“Um, hello? For real, this better not be a joke. I totes won’t be impressed if it is!”

Elsie paused in her path to her front door, a beast of a door with half a dozen locks between her and the outside world. It was what a lot of people might consider excessive, but it suited Elsie’s purposes just fine. As far as she was concerned, the more obstacles between her and the outside world, the better. Typically, if someone was to come to her door, pretty much at any time of the day, but especially in the middle of the night, she would have ignored them completely. She had gotten pretty good at pretending she didn’t hear pounding on her front door and actually found it sort of funny to listen to how frustrated people became by her habit of totally ignoring them. This situation was only different this time because the person at her door was, in her estimation, somebody she had summoned there. One would have thought that would have made her feel more inclined to be friendly, but that wasn’t the case at all. She found it sort of amusing, the way the man on the other side of the door was so clearly annoyed and flustered by how long it was taking her to get to the door. She heard his voice crack in frustration and thought that was sort of funny as well. It wasn’t that she was mean-spirited, because she wasn’t that at all. It was only that people were something she had never quite understood, and therefore she found them a little funny almost all of the time. As she was thinking about how odd people were, she heard the knocking begin with renewed vigor, breaking her little spell of paralysis and getting her moving again.

“Hey! Seriously...Elsie. If that is your real freaking name.” (This was delivered in a raspy mumble that caused her to put her hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh). “I’m not gonna stand out here all day. I’ve got other people to get to, ya know? People who actually want what I’ve got for them.”

“Coming,” she called out in a kind of strangled voice that was the result of her valiant effort not to collapse into a fit of giggles. “I’m coming. Please don’t go anywhere.”

“About time,” the voice mumbled, his clear indignation threatening to send her over the edge into hilarity all over again. She looked down briefly to give herself a once over, making sure there weren’t any offensive stains on her shirt and then put her hands up to her thick, black curls, checking that they at least felt halfway presentable. Those things done, she hurried to the front door, making a big show of undoing all of her locks so that the guy on the other side a) didn’t give up and go on about his merry way and b) gave some thought as to what sort of person he had been tasked to make a delivery to. Perhaps that would make him feel slightly less irritated about the whole waiting-on-her-front-doorstep thing. Probably not, but it was always a possibility.

“Sorry,” she said breathlessly, once she actually got the door open, ignoring the stunned look the pizza delivery guy gave her. “Sorry about that. I’ve got a lot of locks on my door. I live alone, you know? A girl can never be too careful and all that.”

“S-s-sure. I get that. I-I’m sorry. I should have been more patient.”

“It’s not a problem. What do I owe you?”

“Owe me?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling at the man, who was hardly more than a boy. “What do I owe you? For the food?”

“What? Oh! That’s right. Shit! I’m acting like an idiot. Nothing. What do you say to that?”

“I say what the hell for?”

“Aw, you know,” the guy answered bashfully, only able to look at his feet and not up any further. “For the way I acted, I guess. And because I’m pretty sure I got the food to you late.”

“No, don’t worry about that. Just tell me what I owe, okay? I’m not in the business of taking handouts from people.”

“No, that’s not what I—”

“I know it’s not what you meant, but can you just tell me? I’m awfully hungry, and it’s getting pretty cold out here.”

As if to punctuate the point, she pulled her ratty, old sweater in closer, wrapping it about her as tight as it would go. The delivery guy, whose face was blushing pretty fantastically at that point, finally managed to look up when she did so, and his eyes went to the place ninety-nine percent of men’s eyes went any time they looked at her dead on. Elsie rolled her eyes, which the driver didn’t notice, of course, because his eyes were locked on her chest with such a level of concentration that the sky could probably have begun to fall all around them and he wouldn’t have seen a thing. Still, she couldn’t really be mad at him. He was just a human being, after all, and a male one at that. What more could she expect? At least he was finally telling her the total, mumbling it to her so that it was difficult to make out actual words, but telling her. That was a good start—and all she really needed out of him in the end. Before the poor bastard even knew what was going on, she had shoved the correct amount of money into his hand with a generous tip on top of it and was closing the door again, hot pie in hand and a serious feeling of relief washing over her. When the door was finally shut, the delivery guy almost certainly still standing stunned on the other side of it, Elsie set her food down long enough to relock all her locks again and then actually let out a sigh of relief.

“Don’t want to do that again any time soon.”

