by Leddy Harper
Kind of hard to fit in when you lived a life like mine.
“Since when has a guy’s relationship status ever stopped you?” Jill teased.
Rebecca smiled and twirled her hair confidently around her finger. I watched as the silky strand wrapped round and round, and wondered if everything was so effortless to her all the time, or if she ever had to worry about anything.
Mr. Taylor droned on and on for nearly an hour, yet I didn’t hear one word he uttered. It would’ve been nice had the reason been because I was too busy staring at his ass or watching his mouth move as he spoke, but that wasn’t the case. Insecurities had built up too high in my mind, and I couldn’t find the strength to get past them. No one needed to point out my shortcomings, because I knew them all too well myself. I’d never be the pretty girl in class. At least I wasn’t the ugly one, but being the invisible, plain Jane wasn’t too far off. I was smart, but not in the geeky kind of way. It was pretty much the only thing I had going for me.
Maybe my mother was right when she said I’d never amount to anything.
The bell rang and everyone jumped out of their seats. I hated the melancholy that encased me as I stuffed my notebook back into my bag and slung it over my shoulder. I despised those all-too-familiar feelings of worthlessness that overwhelmed me with every step I took. Once they dug their way in, I couldn’t get them out. Insecurity ate away at me—the termite of my emotions—with no regard to the damage it left behind.
“Everything okay, Bree?” His deep voice became softer as he stood with his arms crossed over his broad chest between the two desks at the front of my row, blocking me from getting out. He didn’t seem pissed, more like concerned. Although, no one ever looked at me that way, so I could’ve been wrong.
I slowly lifted my gaze to meet his, wondering why he bothered to halt my exit. No one had ever cared enough to ask me if I was all right before, and I didn’t know how to take it. “I’m fine, Mr. Taylor. Thanks.” I just wanted to leave and move on to my next class, away from this man that had somehow made me feel even worse about myself.
“Are you sure? You were talkative and alert before class, but then became really quiet once the first bell rang. And I’m pretty sure you mentally checked out during my lecture.” He dipped his head, as if lowering it to my level.
“I guess I’m not used to waking up so early yet. My brain must still be stuck on vacation mode.” I tried to laugh, hoping it would ease some of this heaviness around us. More than that, hoping it would clear his worried expression from his face. But the forced chuckle sounded pathetic, even to my own ears.
His arms dropped to his sides as he let out an exaggerated sigh. Could an exhale sound disappointed? “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t last long. Try to stay awake tomorrow. I’d hate to bore you to sleep.” And with that, he backed away and let me slide out of the row.
I sensed his eyes on me the entire way, and I couldn’t breathe again until I was out of the room.
At least the rest of the day passed without incident. I kept to myself, managed to pay attention in class, and made it home without any more confrontations. Yet my mood remained somber and nothing seemed to make it any better. Maybe it’s because I knew my mom would be home soon, and that was almost as bad as the familiar feelings of self-doubt Mr. Taylor managed to draw out of me.
I rushed around the house, making sure I had everything cleaned up and in its proper place. Even though no one had been home during the day, there were always things I found to clean. And there were always things she found unclean. I could never win at her head games.
The buzzer on the dryer sounded moments before the garage door closed. I knew I’d have to wait until she went up to her room before folding the laundry, because she hated seeing a pile of clothes—even if they were clean and fresh out of the dryer. But if she waited too long to head up to her room, then I’d have to run the dryer again, because if she hated anything more than a pile of laundry, it was wrinkled clothes.
She walked to the fridge, and I studied her every step, wondering how long it would be before I could breathe again. But once she pulled out her box of wine, I knew it would be a while before I could relax. Quite possibly all night.
“What’s for dinner?” she asked after pouring a glass of the pink-colored liquid, not stopping until it was almost to the brim of the fishbowl-sized glass.
“I have lasagna in the oven. And I’m making garlic bread to go with it.”
“Better be homemade and not that store-bought shit.”
