Laney

Laney:

"You—after all I—how dare—why won’t—you—YOU!”

            I heard my father in pieces, punctuated by grunts or the crash of something falling and maybe breaking.

            “I—I--- I---“ was all my brother Sam could get out.

            He was loud, but not very eloquent, as usual.  He’s got all these problems – like trouble putting his feelings into words -- related to his being “on the autism spectrum”, whatever that means exactly.  For some reason it pisses my father off but mostly I just find it annoying. 

            “I love cats!” Sam yelled suddenly, which was followed by the loud thump of a body hitting the wall upstairs, and I could picture Sam head-butting my father.

            Loving cats and head-butting were two of Sam’s “things”.

            My mother, who prefers to be called “Judy” ever since she quit drinking and decided her real name, which was Brandy, was a trigger for her – turned up the volume on the TV in the family room.  She pulled me close into a snuggle and we continued to watch Project Runway as if my brother and my father duking it out upstairs were perfectly normal, which it was.   

            There’s this book I read that said a bucket of water is a bucket of water to me, a vast ocean to an ant, a cool drink to an elephant, and to a fish it’s home – it all depends on your point of view.  So when I say “normal,” well, that was like my bucket of water, only in this case the bucket of water was Sam and my father rolling around on Sam’s floor upstairs and Judy and I watching TV downstairs with the volume up.

            As I said, to us, this was normal.  To the social worker who visited last week, the same scene would be dysfunctional and maybe detrimental to the welfare of the children, i.e., Sam and me.  To someone reading this, maybe in my memoirs someday or in a piece of fiction loosely based on us, maybe the scene was tense or sad or even funny.  On the other hand, to our neighbors we were just noisy.         

Like the fish in the bucket, to me, it was home.

Sigh.  Such was my life.  Thirteen and so jaded.  Tsk, Tsk, my grandmother would say.  Laney needs to find her joy, to make her own happiness, to get out of herself, she would say.  She has said, actually. 

“All that time in her room and how does she find anything in that scrap heap?  Anyway, do you know she is on that I-thing until one in the morning when she needs her sleep if she’s going to grow,” she said once to Judy, as if I weren’t there.

“Oooh, I like that one,” said Judy, pointing at the TV as a billowy white dress came down the runway.

“Eh, it’s all right,” I said.  “Kinda eighties prom dress.”

“Mm, maybe,” said Judy, shrugging and sipping her Diet Coke.

“That’s it!” bellowed my father as he crashed down the stairs like a bull in a china shop – not to be all cliché, but he was six foot three and four feet wide and our house was an old colonial full of tiny room and tinier stairways, so that’s what him moving around was really like.

“I can’t take this ANYMORE!  I’m DONE!” he said, roaring past the couch where my mother and I sat.

“Daaaaa….” said Sam, right behind my father.

I looked up as my father left, slamming the back door behind him, and Sam sank to the floor in a ball, pounding on his shins with his fists.  Sighing, I looked back at the TV and stifled the urge to tell Sam to melt-down quietly please, or else take his problems elsewhere.

So you see, to Sam, what I thought was “normal” was actually devastating. 

To my father it was the last straw. 

Corrine

Corrine:  After our earlier argument, Cassidy and I piled our clothes in a line between us, a soft wall that is six inches high and as long as our bodies, which is the same thing as saying as long as our tent, since we are relegated to sharing a tiny pup tent, as usual on these family camping trips – or should I say, these family trauma dramas.

            We used to cling to each other during thunderstorms, when the rain always soaked through the walls of our tent, and the wind threatened to blow us into the lake.  We used to stay up all night by the light of our dim camp-lamp, talking until the lamp’s big battery died.  We used to, we used to, we used to.

            I used to…

            Well, never mind. 

            My nylon sleeping bag crinkles as I adjust to see my journal better.  I remember when I was fifteen, and it came in the mail from my crazy aunt in California, the fucked-up one, or so my equally fucked-up other aunts called Rachel.  I remember I was like, wtf, I mean the blank book was pretty with it’s heavy pages, torn edges, real flowers pressed into the cover.  But I’m not a writer, wasn’t then, anyway.

            Suddenly, the sipper to our tent goes up, and it’s my Uncle Tim, and without thinking, I close my book and start to unzip my sleeping bag.  He’ll say he wants to show me the stars or something.

            “Cassidy, come out!  I have something special to show you,” he says to my sister.

            My sister, not me.

            There was a note that came with the delicate book my aunt sent on my fifteenth birthday.  It said to the journal was a secrets book.  A place to keep my secrets.  At the time, I didn’t have any I dared write down.  But now the book is nearly full, full of secrets, all but the big one, the one I still haven’t written.

            And now Cassidy is going to have secrets of her own.

Gemma, fairy girl

Lilly

“You like sushi?  I get it from the market on Folsom.  After five they sell everything half price—“

“Fuck you!”  I push the plastic container so hard it flips over onto the floor.

He just smiles.  A big, shit-eating grin.  Did I really sleep with this guy?  I don’t remember.  I DON’T REMEMBER!

Shouldn’t that count for something?

“It’s okay you’re clumsy.  Probably hung-over too, huh?” he says as he picks my California roll of the floor with long, hairless fingers.  Dainty fingernails.  Like a piano player. 

Did we talk at the bar at Chex Louis about how I played piano from the time I was seven?  Is that how we hooked up?

I DON’T REMEMBER!

“Please, can I just go?  Please?” I say.

He doesn’t answer, just picks at the wasabi that’s stuck in the carpet. 

“You seem like a really nice guy.  How about I take your number and we get together sometime.  Go dancing.  Whatever you want.”

He nudges the sushi toward me on the overturned crate that’s acting as my dinner table.  I keep looking at the door, and he notices.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he says, not in a mean way, just in a matter-of-fact tone that is way scarier. 

It’s even scarier when he takes one of the pieces of California roll and stuffs it in my mouth.

“Stop talking now,” he says, as he takes my flannel shirt off the bed and uses it to sop up the soy sauce I spilled on the rug.