Their voices were hushed. Bea could barely hear them over the hum of the refrigerator.
“There’s nothing we can do,” her father said urgently. Bea could imagine his glasses coming off, her father’s long, thin hands rubbing the cloth over the lens again and again. “We’ve tried everything else.”
“I just wish there was another option,” Bea’s mother said tiredly. Bea thought about the way that her mother’s flour covered hands would knead together, her thumb pressing into her palm.
“Don’t we all,” her father responded, equally as resigned.
Bea leaned her head against the cool stainless steel of the fridge, letting her hair fall in front of her face. The hum of the machine seemed to surround her head in a pleasant fog. She was supposed to be greasing the cookie sheets. It was the only thing she ever seemed to do right, running the buttered cloth over the metal, making sure to coat the sides and corners. She’d never had her mother’s knack for turning ingredients into masterpieces or her father’s head for math.
Instead, Bea kept her cheek on the expensive fridge, thinking about the cost of everything inside of it. All the milk and eggs and butter and frosting, not to mention the cream and the organic fruit to fill the pies. The spotless exterior seemed to mock her. All the hours of greasing pans and sifting flour and mixing dough didn’t leave a spot on the stainless surface.
Her parents emerged from the office, all traces of worry gone from their faces as they took their places, her father at the back with his books and her mother behind the counter with the clean pans. Bea could feel the surface of the fridge heating up underneath the side of her face, and she pushed off slightly, looking at the pans and starting to walk upstairs.
“Bea,” her mother called tremulously, “did you prepare the pans?” That was what her mother always called it, “preparing the pans,” as though calling it something other than the menial task it was would make Bea feel any more important.
Bea didn’t say anything. Neither did her mother.

Bea knew what they were talking about. She wished that she didn’t, that her parent’s talks in the back room were just private parent conversations about her lack of friends or amount of time spent drawing pictures, but she knew that her parents didn’t talk about her anymore. They’d given up long ago.
“They’re going to break this to me nicely,” Bea addressed the stuffed bird on her bed.  It said nothing back to her.
“They act like I’m oblivious to everything that’s going on around me.” Bea looked into the animal’s plastic eyes. “I have ears, you know. Well, of course you know. You’re the best listener out there.”
The bird didn’t move. It never did.

She woke up late that morning, having hit snooze on her alarm four times instead of her usual three. The bus was long gone, her father was sleeping, and her mother was too busy supervising the morning loaves to take Bea anywhere. She rode her bike, the pink and white one that she’d gotten five Christmases ago, her hands just about freezing to the handlebars. She was five minutes late. Her seat, in the back right corner, had been taken, and so she slid uncomfortably into the second row, wishing that the air vent right above her head would suck her up and into oblivion.
“You’re late,” the teacher said in lieu of a greeting. Bea stared at her, waiting for a question or a demand. The teacher cleared her throat.
“Sorry,” Bea mumbled, ducking her head down to pull something out of her bag. When she came up with her pencil, the teacher was still staring at her.
“I’m sorry, what was that?” There were hands on hips and lips pursed into a straight line.
“Sorry,” Bea mumbled again, softer. The teacher sighed deeply, turning back to the chalkboard. She said something about starting a new unit and looked briefly at her teacher’s edition textbook. Then her hands whisked a piece of chalk over the black surface of the board, weaving numbers and letters together in a way that Bea never thought she’d understand. She kept her head ducked as the girl who’d taken her seat went up to the board and finished the problem, skillfully taking the numbers and pushing them together, making the line shorter and shorter.
Bea let her hair fall over her eyes as the teacher asked “does anybody have any questions?”
“Ask them now, because this is the foundation. If you can’t do this part, the rest of the unit is going to be very difficult for you.” Bea looked at her notebook. There was a slight dusting of flour on the cover that she hadn’t noticed the day before.
The cover flipped open and she looked at the first page, staring at the neat line of cakes and pastries that she’d used to fill in the lines each day. Bea looked at her fingertips, at the minuscule particles of flour embedded in the tiny wrinkles, and she wrote the equation she’d never understand at the bottom. Then she let her hands rest in her lap as she stared, willing the numbers to combine and the pastries to disappear.

Her mom picked Bea up after school, the out of date silver minivan pulling in way too fast as her mom jerked the wheel around a little too harshly. “Can you get your bike in the trunk, honey?”
Bea nodded, getting it in the car without much trouble and climbing in the front seat, pushing cartons of milk and eggs out of the way with her feet. She kept the bags of flour on her lap, wondering what the shopping was for.
“I thought you took inventory last night and everything was good for the week?” Bea asked, calling out her mother and father’s reason for being in the storeroom.
“Oh it was,” Bea’s mother said hesitantly. “It never hurts to have extra, though.”
Bea said nothing to this response, watching her mother’s fingers tap around on the steering wheel. A hard right forced Bea to nestle the flour in the crook of her arm.
“So how was your day?” Bea’s mother asked after a straightened the car out again. “Anything interesting happen?”
“Not really,” Bea said, staring out the window. “Regular, I guess.”
“That’s nice.” The car’s heat began to kick in and Bea’s breath ceased to cloud the air. Her mother, stopped at a red light, held her hands in front of the vents and then rubbed them together, pressing the accelerator with no hands on the wheel. The car veered sideways and Bea’s mother jerked it back on course, forcing Bea to lean against the cool glass of the window. The radio’s static filled songs played softly.
Bea didn’t take her face off of the window, looking sideways out onto the streets.  Her mother hummed along to a song about old rock ’n roll the rest of the way home.

They broke the news to her that night, in her room, letting Bea sit on the bed and hold her bird while they stood in the doorway, a unified front setting up for a battle with their potentially dangerous teenage daughter.
Bea didn’t say anything. She let the words “recession” and “apartment” and “tax specialist” wash over her like the clouds she had so much trouble drawing in her landscapes.
She wouldn’t look at her parent’s eyes, which were overarched by their concerned and drawn in brows, accented by countless worry lines. She kept her eyes on their hands, they way that her father’s glasses stayed perched on his fingertips and the way that her mother’s thumb nestled in the hollow of her palm, rubbing back and forth over her lifeline.
Her bird stayed tucked into her elbow and her hands were clasped tightly. She could still feel the flour embedded in her fingers.