Chapter 7
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“There’s Not a Step We Can Take That Does Not Bring Us Closer” by Jason Webley
Six houses in three years and Mom has never once bothered to come home before the streetlamps.
Not enough hours in the day, she claims, and I can’t help noticing those hours are never spent on me.
I fall off the bottom of every to-do list. Yet today, the second my boot hits the porch, she flicks the lights on, glaring at me through the living room window. I guess I ranked up in priority today.
Not that she bothers to unlock the door.
Her thoughtfulness only extends so far. I insert my key by flimsy sunset seeping through the brewing storm clouds, thunderheads knotting in sync with the anxiety rolling in my gut.
By the time I get the door open, my face burns, a warning thunder rumbling in my ears.
I step inside the living room and into an ambush, my mother prowling so long she’s flattened a trail through the carpet.
Mom stops, staring at me. Shutting the door, I turn the dead bolt and stare back.
Normally, this is where we’d start screaming at each other.
But there’s something stranger about me now, an ocean in my empty chest—and maybe my mother can hear it crashing against my rib cage, because she watches me with her arms folded tight against her chest, almost wary, eyes roving every little detail.
“What,” she says, through her teeth, “in God’s name did you think you were doing?”
Ironic, coming from her, when the only place she worships is at the altar of science. My fingers tingle, impending numbness threatening my party trick. I curl them into fists.
“Skipping school. What’s it matter? They were going to send me home anyway.”
Her eyes flare. She heaves a whistling breath through her teeth, dramatic, as if I hit her.
“You ran away. I had no idea where you were, who you were with, if you were safe—”
“Only because you don’t listen! I told you where I was.”
“Oh, because you’re such a paragon of good judgment?” She aims a finger at me, shaking like a loaded gun. “I am criminally disappointed in you.”
“Yeah?” My lip curls, stomach churning. “Join the club. We meet on Tuesdays.”
“Do you think this is a joke? Do you see me laughing? You know this is going on your permanent record.”
“Who cares about that?”
“You will,” she insists. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get into a good college?”
“When did I ever say I wanted—” I start, but Mom barrels right over me, pacing again. She pulls the alligator clip from her sandy hair, digging fingers across her scalp.
“Maybe I protected you from too many consequences growing up. You clearly don’t know basic cause and effect.
You swan around here like the world can’t touch you, but it can, Persephone.
It’s dangerous out there. You could have been hurt.
You could have been kidnapped, or—or killed.
There’s a thousand things that could have happened that you don’t know how to handle on your own! ”
My seams slip, fingers hazing. I can’t seem to remember how to breathe.
I could have been hurt? I couldn’t handle it on my own?
I handle everything alone. I’ve spent most evenings locked up in her carousel of houses alone, working on homework alone, cooking my dinners alone—and what, suddenly she cares what could happen to me now?
I could have choked to death a hundred times, set the house on fire, run away.
Six houses in three years—I’ve wandered a half-dozen neighborhoods in the time it takes her to come home from work.
She never knew where I was. She never cared.
I fling down my carpetbag like a challenge, an old-fashioned gauntlet tossed before the duel. “I told you I was safe.”
“But I don’t trust you,” she yells. “I can’t trust you.
You lost that today.” Lips pursed, she pauses, eyeing me like some disgusting thing that’s crawled in through the dog door.
“The principal wanted to give you a three-day suspension, but I convinced him not to give you the satisfaction. You’ll have in-school suspension for a week.
And don’t you ever let me catch you around that boy again. ”
An unexpected jab, expertly aimed. I go cold. My vision narrows, my skin too tight. A howling wind slices through the silence. Outside, the storm finally lumbers out of bed. All at once, a sheet of icy raindrops cuts against the house, hissing like ghost salts across the slate roof.
“What boy?” I challenge.
Red to a bull, she stares right back.
“Don’t waste your time coming up with a story. The school told me.”
But my mother only looks me in the eyes when she lies.
I bite back a mean smile, rotten with furious vindication.
“If there was a boy, the school couldn’t tell you. They couldn’t share the disciplinary record of another student with you. So tell me the truth.”
“You are in no position to make demands, missy,” she says. “You skip school, come home with an attitude and flowers in your hair—of course it’s a boy. You’re never as clever as you think.”
