Sophie Gerard lived in a two bedroom apartment with her parents and her little brother. This apartment was poorly insulated and dimly lit.
She shared a room with her little brother, much to her dismay. Her brother was not very mature, and she didn't appreciate that. He would go around the neighborhood playing Cowboys and Indians with his friends.
One day, he took it home with him.
"I am the cowboy and you are the Indian." He poked her in the chest, and looked her in the eyes like some kind of racist cowboy with a domination streak. He tried to look down on her. The thought that he would find himself to be better than her was preposterous. So, she grabbed his finger and bent it and twisted it.
He eventually screamed "MOMMA, SHE'S HURTING ME!"
Their mother came in screaming, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING SOPHIA ONA GERARD, picking on your little brother like that?!" She looked at Sophie like she had killed someone and rubbed Sebastian's hurt finger.
The Gerard family stayed in Resonance because they had no means of moving away. They had no relatives in any of the other towns, and no money to pay for it. There was no money or a new place to stay. There were still jobs in Resonance, but not very pleasant ones.
Her brother Sebastian worked as a paper boy for very little money, and it got them only enough to pay their water bill which they kept very minimal as it was. He could not finish school, and nor could she. The other children would make fun of them for it.
"Ha, ha, you're poor, you're poor!" They pointed at them when they saw them walking to their jobs. She knew they were poor, because their laced up boots were getting torn and defiled. She knew they were poor, but sometimes, Sophie wanted to ring those kids little scrawny necks for stating the obvious and being ignorant. But, that was considered horseplay, and horseplay isn't considered lady like. It was a sad life, but they learned to cope with it.
Sophie had worked at a sweatshop. She was paid per piece she made so she learned how to make one shirt per hour efficiently and safe. She had to learn to do so after her father screamed in her ear to earn more money and had threatened to use his rusty scissors on her favorite hat that she would have no means of replacing if he did.
Her boss Mr. Squalor was a greedy man who had a nasty habit of finger nail biting. His fingers were gross, so he covered them up with masking tape. He also would 'take a little money off the top' as he would call it, and threatened to take her job away if she ever told. He also said that she wasn't a very credible person since she was poor and if she did try to tell someone that they wouldn't have believed her anyways.
Her pay was only enough to buy the groceries, but she was happy to do that for her family. She was supposed to walk straight home after work and make dinner for all of them. But, in those hard times, Mr. Gerard wouldn't come home until quite a long time after they had eaten the meal that she made.
Mr. Gerard worked as a repairman for the steamships. He worked on at least one a day. He was paid the most out of the family, but still only enough to be able to put away a few Kiloms a day into savings. That is, he would put it away if he didn't spend it at the pub drinking some kind of piss water beer. The poor man's alcohol. [I suppose people drink alcohol for the feeling it gives them] He was an angry drunk, and Sophie would hear stories about him at work from the other ladies.
"My husband says your father is a crazy drunk, who works at a dead end job." The managers would always criticize her father. If she was able to, she would have loved to scream at these managers that it wasn't any of their business what her father did in his free time, and she had no right to criticize her about it.
Sometimes, her father came home stammering drunk and yelled about how he wanted to get out of such a shitty little town. He would always punch a wall or something else in his way, and Mrs. Gerard would start to sob, and curl up into a ball on her bed. Little Sebastian would hide in the closet. The only remedy of the situation was Sophie. She'd go to her father and gave him the cane she made. She somehow got him to the toilet to make him throw up the alcohol. This was because she had heard that a person could die from not throwing up before he passed out. A person could become brain dead from not throwing up before passing out, because of lack of oxygen to the cells.
She then brought her dad to bed. That was routine for her. Her mother didn't do much of anything, except for moping around the house and maybe yelling at Sophie about how much of a failure she is. Sophie figured that her mother was reflecting on her own mess ups.
Her mother sometimes played the piano that they somehow made space for in their tiny living room. She sang songs of hopelessness and sorrow, and sometimes even wrote some.
Sophie loved her mother's voice, but wondered why her mom never decided to get a job as a singer. She wondered why she would just sit around on her tush all day and why her mother wouldn't use her voice to cheer up the town, and what was wrong with her. Sophie's parents were just as depressed as everyone else was, which became the norm in the town of Resonance.