“It’s homemade. With real garlic, just the way you like it.” I’d made sure to pick up fresh ingredients at the store the day before, and knew to use them first at the beginning of the week before they were no longer considered fresh. Especially since, now that school had started, I wouldn’t have time to hit the market after school and still get my chores done before she came home.
She nodded without once making eye contact with me, only tipped her glass back and took a drink of her wine. I knew what that meant—she had a bad day at work. Mom wasn’t much of a drinker. Usually, one glass would relax her and two would get her drunk. Granted, her one glass was about the size of two normal ones. But with one, she would act calmer and tended to leave me alone, although I could never fully appreciate those times because I’d spend it worried she’d help herself to another.
I watched, holding my breath, as she took her wine upstairs and left me alone in the kitchen. Her bedroom door closed shortly after, and I could finally release the air I’d held onto. The timer on the oven said twenty minutes, which gave me just enough time to fold the laundry and put them away before she’d be back down and expect to eat.
Luckily, the clothes were still warm and wrinkle-free, so I sat on the couch in the living room and sorted hers from mine. If she knew I’d washed our clothes together, she’d probably have something negative to say, which is yet another reason why I never let her watch me do the laundry. One load was always easier than two, and less time consuming.
As predicted, Mom stayed in her room until the timer went off, alerting us that the food was done. I stuck the bread slices on a pan and into the cooling oven while cutting into the casserole dish of lasagna and preparing our plates. I’d done this so many times I had it down to a science. Ever since my dad took off five years ago, the house duties had fallen on me. Which hadn’t been easy on an eleven-year-old, but I quickly learned to adapt. I had to take care of the laundry, the dinners, the cleaning, and making sure to stay out of her way.
Before me, that had been Dad’s job. But he couldn’t take it anymore and left. And I wished every single day that he’d come back for me and take me away from this nightmare. But he never did, and he never would. He met a new woman, one who loved him and treated him right. She had her own kids, and even though I’d never met them, I’m sure they were better than me. That’s what my mom tells me all the time, at least. He chose them because I wasn’t good enough. He left her because of me. All that may seem like utter bullshit, but in reality, it was the truth.
Mom got pregnant with me while they were dating. Dad wasn’t ready to settle down, but she guilt-tripped him into it. He tried his best, put in eleven solid years, stayed because he felt bad about walking away from his child, but when he looked at me, I’m sure all he saw was a life sentence.
A jail cell.
That’s what I’d become to him. I was the mousetrap that snapped his tail off—more accurately, his manhood. Because Mom had carried his balls around in her purse the entire time they were together. She was a bitch to him… All. The. Time. Nothing he ever did had been good enough. I’m sure she resented him for resenting her. Endless cycle that swept me up in the middle of it. Then, one day, Dad had had enough and left, ending the cyclone of nightmares—for him. Except, once that happened, I got chewed up, spit out, and left to fend for myself. In my dad’s defense, I’m sure he had no idea Mom would treat me the way she’d always treated him. After all, she’s the one who wanted me in the first p
lace.
Except now she doesn’t anymore.
I’m no longer a pawn in her game.
I’m now her real life Cinderella. Only problem is, in the fairy tale, Cinderella was pretty and caught the eye of a prince. She had mice and a fairy godmother to help and encourage her. To keep her company. I had squat. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
I was utterly alone.
“Think you can pull off a four point oh this year?” Mom asked between bites of food, pulling me out of my depressing, self-absorbed thoughts. That’s all she cared about, my grades. Yet she didn’t seem to understand that being her bitch all the time took away from my studies. She didn’t care about that.
“It shouldn’t be a problem.”
“That’s what you said last year and then fell short at the end. Don’t let that happen again. You can’t have two years with low GPA scores. You need to get into a good college and make something of yourself. I won’t support you forever.”