And there she goes—pick, pick, picking at something she thinks she can break—but I won’t let her ruin this. I refuse to back down. Kicking off my muddy boots, I march all the way into the living room.
“But that’s not what you said,” I insist, squaring up, toe to toe and ready for a brawl. “You said the school told you. You lied.”
Mom’s face riots, a complicated mess of disgust and rage. After a second it settles into a curled lip and a low threat.
“You better fix that attitude quick,” she grits through her teeth, her clawed hand whipping out to rattle my arm in its socket.
“After the day you put me through—getting an emergency call from the principal and showing up to school to find you missing—you think you have the right to catch an attitude with me?”
I jerk backward, knocking her beige little talons away.
“You know what? I do. I do have the right! You wanna talk about trust? Well, you’ve lost mine too. I’ve let you drag me around my whole life without answering any questions and I’m done.” I step forward, demanding, “Who was that man?”
Glowering, Mom says, “You do not take that tone with me.”
Wind collides against the side of the house.
“He has a son, doesn’t he?”
“I can’t even look at you right now.” She turns away, holding up a hand. “Go to your room until I figure out just how long you’re grounded.”
Trying to dismiss me. To fold me back into the little box in her head where she’s kept me, to shove me back into the ill-fitting skin of a girl—to force me small again.
No.
The ocean screams in my ears. My soul slips. Outside, the storm batters into the windows, ice slanting under the overhanging porch like it wants to join in. I feel its howling echo trapped behind my teeth, grinding on my last weapon. “Why don’t I have a heartbeat?”
Mom stops cold. She flinches. “What?” she asks, eyes wide.
“You heard me,” I press, seizing on that little weakness. “Why don’t I have a heartbeat? What were you supposed to handle seventeen years ago?”
“Don’t be stupid, of course you have a heartbeat,” she says, arms squeezing hard against her chest.
Stupid—the word slaps me across the face.
I want to spit blood but settle for venom.
“Oh, right, yeah, of course. Because you wouldn’t lie about that, right?
You wouldn’t do all my school physicals to hide that abnormality, right?
Just like you wouldn’t lie about why we keep moving.
What was it this time, you said? You just had to come help a little nonprofit? ”
Her fingernails dig into the arms of her scrub coat, then rip away, balling into fists. She bares her teeth, voice rising. “That is enough. Don’t you dare speak to me that way. You self-centered, short-sighted little—thing.”
The word falls hard and heavy.
“Thing?” I repeat, cold. “That’s an interesting choice of words. Thing.”
Mom’s eyes widen. A flicker of something I’d like to think is regret tugs down the corners of her lips. But whatever it is, she squashes it, doubling down. “Would you prefer bitch? Because that’s the way you’re acting.”
“I’d prefer the truth,” I say. “For fucking once! Why do we keep moving? What are you running from?”
“You better check that entitlement and do it fast,” Mom yells back, leaning close enough I can feel her breath on my face.
“You are not the parent here, Persephone Green. I owe you a roof over your head. I owe you the clothes on your back and the food in your belly. I do not owe you a goddamned ounce of explanation.”
I don’t flinch. I’m too big to flinch, the ocean inside me battering my seams. I lean in.
“What about the man that came today? What do you owe him?”
Mom lurches away, retreating.
“Nothing. I don’t owe him a goddamned thing. He had no business coming here and that’s all you need to know,” she says, turning away and striding into the kitchen so she doesn’t have to meet my stare.
“Oh, big surprise!” I throw up my hands, hot on her heels.
“Hiding and lying, just like always—just like he said.” My rib cage swells around a trapped scream.
I can’t breathe so I stop trying, my body turned to furious stone.
The storm roars, wind screaming down the chimney, digging icy fingernails into the windowpanes when I ask, “What signs was he talking about? What can’t you outrun? ”
My mother won’t look at me. Suddenly the moving boxes require her full attention, and she’s cracking them open to get at serving dishes and tablecloths older than I am but somehow, at this moment, critically more important.
Distantly, I feel my body shaking. My vision burns too bright, strange and hyper-saturated, narrowed down to this single moment—my mother rendered in high definition.
Every gray hair, every crow’s-foot, the curl of her snarl and the bright spark in her eyes, staring down into a box of thrift store reject garbage so she doesn’t have to look at me.