She shut her eyes, resting the back of her head against the cool metal of her door, and breathed a sigh of relief. She really wasn’t just acting like a brat with that guy. There was more to it, that more being that she kind of hated having to interact with other people, especially people she didn’t know at all. As far as Elsie was concerned, dealing with strangers like the pizza delivery man was a necessary evil, tolerated because going to the grocery store was a much-worse option. She had heard plenty of people express a dislike for going to the grocery, more so back before she had decided to so completely remove herself from the goings-on of the world around her when at all possible, but she doubted very much that there were many people who hated it quite as much as she did. When she had discovered that there were now services that would both amass and deliver groceries to her, she was over-the-moon excited. It hadn’t done a lot to reduce her takeout habit, which had become something of an overwhelming obsession, but she used it from time to time and was glad to have the option at her fingertips.

“Thank god for modern man and all of the technology that comes with him,” she said in a heavy exhalation of breath, something that someone might have found comical had there been another someone in the apartment besides her. Fortunately—at least as far as Elsie was concerned—there was nobody else there but her, which was exactly how she liked things. She plopped down into her couch and flicked on the tv, the talking light box that was sometimes her only source of human voices for days. She started to cycle through channels, her mouth salivating a bit as she waited for her pizza to cool enough to eat and finally landing on some kind of crime documentary that required very little effort on her part to follow. She was fond of that kind of thing, fond enough that it was something she had on most of the time that she was home. It was her own gruesome kind of background noise, something others would probably have thought terribly strange but that she found to be oddly comforting. She was finally starting to feel pretty good, all things considered, so—of course—that was the moment when her phone chose to ring. She groaned and glanced down at the little viewing window that would tell her who was intruding on her pleasant evening.

Oh Christ, really? Of course, you would call now.”

It was her mom. Of course, it was her mom. The lovely Mrs. Morrow had a particular talent for calling at the times when Elsie was feeling a particular need to be left to her own devices. Take now, for instance. Elsie would always prefer to have loads and loads of time on her own, but even for her, there were times when she felt the need so strongly it was almost as if it were an imperative. It was typically in times like that, times when she really wanted to be left totally alone, that her mother always saw fit to call her, and this was no exception. She groaned, thought seriously about just ignoring the call and letting it go to voicemail, and then picked up the phone anyways. Her mom was the type that would only keep calling, and they both knew it. It was best to go ahead and get it over with. If Mom was calling, she was going to have her conversation, no matter how long it took.

“What’s going on?”

“What a way to greet someone!” Her mother cried, laughing but still making clear that she definitely disapproved. “Those certainly aren’t the manners we taught you when you were a little girl.”

“Okay, right you are. Sorry. I meant to say, how lovely to hear your voice! Whatever do I owe such a monumental and wonderful surprise?”

“Ha ha, very funny, Elsie. I swear, I have no idea where you get your sense of humor from. It would have to be your father, certainly not me, but I’ve never heard your father act the way you do either.”

“Maybe I don’t belong to you. Maybe I don’t belong to either one of you.”

“Elsie!” She admonished again, her voice actually cracking with the force of her disapproval. “Why would you say such a thing? Why, that would mean...I’m not even sure I know what it would mean, but I know it’s not right.”

“Right. I was only joking.”

“Were you? I don’t know how on earth I would be able to tell.”

“Sorry. I’ll try to stop.”

“To stop which part of it?”

Elsie closed her eyes and actually bit down on her tongue, drawing her own blood in order to keep herself from saying whatever might come out of her mouth, which would undoubtedly be something rude. Elsie certainly knew that well enough, seeing as this wasn’t exactly the first time she and her mother had been through this conversation. Not the first by any means, not the fifteenth or the fiftieth either. To Elsie, it felt like she’d been having this conversation with dear old Mom every day for the last decade, easy. She and her mother had never been the type of mother and daughter who were super-close, never the kind of pair that was destined to be the closest of friends when she grew up. Her father was the one she’d always been close to, without a doubt. Elsie had always been a daddy’s girl, from practically her first memory. It was something her mother had exclaimed often and to anyone who would listen, something else Elsie remembered, and although when her mom said it, she made it sound like a bad thing, but Elsie had always thought of it as a compliment. Who wouldn’t want to be a daddy’s girl? That’s what Elsie would whisper to herself when she heard her mom call her that to the grocery clerk or the Avon lady or whoever else happened to be around. She would whisper those words to herself, and she’d be positively sure that there was nothing better in the world than to be the apple of her father’s eye because he never wanted her to be anything aside from herself.