It was the same talk over and over again. Never ending. Last year, I ended it with a 3.95 GPA. But that wasn’t good enough. I heard all the time how I needed to pull it up this year so I could apply to good colleges. She didn’t care where I went to school. She resented me so much that she just wanted me out of the house, and she saw college as an escape route. And the only reason she wanted me to attend a good school was so she could brag to everyone at the office about how smart her child was. Because, apparently, a 3.95 GPA means I’m stupid. It wasn’t like she planned to pay for my school. I had to worry about scholarships and student loans. I certainly wouldn’t be eligible for grants since my mother made too much, yet wouldn’t pay for anything. They didn’t care about that part. All they paid attention to was her bottom line.
Yeah, my life sucked, and I had nothing to look forward to. Even college came with a headache. I’d leave one hellhole for a mountain of debt. But at least I wouldn’t be under her thumb anymore. That was something to line my cloud with.
“I had nearly straight A’s last semester. And my schedule is fairly simple this semester. I’ll be fine. I’ll get that shining four point oh for you.”
“You know the good schools look at more than just grades. You need more than an A in art or physical fitness to get accepted. You need challenging classes. That perfect GPA won’t mean shit if you got it by taking the easy route. And they look at extracurricular activities, too. I’ve been telling you that since freshman year, yet you never listen to me. You’ll be lucky to get accepted by a regular, run-of-the-mill college. Is that what you want? A degree anyone could get? Where are your standards?” Her lip curled up as she rolled her eyes, showing her disgust for me. At least she didn’t add in her famous line: You’re going to end up just like your father, no education and living off others.
Yet she conveniently leaves out the part where he dropped out of college to help raise me and allow her to finish her degree. Yeah, why would she take any of the blame? And she also doesn’t recognize the fact that if I had extracurricular activities, I wouldn’t be able to clean her house or make her dinners. Those were all the extracurricular activities I could handle. I would know this because when I was a freshman, I participated in afterschool groups. And then I had to catch the city bus home because she wouldn’t pick me up from school, meaning dinner wouldn’t be ready on time—meaning I had to deal with the consequences. Needless to say, I didn’t stay in those groups long, leaving me even less chance of making friends.
It was no wonder how I’d made it to my junior year in high school without one single real friend. Hell, I was lucky if people noticed me in the hall and said hi. I only hoped college would be different.
Only a year and a half away.
“I’m taking honors classes this year, Mom.”
“When you could be taking AP.”
I didn’t even offer a reply to that. If I took AP classes, I wouldn’t have enough time to focus on my studies, and that would produce lower grades, meaning my ever-important GPA would fall. I couldn’t win with this woman, so I closed my mouth and finished eating. I guess she had nothing else to say, either, because she stayed silent through the remainder of the meal. It was too much to ask that she at least compliment my cooking. But I’d gladly accept the silence instead of more insults and lectures.
After dinner, I cleaned up the kitchen while Mom went back to her room. I didn’t miss the second glass of wine she took with her. That meant it must’ve been a really bad day at work. But she’d never talk about it. I never knew anything about her because she never offered, only criticized my every move instead of sharing anything about her own life. I had to learn about her through her actions, and having a second glass of wine was rather telling. It also told me to stay far away from her for the rest of the night.
So I did just that. I finished cleaning the kitchen, took my bath, and settled into my room for homework. By the time I cracked my first book, it was almost nine o’clock. Thankfully, it was the first day back from break, so I didn’t have that much work to do, and most of it was easy. Because I found silence to be more distracting than a roomful of sound, I turned on my TV and lowered the volume some to add just enough background noise while not interfering with my concentration.
But apparently, that was too much for Mom.
I heard her stomping down the hall long before the pounding on my door. Our rooms were both upstairs, close to one another, with a small bathroom in between. The walls were thin, so I knew to keep the noise down when she holed herself up in her room. There was no way my TV could’ve been loud enough to bother her, which only meant the second glass of wine had kicked in.
She was an angry drunk.
