baked sourdough bread from scratch. Everyone was becoming a version of themselves that was more productive, more creative, more put-together.
Evie rolled onto her stomach and screamed into her pillow.
——
The days blurred together after that.
Tuesday bled into Wednesday. Thursday felt exactly like Monday, and Saturday was indistinguishable from everything else. Evie stopped checking the day of the week entirely, because what was the point? The calendar was just a suggestion now, a structure that no longer held any weight.
She found herself watching her dad with new eyes. Not out of nothing to do—though that was part of it—but because something felt off. He'd always been a creature of routine, but this was something else entirely.
He emerged from his room at exactly noon every day to make lunch. He'd stand at the counter, assembling sandwiches or reheating leftovers with mechanical precision, making small talk that felt hollow.
"How's the sun treating you?"
"Fine."
"You need anything from the store? I'm going out later."
"No, I'm good."
Then he'd retreat, carrying his plate back to his room, shutting the door behind him. The click of the latch became a familiar punctuation, marking the end of their brief interactions.
He showered in the evening—she could hear the pipes groan through the walls around seven. He'd emerge with wet hair and red-rimmed eyes, make dinner, eat it standing up at the counter, mention something about work being "crazy" with everything going on.
Then back to his room until morning.
Even on Sunday—a day that had always been sacred in their household, a day for pancakes and lazy afternoons and family time that her mom insisted on—he stayed in his room. No pancakes.
Evie stood in the kitchen at ten in the morning, staring at the closed door down the hallway. Her cereal had gone soggy while she'd been watching it.
What was he even doing in there?
She knew he had work. He was an accountant, and tax season had apparently gone sideways because of the pandemic. But no job required that kind of isolation. That kind of total withdrawal.
A knot of unease twisted in her stomach. Was he sick? Had he caught something and was hiding it from her? Or was it mental health—his version of her own shifting, restless sadness?
On a whim, she walked down the hallway. Her bare feet made soft sounds on the floor, and she tried to be quiet, which felt foolish. He was an adult. He was allowed to have privacy. But something pulled her forward anyway.
She stopped outside his door. The light spilling from beneath it cast a warm glow across her toes. She raised her hand, ready to knock, to ask if he was okay.
Then she heard a muffled sound. Not quite words, not quite music. It was the kind of low, rhythmic noise that made her think of headphones pressed against a door, keeping sound contained.
The bathroom door was open across the hall. His towel was still hanging there, still damp from his morning shower. His toothbrush sat on the counter, and she noticed toothpaste dried in the bristles.
Running into the room again.
That's when she heard it—the faint, unmistakable hum of something. A vibrator.
Her blood went cold. Then hot. Her face flushed crimson as the realization hit her like a physical blow.
No. No way. That had to be something else. An electric razor. A massager. An old phone buzzing on the nightstand.
But she knew what she'd heard. She wasn't a child anymore. She knew that sound.
She backed away from the door, stepping quietly, her heart hammering so loud she was certain he'd hear it. She fled to her room and shut the door, pressing her back against it, breathing hard.
This wasn't happening. This couldn't be happening.
But even as she denied it, a part of her mind was already spinning, processing the implications. Her dad was in his room, alone, every single day—even on weekends. He spent hours in there, emerging only for meals. He was always red-eyed and distracted, like he hadn't been sleeping.
He wasn't working.
He was jacking off.
——
The next day, she watched him closer.
It felt gross, like some kind of violation. He was her father, for Christ's sake. She didn't want to think about him in that way. But the curiosity was like an itch she couldn't scratch, a splinter buried deep in her subconscious that she couldn't stop picking at.
He made lunch at noon, exactly as expected. Turkey and cheese, white bread, mustard on one side only. He ate standing over the counter, jaws working mechanically. He asked her about the weather.
"Nice day," he said, gesturing vaguely at the window.
"Yeah," she said. "It's nice."
Then he washed his plate, dried his hands, and walked back to his room. He didn't look at her phone. He didn't turn on the TV. He just walked down the hallway and closed the door.
Evie waited for a moment, then followed.
She stood in the hallway, ears straining. The TV was off. No voices. No sound of typing. The house was still and silent.
She crept closer. Three steps. Two. One. She pressed her ear against his bedroom door.
For a long moment, there was nothing. Then, a faint creak—the sound of a bed shifting. A man settling in. And then a sound she couldn't quite identify. Soft and rhythmic.
A hand moving.
Her stomach clenched. She pulled away, backing down the hallway with guilty, furtive steps. She didn't stop until she was in her room, her door locked, her back pressed against the wood.
She slumped to the floor, wrapping her arms around her knees.
This was not how she'd expected quarantine to go.
——
By Thursday, she'd started keeping a mental log.
Her dad's schedule was predictable in its strangeness. Morning: wake up, shower, go to his room. Around ten, he'd emerge to refill his coffee, blinking owlishly at the sunlight like a creature unaccustomed to the surface world. Noon lunch. Three refill. Six dinner. Eight shower again—a second shower, which seemed excessive for a man who wasn't leaving the house.
She'd thought about asking him. Really, truly considered just saying, "Hey, Dad, what exactly are you doing in there all day?" But the words died in her throat every time, because she already suspected the answer.
And she didn't want to know. She really didn't.
But the wondering was eating her alive.
One evening, while she was scrolling through photos on her phone, she found a picture from two Christmases ago. Her dad was in it, wearing a stupid Santa hat, smiling wide at the camera. Her mom was beside him, laughing. Evie had been in the middle, arms around both of them, looking genuinely happy.
It felt like another lifetime. Like a family that existed before the world had shut down, before everything had become strange and distant.
She zoomed in on her dad's face. He looked tired even then, but there was warmth in his eyes. A kindness she recognized.
She wondered if that man was still in there somewhere, trapped behind the closed door.
She wondered if she was going to lose him to whatever this was.
——
The pool had always been her sanctuary. Growing up, when the world got too loud, she'd slip beneath the surface and let the silence wash over her. It was the only place she felt truly peaceful.
Now, she claimed her daily spot. She'd stretched out on a lounge chair, the sun beating down on her skin, warming her through. She wore the coral bikini again, not because she still cared about looking nice for anyone, but because it was the only swimsuit she'd brought home that wasn't a one-piece.
The water glittered and danced, and she sat up for a moment to dip her toes into it. The coolness was a shock against her skin, a welcome reprieve from her thoughts.
She closed her eyes and let herself drift.
For a tiny slip of a moment, she was somewhere else. Somewhere that wasn't her childhood bedroom or her haunted house or this eternal, suspended season. She was in a crowd, pressing against strangers, catching a stranger's eye.
A boy with dark hair, maybe. A drink in his hand. A slow smile spreading across his face as he made his way toward her.
He would be charming. He would know exactly what to say. He'd make her laugh, and then he'd make her forget, and then—
A door slammed somewhere in the house. The fantasy dissolved, and Evie was alone again.
She opened her eyes and stared at the blue sky, so clear and impossible it felt fake.
How much longer was this quarantine going to last?
But even as she asked the question, she knew: it was barely a week in, and she was already cracking. If this went on for months, she'd be a hollow shell of herself.
She glanced back at the house. The window of her dad's room was dark, curtains drawn. He was in there now, in that cocoon of his, doing God knows what.
A thought crept into her mind, unwanted and unwelcome: she wasn't the only one who was losing it in this house.
Actually, she wasn't sure which of them was worse.