I’ve stuck up pictures of my friends on the wall beside the bed, a mixture of show photos and random candid shots. There’s one of you sitting on the edge of the stage, fixing me with a lazy grin. I have pictures of my idols: Julie Taymor (only the best director ever), Walt Whitman. There’s also my favorite quote, which my freshman-year English teacher had on a poster above the whiteboard: Medicine, law, business, engineering are necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, and love—these are what we live for. It’s basically my mission statement.
The quote’s from Dead Poets Society, one of the parts where Robin Williams is in the classroom, teaching his students about Shakespeare. No one had to get me to like Shakespeare. I’ve memorized nearly all of Romeo and Juliet. I understand how trapped they feel, how desperate they are to get out. In eighth grade, I carried it everywhere, reading and rereading it in all my spare moments. My copy is pretty beat-up, but it would probably be the first thing I saved in a fire. The pages are brittle and yellowing already, stained with the hope that bled through my fingers, a new girl in a new town looking for something epic in her life.
I remember the day we moved here from LA. My mom and The Giant had just gotten married, and Beth and I stayed up late in the dark, crying. It was too quiet—we missed the sound of the freeway, the helicopters. It smelled weird, like dung and dirt and broken dreams. We made a list of all our favorite things about LA and then posted it on our bedroom wall. It’s still up there: Venice Beach, the Fifties Cafe, Pickwick Ice Rink, standing in line at Pink’s, Mexican food.
I dump my backpack on the floor in the entryway of our house just as Sam skips in. Even though I love him, Sam, through no fault of his own, is kind of the bane of my existence. My mom has already told me that my (unpaid, unappreciated) job this summer will be to babysit him every day, all day, whenever I’m not at the Honey Pot. Beth and I used to share the burden, but now it’s all on me—babysitting, chores, punching bag. Mom takes advantage of the free labor so that she can spend time on Mineral Magic, this makeup company she does parties for, selling the makeup to her friends and their friends and their friends.
“Gace!” Sam yells.
He has trouble pronouncing his r’s. Sam reaches his arms up, smiling, and I hug him to me, pick him up and spin him around. I like the way he throws his head back and how the laughter starts somewhere deep in his belly. Right now, he’s not the bane of my existence: he is adorable and sweet and really the only good thing about this house.
“Grace!”
My mom, already calling, impatient, irritated. It’s chore time, I just know it. I swing Sam around so I’m carrying him piggyback style and head for the kitchen. Mom’s doing her drink ritual: glass, ice, water, lemon wedge, one packet of Equal. Place in glass in that order, stir three times clockwise, three times counterclockwise. She has me make it for her all the time. Grace, I need a water. She’ll do that, just call me out of my room while I’m doing homework, like I’m some on-call bartender. One time she caught me stirring it four times—I was daydreaming about you and lost track. She screamed at me for wasting the lemon, the Equal, the water during a drought as she poured the contents out, rinsed the glass, then set it on the counter. Do it again.
“I need you to weed the backyard,” she says. “Take Sam with you and keep an eye on him.”
No Hey, how was your day? No Do you have a lot of homework? Did any more of your friends try to commit suicide?
Ever since last week I kept wanting to talk to her about you because sometimes adults know stuff, but she’s always busy with some new project and now I feel like, what’s the point? I hate the yo-yo that is our relationship. Sometimes I feel so close to my mom, like we’re two soldiers in a trench, clutching our guns to our chest, ready to charge when the enemy comes. Other times, she is the enemy.
This is my attempt to not have the worst afternoon ever: “I have to do a ton of trig before work—”
She raises her hand. “You should have thought about that before you decided not to weed last weekend.”
The anger in me simmers just under the surface of my skin. It’s there, right when I want it. Waiting. I only have an hour to do homework before I have to work the closing shift at the Honey Pot. Now I don’t even have that.
“Mom, that’s not fair. I had work and then that big project for English to finish, remember?”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
She’s yelling now. It doesn’t take much to get her there. Sam digs his forehead into my back like he’s trying to hide. My mom is angry all the time. When she talks to me, she clenches her teeth, growling. I’m too old for an actual spanking, but my face, my arms, the back of my head—all that’s up for grabs. I’d like to avoid getting slapped around today. I’d like to not hate her.
“Okay,” I say, my voice suddenly quiet. Beaten-Down Daughter. I curl my toes. Stare at my Doc Martens. Except I don’t do a good enough job of hiding my frustration this time.
“I’m this close to keeping you home.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, contrite, like she’s Jesus and I’m asking for forgiveness.
If I skip work today, I could lose my job. I just want it to stop. This constant confrontation—it’s exhausting. Mom has three major states: Angry, Depressed, Unhinged. By unhinged I mean she’ll decide to reorganize the Christmas decorations in July—at three in the morning.
I’m so tired.
When I try to explain how awful it feels here to my friends, when I try to explain the fear I constantly live with that the bit of freedom I have is going to get taken from me—it just comes out sounding petty. Poor me. And their sympathy isn’t what I want, anyway. I need righteous anger. I need someone pounding on the front door, ready to tell my mom and The Giant just how lucky they are. I get straight A’s. I’m a virgin. The only alcohol I’ve ever had is a thimble of Communion wine when my Grams takes Beth and me to church. I’ve never smoked pot or a cigarette or even been in a room where those things are present. I don’t jaywalk, I don’t ditch classes, I never lie to my mom. In short, I am a really good fucking kid. But they don’t see that. They see someone trespassing on a life that would, it seems to me, be much better without me in it.
Please don’t ground me. Those are the words that go round and round in my head right now. I was grounded for half of last month because I hadn’t cleaned the master bathroom that my mom and Roy share before I went to Nat’s house. I was running late and wiped it down quickly, hoping she wouldn’t notice. But she did, of course she did. There was a hair on the base of the toilet (You call this CLEAN?) and a speck of mold between two tiles (And THIS. I’m not blind, Grace.). My punishment: two weeks of imprisonment, which just happened to coincide with a home improvement project that The Giant was undertaking.
Mom’s voice turns indifferent—my apology does nothing. “When you’re done you can go.”
“Are you still okay to drive me?”
The mall is a half-hour walk away and my mom refuses to let me get my license because she says it’s an adult responsibility and I’m not mature enough to handle it (except: Straight A’s! Virgin! Sober!).
“Let’s see how you do on the lawn.”