And a cheap drunk. Two glasses of boxed wine was enough to turn her into the Hulk. It was a bad combination.
“Aubrey Jacobs! Turn that off right now! I’m trying to sleep!” She sounded wild and emotional as she threw herself into my door.
I often locked my bedroom door, not to keep her out, since I knew that would never work, but to at least give me some sense of security. I could hear her furiously twisting the knob while beating on the cheap wood that separated us.
After turning off the small television set on my dresser, I walked to the door and flicked the lock, my heart pounding frantically in my chest the entire way. I braced my hand on the knob, ready to open it for her, but then it flew open, smacking me in the eyebrow area. I jumped back from the intense pain radiating through my head and noticed my mom had her shoulder pressed against the door, which would explain the force behind the push. The second the door made contact with the thin skin over my brow bone, it split and a trickle of warmth rolled down my temple.
But before I could do anything other than flinch, she tangled her hand in my hair. With dark and wild eyes, she pushed the sore side of my face into the wall beside me, the rough texture rubbing painfully into my tender flesh.
“I had a stressful day and I’m trying to sleep.” She ground her deep, low voice out between clenched teeth, sounding nothing like the cold mother I knew so well. This was White Zinfandel Mom, her pissed off alter ego. “Do you know what time it is? Do you know what time I have to get up in the morning, or what I even have to do tomorrow?” She yanked me until my nose came closer to hers. With her hand gripping my hair, she huffed out a humorless laugh, her warm, alcohol-laced breath engulfing me. “Of course you don’t. Because if you did, I’m sure you wouldn’t have this TV turned up so damn loud, knowing it would wake me up. Unless you did that on purpose… Did you turn your TV on to purposely piss me off, Aubrey?”
My chin quivered as I watched this stranger in front of me, her face twisted like the Scream mask. I’ve seen her livid, I’ve been around her plenty of times when she’d had too much to drink, and I’ve even witnessed her vicious side, but this was something new. I could tell by the twitchiness of her eyes, that this had nothing to do with me. It had nothing at all to do with my TV. It was work. Something bad happened today, and I’d just become her punching bag.
I shoo
k my head as much as I could with it pressed against the wall. I didn’t trust my voice to answer her, knowing it would shake with the tears that threatened to spill and sound pathetic with the tight knot lodged in my throat.
She finally let go and took a step back, her eyes shuffling around the room as I slowly cowered away. “Clean that up.” She pointed a stiff finger to the smeared blood on the white wall, not even bothering to glance at me to ensure I was okay. I wanted to believe she couldn’t meet my eyes because of the guilt that ran through her over hurting me, but I’m positive that wasn’t the case. I’m sure her inability to make eye contact had more to do with her inebriation than guilt.
I waited until her bedroom door closed before I crumpled to the floor and cried. But I made sure to cry silently, not wanting to chance pissing her off even further. It took me a few minutes, but once I calmed down enough to get up, I grabbed a dirty sock and got it wet in the bathroom sink, not bothering to turn on the light or look at my reflection. The pain radiating from my eye was enough to imagine how horrible it must look without checking in the mirror. Not to mention, seeing an injury tended to make the pain worse, and I couldn’t handle that when I had a mess to clean. I used the wet sock to wipe my blood off the wall, knowing she would be mad if I ruined one of her good washcloths. It was always about her possessions and appearance. Always. And then, after I had the wall scrubbed spotless and my tears had dried, and the pain became unbearable enough to see the damage, I went to the bathroom mirror with my first aid kit.
Even before I saw it, I knew the injury would look terrible. The blood ran in a constant stream over my cheekbone, past my jaw, and onto my chest…much like tears. Except these were thick, dark-red tears, leaking from a wide split next to my eyebrow. I cleaned it up, applying pressure until it stopped bleeding, and then closed it with two butterfly strips. Stitches would’ve been better, but I didn’t have that option. People would ask questions, which meant she’d have to lie again. And, of course, that would make her look bad.