Brittle Fortress

“IF YOU SPILL that on the carpet, I swear I will fucking kill you,” said Leda’s mother in a bright, chirpy voice. She’d been talking like this lately, hyper and scary-controlling, overly cheerful like it was all a joke.

Leda was lying on the living room floor in leggings and a sweatshirt, frantically trying to finish The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. She was drinking a can of coke, warm from the cardboard case on top of the refrigerator. They were supposed to be for her brother Freddy, at least he was the one who usually drank them. But her stomach felt horrible, and the warm bubbles and sugar helped a little. 

She had to give a presentation on this book tomorrow, and she still had two hundred and seventy pages to read. This was her Classic Book from History, assigned to her personally by her freshman history teacher Mr. Moser. 

“Because you’re an artist,” Mr. Moser had said when he put it on her desk, the edges of his walrus mustache turning up to show he was smiling under there.

“No, I’m not,” Leda said.

She hadn’t done any art at all since her parents got divorced, but her binder was still covered in old drawings. Mr. Moser didn’t seem like he heard her. He was extremely old and either hard of hearing or just really out of it.

It turned out that Benevuto Cellini was not only one of the most famous artists of the Renaissance, but also probably the most long-winded guy in all of history. He had twenty pages just on who his father was, and his father’s father, and how he was definitely descended from “a man of worth.” Like Leda was supposed to be impressed with who Benvenuto Cellini was descended from. She didn’t even care who she was descended from. 

And then he was supposed to be all interesting just because he killed a bunch of people. Leda didn’t find killing people particularly interesting, especially if there wasn’t any good reason to kill them. 

“Leda!” Her mom was sitting on the other side of the living room, folding laundry, slapping it into piles. “Take that soda to the table.” 

Leda couldn’t imagine sitting at the table. Something was wrong with her stomach, like her intestines were trying to crawl past all her organs to the other side of her body. The first thing she wanted to do was probably die, and the second was go to sleep. But since she couldn’t do those, she wanted to lie curled up like a little shrimp in her bed while she skimmed the last third of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. And she couldn’t even do that, since her brother Freddy was in the room they now shared, playing Brittle Fortress which was this online game he was completely obsessed with and which involved a lot of shouting and snickering into a headset. 

She took the can of Coke to the sink and poured the whole thing slowly down the drain.


Leda’s old bedroom had lavender walls and moss-green curtains. On her small white bookshelf, her favorite books, in the order she had first read them. Now she was a freshman in high school who shared a room with her twelve-year-old brother. He was annoying and smelly and he made weird noises while she was trying to sleep.

“If you don’t like it, you can go live with your father,” her mom had said when they all moved into the apartment a year ago. It was clear from how she said it that if it actually happened, Leda and Freddy would be dead to her. 

Leda texted her best friend Alisha. 

Stomach hurts bad and haven’t finished benvenuto cellini. 

Alisha was in Mr. Moser’s class. Her book was The Seven Pillars of Wisdom which was the book they based the movie Lawrence of Arabia on. She’d already finished it, and her presentation wasn’t until next month. 

“He gave it to me because I’m Indian,” Alisha had said, which sounded like a stretch unless you knew Mr. Moser, in which case you would actually believe he didn’t know the difference between India and Arabia. He couldn’t even figure out a suit that matched. He was always wearing something like blue slacks and an olive green jacket. Plus he thought Leda’s name was Alisha about half the times he spoke to her.

Look on wikipedia, Alisha texted. 

Nothing there, Leda texted back. Basic biography, that’s all. 

Just make up what happens, Alisha said. Mr. Moser won’t know the difference. 

That was Alisha’s sort of thing: she aced all her schoolwork, but she had no respect for it. She thought school was a scam. Leda was the opposite, always behind on everything somehow, but desperate to do well. She flipped through the pages, looking for more murders. That was what she’d have to know about for the presentation, the murders. Everything else was too generic to say anything about: he made a sculpture, he had a meeting with a duke. He worried about money like constantly. 

Her stomach had never hurt so bad. 

She rolled over on her back. The walls wavered. Salmon-colored walls that looked like a hotel, like everything did in this rented apartment: the pink-and-gray swirls on the linoleum, the fake fireplace, the moldings smooth like car fenders. The cream carpets that Leda’s mother vacuumed twice a day and cleaned with a spot-remover. All of it looked translucent, like it was about to dissolve, to reveal some dark sickening thing that lay behind all this lightness. 

“What’s wrong with you?” Leda’s mom asked. 

Leda got up and went to the bathroom. 


Leda’s family had been normal once. Her dad was distracted and distant, her mom was sarcastic and bitter, Freddy was a little kid, and they all lived in a comfortable house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a small front yard filled with drought-resistant plants, a deck in back. Leda’s own bedroom, filled with Leda’s things, the same bedroom she’d lived in since she was two years old, so she couldn’t remember where they’d lived before that. 

Now the house was sold. Leda’s father was in a condo with his girlfriend, and Leda’s mother was like a different person. 

