Esme and Atty had been living with Augusta in the house on Asbury Avenue for a week, their long-snouted collie in tow. It had proven to be a turbulent school year. After news of Atty’s father’s affair swept the boarding school—Doug stayed in France—Atty chunked the rest of the year in a downward spiral that ended, spectacularly, in a “behavioral prank” involving the history teacher’s Civil War–era musket. Esme and Atty didn’t offer more details to anyone than necessary. After a disciplinary hearing, she was NIB’ed—a polite way to say that she’d received a letter stating that she was “Not Invited Back” for the following year. The letter was overkill; they weren’t coming back anyway, so why be so official about it? Atty hadn’t yet been placed in another boarding school because Esme hadn’t found another job on the boarding school circuit, which she blamed on a prejudice against the non-Ivy-League-educated; inexplicably, she hadn’t gotten into Smith or any of the Ivys and her guidance counselor had thought she’d be a shoo-in. Meanwhile Doug, Esme’s soon-to-be ex-husband, was quite happily glomming off his French girlfriend, the dentist.

While Esme and Atty tried to recover from their personal hurricane, many others were still reeling from the actual hurricane.

Hurricane Sandy had killed over 125 people. It destroyed over seventy-two thousand homes and businesses in New Jersey alone, causing over sixty-two billion dollars in damage.

It broke people down.

But it seemed to have broken Augusta open.

Esme sensed that her mother was altered by the storm on what seemed a molecular level. Augusta told Esme that the storm meant that life was precious—including her own—and she felt herself, for the first time in a long, long time, pushing outward. “How else to explain it?” she’d told her daughter. “I’m pushing—outward.”

The house on Asbury Avenue got off light compared with many others. The hurricane destroyed the family furniture on the first floor—the piano, sofas, armchairs, books. The entire set of Nancy Drew mysteries—fifty-six books in total—taking up a low shelf were either damaged or swept out to sea; even the bottom halves of a few paintings had been damaged. The faces of old, now dead Rockwells seemed to be bobbing heads, the paint beneath their shoulders forever chipped and blurred. Augusta kept the paintings on the walls. However, her great-grandfather’s whimsical taxidermy of various rodents in elaborate dress having tea had to be thrown out. All other furniture had been cleared away and temporarily replaced by beach chairs and a small circular glass-topped garden table.

Augusta wanted the house exactly as it had been before the storm—which was the same as it had been for decades.

And so she sent Esme and Atty around to antiques shops, secondhand shops, garage sales, and Goodwills with pictures of the living room and dining room in hand, trying to match the furniture as closely as possible. So far, they’d only been able to replace the dining room table and chairs. Some items would prove much harder—an antique secretary’s desk, a specific grandfather clock, and, impossibly, the glass-encased display of two taxidermied squirrels sipping tea in a parlor.

The day that the man with the package appeared at the house on Asbury Avenue, Esme and Atty were at an estate sale on Sea Spray.

“This can’t be psychologically healthy,” Atty told her mother as they walked through the pallid living room. “You get cheated on, kicked out of your house, fired, your daughter—once a golden girl—has a breakdown, and then you’re forced to re-create your childhood home like a twisted museum?”

Esme noted that her list of failures was too quickly rattled off not to have been previously cultivated, perhaps even tweeted.

“Were you really once a golden girl? Isn’t that a little revisionist history?” Esme said. They had developed a frank camaraderie over the course of the troubling year.

“Next to that girl with the musket at parents’ weekend, I’d say, Yes, I was once a golden girl.” She tweeted this, adding #sarcasticyolo.

After the musket incident, while the school year wrapped up, Atty had taken a leave of absence and worked intensely with a therapist. This would supposedly help repair her badly dinged high school record. Those fourth-tier schools she’d once feared were now aspirational. There was some talk of trying to address some of this positively in her college entrance essay. Atty couldn’t figure out a way to package the musket incident, though—an interest in historical firearms? Esme’s colleagues would ask how Atty was doing with such saccharine sympathy that Esme wanted to slap them. It was a humiliating time for both of them.

Esme had told Augusta that Atty wasn’t crazy. That weird, uptight, self-reverential school was! Heap on top of that a father who skips the preset Skype calls with his daughter and, well, Atty was deservedly pissed off. To be honest, Esme had been jealous of her daughter in that moment on the field hockey field, giving an oration on life and the living, musket in hand—armed with a piece of history.

Rockwellian teen years were sometimes difficult. Liv had dated a local bad boy while Esme was already off at college. (Obviously the whole thing made a great impression on the impressionable Ru, who’d written a book and film loosely based on it all.) Liv was shipped off to a prestigious boarding school as some lavish form of punishment that Esme had always envied. Things always weirdly worked out for Liv. Even her recent arrest for illegally vandalizing her ex’s apartment had landed her in a rehab center that was more like an upscale spa.

And Ru had been a troubled teen. She ran away at one point—Esme couldn’t remember the details—but she’d come back and had to go to counseling too. She was probably a writer because of some therapeutic necessity, a better kind of coping mechanism than Liv’s drug use and boozing, but not too different in root cause, probably. It wasn’t their fault anyway. They’d been raised by someone who remained pathologically delusional. Esme loved her mother, but she was troubled.

Still, Esme worried. Atty had lost it, plain and simple, and although the therapist felt she was taking great strides, Esme was sure there was something Atty wasn’t telling anyone.

At this very moment, her sisters were on their way home. Would they be positive or negative influences on Atty? Esme wasn’t sure. She only knew that she alone seemed to be the Rockwell woman who had managed to keep her shit together.

She was looking at embroidered pillows, none of which looked like items from her childhood, but was distracted by Atty’s voice echoing in the distance. “Hey! Excuse me! Do you have any taxidermied squirrels? High-class ones, sipping tea like they’re British?”

And she knew that Atty was only asking so that she could tell the story in a tweet to her followers. Atty’s most recent update was that she had 3,465 followers—who on earth wanted to hear what her daughter had to say?

The bigger question, though, wasn’t how many followers she had, but if she had any friends—the living, breathing kind. And Esme was fairly sure she didn’t.