Elsie had been a little bit different from the rest of the kids—especially the other girls, her mother had always been fond of pointing out. Especially different than them. But that was something that never seemed to bother her father a single iota. While her mother was forever trying to stick her in frilly dresses and teach her how to cook, her dad had allowed her to look over his shoulder while he worked on cars or tinkered around in his shop. When he’d brought home their first family computer, she’d known immediately that it was going to become something important in her life and her dad had always been one-hundred-percent supportive of that. Her mom had been horrified and had been very vocal about it, but her dad had come to her rescue. He wasn’t typically the fighting kind of man, instead opting to be more the kind of man to fade back into the background and let things go their own course, but in this situation, it had been different. On more than one occasion, she’d awoken in the middle of the night to hear her parents arguing, her mother’s voice shrill and on the verge of melting down while her father’s sounded tense and as close to a yell as Elsie had ever heard coming out of his mouth. Each one of these arguments had been about her. She’d listened to those arguments, and instead of feeling bad, she’d felt cherished. Most people probably would have found that to be an odd response, but for her, it was the only one that felt natural. Their fighting was an example of her father loving her no matter what, and who wouldn’t feel cherished by a thing like that?

It was after her father had passed away that things between Elsie and her mother had gotten really bad. Her father had been the only link between the two of them, and with him dying suddenly, the consequence of a brain tumor nobody had known he had, they were thrown together without respite and without mercy. It was like two people who spoke entirely different languages being forced together all of the time without the use of a badly needed translator. Their fighting increased, becoming more verbally violent to the point of hinging right on the border of abusive, until at the age of seventeen Elsie had left her mother’s home for good. Her mother had stayed in Texas while she moved to New York City, and after that, the majority of their interactions had taken place over the phone. Elsie had graduated high school early, right before her seventeenth birthday, and left—despite her mother’s strenuous objections. At first, all her mother had been able to talk about (on those rare occasions when the two of them did speak, which were few and far between) was how Elsie wasn’t old enough, wasn’t mature enough, to make it in a city like New York and how she would wind up limping back home humiliated and very much worse for the wear. When that proved to be untrue, her mother’s disapproval had shifted, her dialogue different while the heart remained. The heart, sadly, was this; she did not like the things her daughter was and never would. That was what this conversation would be—and Elsie knew it, knew it even before her mother began to speak at all, but she couldn’t seem to make herself ignore the call. Her mother was her mother, and for better or for worse, she was pretty much the only family Elsie had left.

“To try to stop all of it, I guess. I think that’s what I mean.”

“So…the job then?”

And there it was. Elsie rolled her eyes, which only made her feel slightly better, and willed herself not to say any of the things she so desperately wanted to say. This was all the conversation was ever going to be anyway, and she knew it. What was the point in being surprised when the situation was only typical?

“No, Mom, not the job. I don’t intend to stop that, and you know it.”

“Well then, you don’t plan on stopping all of it.”

“Mom! Come on, okay?”

“Come on, what? I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just trying to make you understand—”

“To understand, what? There’s nothing I’m going to understand. It’s not the kind of job for a girl like you.”

“A girl like me? What’s that supposed to mean? What’s a girl like me?”

“A girl from a good family. A girl who had all of the advantages a person could want. You act like you grew up on the streets or something! Like you’re some kind of street urchin or something.”

“A street urchin? Come on, Mom! Get real. We’re not talking about London in the nineteenth century. I’m not one of the kids from the movie Oliver Twist. Working with computers is a reputable job, you know? It’s not a black-market thing. It’s a real job, something a lot of people really want to get into. I think a lot of other moms would be happy with a daughter who had done so well for herself.”

“Please, really? You sit in a cubicle, for god’s sake, don’t you? You’re a glorified hacker, sitting around, living your life through other people’s lives. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that about sums it up.”

“Cool. Point taken. But you know what? I think I’ve got to go.”

“Oh, come now,” Elsie’s mom said in a conciliatory tone that made Elsie’s skin crawl. “Don’t be offended. We’re only having a conversation, aren’t we?”

“Sure, I know. It’s just that I’ve got some things to do. I would tell you about them, but they involve my computer and I know what a filthy thing you consider that to be.”

Elsie hung up without waiting for her mother to respond, or to be fairer, without allowing her the chance to respond. She waited for a moment to see if the unrelenting woman would call her right back, but her dreaded phone remained mercifully silent. It was the only thing she wanted, that silence, and when she picked her laptop, she felt a little bit of the tension in her begin to melt away. The humming warmth of the laptop on her legs soothed her, and as she fell into the world her computer was able to give her, all of the rest of her world fell away. It was always like that when Elsie opened her laptop, and she didn’t need anyone to understand that at all. She understood it, and that was good enough.