"Make friends with my daughter, and I'll pay you a thousand dollars."
Tara's junior year of high school is turned upside down after she collides into the life of Aurora Rosenberg, the autistic teenage heiress to Rosenberg Technologies. Mr. Rosenberg...
Dawn turns away, stumbling towards a cabinet. "Let's do movies! Everybody likes movies..." Her voice wavers. She grabs one, seemingly at random, and crams it into the player.
I keep an eye on the other girls as it begins to play. Aurora is sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth, seeming a bit confused by the sudden change but uncertain what to do about it. Dawn drops the remote into Debra's lap and mumbles something about subtitles for Aurora. Then she plops down on the floor with a sigh.
She stays upset throughout the entire movie.
Dawn looks very tired after that, so we take out our sleeping bags and dream our separate dreams...
Aurora's dream
Content note: This dream is about parental abandonment and forced institutionalization, and it may be upsetting. Readers with mental illnesses might prefer to skip.
The sky is dark, so dark, so dark. A cold breeze blows on her bare arms, and she tries to lift her feet to walk to shelter, but her boots are weighed down by heavy, thick snow.
Help me...
The building is so tall. Old vines strangle crumbling bricks. Its windows are dark, except for on the bottom floor, where she sees shadows of people, unearthly still.
What is this place?
"This is your new home."
It's her dad. He towers over her in his sharply-ironed shirt and tie.
Aurora looks up at him. "My...?"
"Don't you understand?" he says. "I'm leaving you here!"
"N-no..."
Her mom is there, now, too. "Don't talk back!" she snaps.
They're starting to look taller, or maybe Aurora is shrinking.
"We'll be so much happier without her in our way," Aurora's dad tells his wife.
Mom...
"I agree," says Mrs. Rosenberg. "Life will be so much easier without autism!"
Aurora is smaller now, smaller than their shoulders, so small she couldn't reach the tops of their heads if she tried. Everything towers over her.
"No more of her crying or interrupting to look at bugs," says her dad.
Her mom laughs abruptly. "I hate bugs!"
"Our family is so much better without her," her dad says.
"Without her, we can be happy," her mom says.
"Without her, we won't suffer anymore."
Aurora shrinks until she can't shrink anymore, and then the people put her in a cart and take her away, to a cold white room made of tile on its floor and its walls and its ceiling. A heavy rope ties her ankle to the bed so that she can't wander into the halls. She looks up at the big frosty mirror, blurry and tilted down, showing how small she is.
Where is she?
Does it matter? She's not important. Tears begin to spill down her face, but they freeze upon her cheeks. Her parents will be happier this way, with their daughter in the cold, so they don't have to deal with her anymore...
Cold seeps from the tile to her bare feet, and up her legs, and up, until all her warmth is gone.
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