On March twenty-third, I sat at my laptop, almost sixteen weeks pregnant and feeling tiny little pokes from my baby as the world collapsed around me. Steam was having another sale, so I was stocking up for lockdown with a boatload of new games that Jen and Karly recommended.

    "Hey." I felt a poke on my shoulder. I turned around in my chair and saw Venessa. "I'm going now."

    "Okay. See you when you get back," I said.

    "I want to give you a hug before I leave."

    "Why?" I asked.

    "Mom and Dad said I can't hug you until things get better. Once I start going to work, I'll be exposed to all those germs. So I want to give you one last hug."

    I stood up and put my arms around her. "Remember, it's just fifteen days to flatten the curve."

    "I know," she said, letting go.

    She left the house and I shut my laptop. My eyes needed a break, and I was getting another craving. I went downstairs, where Faye was having another bowl of cereal in the kitchen. I checked the clock. I had a half hour before I had to report to my first online class.

    "Yes, yes. We own a flower shop and we've been deemed as non-essential," I heard Mom say from the dining room. I took the box of pancakes out from the freezer and popped four of them in the toaster. "Yes, I understand that it's only for a few weeks, but this is our entire income. Both my husband and I work in our shop."

    I heard a gasp from Faye and quickly turned around. She was pointing.

    "Look at your belly! It got bigger since yesterday!"

    "Shh! Mom's on the phone!" I whispered.

    The toaster pinged and I took out my pancakes, then covered them in chocolate chips. I poured myself a glass of orange juice and then sat down across from Faye with my plates.

    "Are you ready for your first day of online classes?" I asked her.

    "Yup," she said.

    "I'm sure you're happy. You hate school," I said, cutting a triangle into my pancake stack.

    "Yup," she said, followed by a long pause. "Aster?"

    "What?"

    "Are we gonna lose our house? Dad said he was worried that we were gonna lose the house. I don't want to sleep in a cardboard box on the street. There's no wifi for me to do my classes."

    I practically choked on my orange juice. I quickly cleared my throat. "Faye, we're not going to sleep in cardboard boxes. Lots of banks are trying to help people who got impacted 'cause of the shutdowns."

"Oh. Then why does Venessa want to work at the germy hardware store?"

"Because when you can't work, you get a little money from something called 'unemployment'. It doesn't pay as much as we made for the flower shop, so Vanessa got a job to help out until we can all go back to the job. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah," she said, taking another bite of her cereal.

"Don't worry about these things. You're still a kid. You need to worry about kid things, like what cartoons you're going to watch after school. It's a nice day out. You should play with all that cool new chalk stuff Lenny the Leprechaun left you on Saint Patrick's Day."

She rolled her eyes. "It's just dad. Lenny the Leprechaun isn't real."

"That's what he wants you to think! If you don't believe, then he doesn't have to spend all his gold coins and can keep them all to himself. Why do you think you and me got gifts and Vanessa got nothing? Because she didn't believe."

Faye smiled and kept eating. Mom and Dad were so tied up in trying to get unemployment and keep us afloat while the world, especially here in New York State, descended into madness. She needed someone to be there for her.

    "Dad said he's going to be too busy cleaning the basement for Vanessa today. Will you come draw with me in the driveway?" she asked.

    "Of course. How about we make a big rainbow for the rainbow hunt going around on social media?"

    "Okay."

    I finished my pancakes, brushed my teeth, and got myself set up in my room. Faye was going to sit at the kitchen table, so Mom could be nearby to help her with her work on her school-issued computer.

    My first period class was history, so I went into Google Classroom and waited for the rest of my classroom and Mrs. Kuntz to join the call. When we were ready, she started her boring lecture about the Cold War and I tried to follow along in my textbook while texting back and forth with Jen and Karly, who were also up all night playing Animal Crossing.

    "Aster, your turn to read," Mrs. Kuntz said.

    I picked up where we left off and cleared my throat, then started reading the next two paragraphs in my textbook. I figured online classes would be really chill and I could just kinda goof off the whole time, but I actually had to pay attention, which sucked.

    "Okay everyone, that's all for today," Mrs. Kuntz said forty minutes later. "I can't figure out the website where I have to put your homework, so there won't be any for tonight."

    Everyone erupted in cheers, each of our squares lighting up one at a time with whoever was the loudest.

    "Nuh uh uh! That doesn't mean you won't have to do it at some other point," Mrs. Kuntz said. Everyone got quiet. Shawn, the class clown, let out a big 'Boooo!' "Alright, alright. Buh bye everyone."

    We all exited out of the classroom, and I had fifteen minutes until trigonometry, so I played animal crossing in the meantime. I was on a mission to catch a betta fish and have a bigger aquarium than Jen.

    I had the game loaded when there was a bunch of noise next door. I opened my door to see Dad disassembling Vanessa's bed from her already mostly-barren room.

    "Dad. One: you're making too much noise and I have classes. And two: are you guys really serious?" I asked.

    "Aster, you're at risk. I used to smoke, so my lungs put me at risk. If she brings COVID back from that filthy store, you, the baby, and myself, are in big trouble. There is absolutely no way she is going to be sleeping or hanging out anywhere near us."

    "But banishing her to the basement?"

    "She's got a TV and a bathroom down there. It's not like we're making her live in the yard," he said, continuing to remove screws from her bed frame.

    I went back into my bedroom, put on my noise-cancelling headphones, and got ready for trigonometry. Two weeks. It's only two weeks.