Hi friends! A few of you have asked about the other ending I wrote for The Ruining (the one that wasn’t published in the final version of the manuscript). You can find it here:

http://annacollomore.com/alternateending

As always, I’d love to hear what you think! 

“I’d never been to California. For the first eighteen years of my life, it was some other girl who watched the sun rise over the hilltops of San Francisco, dipped her toes in the Pacific Ocean, and ate raspberry frosted cupcakes from Cups and Cakes on a pier at Fisherman’s Wharf. It was always some other girl, and I’d grown used to that. Then one day it was me. I knew from the photos the Cohens sent (in emails and letters, every other day for a whole month before I arrived) that San Francisco would be hilly; that my new neighborhood would overlook a vast expanse of water with a concrete playground rising up beyond; that the sun would be perpetually brilliant. But I didn’t feel it, and so I was unprepared for its essence: the thing that seeps into your bones only after you’ve been inside a place and felt it surround you. I’d imagined all of these things, but nothing can ever prepare you for a place—the way it comes alive—except being there.

The day I got my letter from San Francisco State University, my stepfather had been sitting on the sofa we’d picked up at the Salvation Army a year before. He was smoking inside the house, even though my mother constantly begged him not to. The sofa itself had been beat up already, but within a month of purchase it was sunken in at the middle and stained with Dean’s sweat residue. The tips of Dean’s fingers were always dark from nicotine, and I was glad I hadn’t bothered showing him the letter—hadn’t let him hold it in his grimy palms. I hadn’t wanted his filth to ruin it. Dean’s front teeth had brown spots on them. It made me sick.

The smoke had begun to feel oppressive, and Dean’s focus had already turned back to the TV. I crossed the short expanse from the living room to the kitchen to the tiny patch of faded, green-and-yellow linoleum that marked our foyer. I let the screen door settle in place behind me as the cheap, rusted outer door slammed hard against the side of our dilapidated home. I hated it there.

It was gray outside, and if I hadn’t spent my entire life in Detroit I’d have assumed all of Dean’s cigarettes had leaked their charred air out the window and settled onto the surfaces of the city. But Detroit was mostly always like that: everything was different shades of gray no matter where you looked. The grass, the pavement, the buildings—but also the animals and the people. Like if you looked closer, the word “hopeless” would be scrawled all over everything, just under all of the tattooed and graffitied exteriors.

California, though, was the opposite of Detroit. California was golden to Detroit’s gray. I’d always known I needed to be there, ever since I saw it in Little Miss Sunshine when I was in middle school. And when I’d found the Cohens’ ad on the SFSU virtual billboard—“New to Marin County/Fam of 4 Needs Nanny”—I knew I had to be there. We could be new together, the Cohens and me. Dean and my mother didn’t know anything about the Cohens, of course. It was my secret—my ticket to a new life—and I needed it to stay that way.” —The Ruining