Always out at exercise classes, doing some kind of epic cardio workout she talked about all the time, HIIT for high intensity interval training. She stopped cooking the kind of food Leda’s father liked—stuff like macaroni and cheese drizzled with truffle oil or homemade hamburger patties on fresh challah rolls—and started a diet of green smoothies and quinoa bowls. Sometimes she went on dates with guys she met on the internet and didn’t come home for dinner at all. 

Leda and Freddy made their own dinners. Frozen pizzas for Freddy, heated in the oven. For Leda, mostly yogurt and crackers. 

Leda’s mother became thin and angry, stalking the house in trendy athletic clothing. Always cleaning things and arranging pillows, like if she had to live somewhere ugly, it had better be spotless as an Instagram photo. She bought a bunch of little jars with air plants that she sprayed with an antique-looking mister, posted them around the apartment.

“I officially changed my name,” she told Leda one day, her lips pursed in an angry, triumphant smile. “Back to Susannah Huang.” 

It was strange to think of back. As far as Leda was concerned, her mother always been Susannah Levine, wife of Professor Richard Levine, mother of Leda and Freddy Levine. 


In the bathroom, Leda studied her face in the mirror, like she always did in bathrooms and anyplace that had a mirror and some privacy. She’d been happy with her hair the last few days, but today it was limp, her dark bangs sticking to her forehead. Her skin looked like someone had sucked out her life force, everything pale except her eyes and the red bumps on her forehead. She wondered, as usual, whether she looked this bad most of the time, if the days when she caught herself looking pretty were just an anomaly and the rest of the time she looked like the girl in a movie who everyone feels sorry for. 

When she pulled down her leggings, something was wet. So wet it got her hand all wet. She wiped her fingers on her other arm, looking for the brown of the Coke—how had she spilled it? She had barely even drank any of it.

But what smeared across her skin was blood. Deep red blood like a murder scene. She looked down, and it was all over her legs, brighter there. Soaked through her underwear, pooling in the crotch of her leggings. She grabbed toilet paper, a long rolled-up bunch of it, tried to wipe from the inside of her thighs. It was sticky, staying firm on her skin even as it painted the paper a fierce angry red. 

Leda screamed. 

Not because she didn’t know this would happen. She was one of the last girls in her school to get it. Stress, the doctor had said. 

It was just so much blood. 

The most blood she’d ever seen, more blood than when she cut her foot and needed stitches, when she bled through two white t-shirts on the way to the hospital. Blood like a horror movie, everywhere. Splotches on the white floor tiles. Smeared across the toilet seat, where she’d sat down for a moment before standing back up. All over her hands and legs. Droplets on the glass jar with the air plant and seashells next to the toilet. Droplets on her feet, her toes.

Everything was going dark in her head, like she should lie down, but the floor was so cold and blood-stained. She propped her hands onto the bathroom counter like kickstands, held her body upright against the darkness.

She wanted her mommy. 

Please come help me, mommy, she said to the mirror. Again and again, out loud. Come help me, mommy. 

Her face was still pale, a bloody fingerprint marking her forehead like a third eye. She saw her mother in that face, the puffy tired eyes, the drawn cheeks. Teenaged Susannah Huang, at her parents’ house in Pasadena. An American girl with parents from Taiwan, parents who packed choy sum and aged tofu for lunch, which Susannah didn’t eat because she was on a diet and anyway she didn’t want anyone to think her parents were weird. Susannah whose parents wanted her to marry a Taiwanese boy, but instead she fell in love with her college professor, a Jewish guy from New Jersey. When she told her parents she was engaged, they told her that Richard would never truly love her, that he just wanted to marry a pretty young Chinese girl, that he’d cheat on her, that he’d leave her as soon as he met someone younger and prettier. Susannah told her parents that they were being ridiculous. 

Leda came out of the bathroom, showered and in her bathrobe, wearing a tampon she’d found in a drawer. The tampon was terrifying, but there weren’t pads anywhere. Leda lay on her back on a towel and took deep breaths to get it in. She’d put her leggings in the bathtub to soak, washed the blood from the toilet and floor with a sponge. Her skin was clean, her wet hair hanging straight and combed. She felt shaky but tended to. A problem addressed, at least temporarily. She was an adult now, evidence suggested, and no one was going to take care of her but herself.

In the living room, Leda’s mother was kneeling on the carpet, sobbing. Next to her was the Benvenuto Cellini book, a pile of cleaning rags, a spray bottle of spot remover. Wooden brush in hand, scrubbing loudly at a broad, pink stain where Leda had been lying. 

She looked up at Leda, her eyes somewhere between an apology and an accusation.

“The carpet is ruined,” she said. 

Leda didn’t say anything back, just went to the bedroom and went to sleep. She was so tired she didn’t make Freddy turn off the lights or quit his game. But she set an alarm for five in the morning. That’s when she got up, looked online, found out how to remove blood stains from carpet. Benzoyl peroxide, several websites agreed, which was something they had in the bathroom. She scrubbed, applied water, scrubbed again, applied more peroxide, until the stain was gone. Then she got our her note cards and wrote her presentation. For the pages she hadn’t read, she invented a fake ending, one where Benvenuto Cellini creates his most famous piece of artwork and then stabs somebody to death for no particular reason.

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