My father sighed through the door. "This girl gets more ungrateful the older she gets. Let her stay in there and think about what she's done."
I stopped pounding.
I let the carbon monoxide strip my consciousness away, piece by piece.
In the moment my eyes fell shut, I thought: Tomorrow, at least, I won't have to watch the three of them play happy family without me.
……
In the last second before everything dissolved, I heard Harrison laughing outside the door.
"Big sister's warming herself by the fire in her ice castle! She's about to turn into Cinderella!"
Then everything went quiet.
My body felt weightless, drifting above the spare bedroom that reeked of scorched coal. Smoke no longer seeped through the crack under the door. Inside the sealed room, the fumes had settled, coating the walls in a layer of black grime.
I looked down at the body curled on the floor.
It was me—shriveled into a tight ball from the heat.
The cotton blanket over me had burned through in several places, exposing skin blackened with soot. Shattered pieces of the oxygen concentrator lay scattered everywhere, its plastic casing melted into a hardened puddle.