Round 4: Kirsch

Samuel Kirsch and his husband Maxwell Kirsch are Adults. Their daughters Caritas (Cari) Kirsch and Iustitia (Izzy) Kirsch are Teens.

* * *

With Liss gone, everything felt a little quieter, a little emptier. Although Liss had long since stopped needing constant parental attention, Maxwell and Samuel still felt aimless without her, like they didn’t know what to do with themselves. They spent a lot more time than usual cleaning the house, spent extra time with Cari and Izzy, and tried not to think about the fact that Cari would be the next to leave.

No Liss also meant no buffer between Cari and Izzy, and no one to talk one or the other of them down before things got too heated. Both of them tried not to let the other one get to them too badly, but they could all feel the tension simmering just below the surface.

Izzy tried to keep herself calm by expressing her frustrations to Dmitri. She could talk more comfortably with him than anyone she had ever met, and venting to him for a while always made her feel better.

Her relationship with Dmitri sometimes seemed too good to be true. Her lackluster relationship with Cornelius finally made sense to her – she had never been able to care about him the way he deserved because her crush on Dmitri had never really gone away. Somewhere inside, she must have always known that he was meant to be hers.

She did sometimes feel a twinge of guilt when she thought about Liss. But Izzy had asked her, before she had even agreed to go on one date with Dmitri, and Liss had given her permission. Besides, Liss seemed happy with Ellis. She already had a good relationship, so why shouldn’t Izzy?

Despite her relationship with Dmitri, sometimes everything just got to be too much. There was Cari, and no Liss to talk to when Cari started being too much of a problem. There was school – the principal called her down to his office to discuss her grades practically every week. And some days the pressure to do something – something exciting, something meaningful, something besides sitting in school all day – made her feel like she was about to burst.

It was on a day like that that she got her tattoo.

She tried to hide it from her parents at first, but they spotted it one day at breakfast. When they saw it, though, their nonchalant reactions made her feel silly for trying to hide it in the first place. Why had she ever thought they would be mad?

Cari didn’t want a birthday party. Her parents tried to talk her into one, but she insisted: she just wanted a quiet night of cake with the family. She didn’t even want the confetti and noisemakers Izzy had brought home, but she smiled and went along with it so she wouldn’t look like a spoilsport.

As Cari blew out the candles, Samuel tried to look happy, but he wasn’t sure he managed it. They had already lost one daughter; now they were losing a second. Soon their house would be entirely empty – it would just be a hall full of empty bedrooms, and him and Maxwell rattling around.

The day after her birthday, she left the house like she was going to school. When her parents tried to stop her, thinking she had forgotten she didn’t have to do that anymore, she told them she had found a job as a secretary at a local doctor’s office. They tried to pretend they were happy that she had found a job so quickly, but Liss moving out had left more of a wound than they had thought – both of them found that they wished it had taken Cari just a little longer, so they could have kept pretending she wasn’t quite an adult just yet.

Cari, on the other hand, was – well, she wouldn’t call it excited, exactly, but she was a lot more satisfied than she had thought she would be. She liked the routine of work. She liked going into the office every day, and having a specific job to do, and being left alone as long as she did what was asked of her. And unlike high school, this actually gave her something in return.

Her newfound contentment even made her feel more well-disposed towards Izzy. She started reaching out to her, and before long they were getting along better than they had in years.

Even when she had to watch Izzy and Dmitri being sickeningly sweet together.

But now that she was an adult with a real job, it was beginning to feel silly to sleep in her childhood bedroom with all the pink and the unicorns. And when she thought about living on her own, without no one to measure up to and no one to pretend in front of, it was like her whole body heaved a sigh of relief. She knew her parents dreaded her moving out, but after one too many nights in the unicorn room, she decided it had to happen, and sooner rather than later. All she had to do was find a place to live.