Chapter 18
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
My first day undercover is when I’m twelve, two years after Mom dies.
I wake from crying myself to sleep and find khakis, a crisp white shirt, and a bow tie waiting at the foot of my bed. The outfit is not my school’s uniform. It’s his.
I begged the night before to wear normal clothes, and finding that uniform there in the morning teaches me, yet again, what my begging is worth.
When my feet hit the cold floor, I picture a different boy.
A boy who can leave a toy out of place without getting screamed at.
A boy with a hobby like piano, dance, or tennis, the kind of thing other kids do because someone once noticed what they liked.
A boy with a real friend instead of somebody who talks to him out of pity and then looks relieved when the conversation ends.
Still, by the standards everyone else seems to use, my father is doing fine.
I’m clean, clothed, and fed. That’s the bar he clears, and from the outside it must look high enough.
The other parents whisper at pickup about how strict he is, and strict is such a polite word for it.
Strict, like I’m not allowed dessert before broccoli.
Strict, if only vegetables were the issue.
I pull on my khakis, tuck in my shirt, straighten my bow tie, and march across the hall to the bathroom.
In the mirror, my cheeks are swollen from crying, my eyes still puffy with it, and my hands look too small to change anything.
I stare at myself as if there ought to be another version underneath that’s bigger, harder to hurt, or at least better hidden.
“Marcus!” my father calls.
“Brushing!” I shout back, my voice louder than it needs to be, rage scalding the inside of my ribs.
I turn on the faucet, though the sound has already given me away, and drag my toothbrush through the stream before adding a careful, pea-sized bead of toothpaste.
Scrub for two minutes. Spit. Rinse. Spit again.
Every part of the routine is a page in his invisible rulebook.
The routine is another uniform, and once I’m done with my teeth, I stand there looking at my hair and know exactly how the morning will go.
If it isn’t my hair, it’ll be a sponge left damp in the sink.
If it isn’t the sponge, it’ll be my posture.
If not my posture, then my tone. Dad can always find something to correct.
I like telling myself my anger curdles because I’m never allowed to act out. It gives the whole thing a kind of logic. Then combing my hair the wrong way would be silly, ordinary preteen rebellion, and not a revolution.
But by then, something in me is done.
Standing there in the bathroom, looking at my hair parted wrong, I feel some invisible thread snap. It’s been fraying for years, every time he tells me what to wear, when to speak, how to sit, how to stand, how to be. This is only the first time I hear it break.
By the time I get to the kitchen, he’s already there with the paper open in front of him, waiting.
“Two minutes late,” he says without looking up. “Eat fast.”
He’ll be furious when he sees the tiny decision I’ve made for myself, and that’s precisely why I did it.
At least this time I know what part of me he’ll go for first. My heart pounds anyway as I pour cereal into a bowl and carry it to the table, feeling his eyes move over me piece by piece until they reach my hair.
His face goes still, and my courage collapses.
I’m not strong enough to confront him, not really, not yet. So instead I do the thing that will end up saving and ruining me for years.
I build a cover.
“A girl likes it this way,” I blurt before he can say a word. “If I do it like this, she might be my girlfriend.”
Even as I say it, I know it’s a stupid lie. No girl has ever talked to me like that. She’d have to look at me first.
“A girl, huh?” He lowers the paper just enough to study me properly now. “What’s her name?”
“Sarah. Sarah Miller. From English class.” Another lie, and this one comes even easier than the first. I watch myself do it and feel something spark inside my chest, something hot and dangerous and exhilarating.
He’s deciding, I can tell, whether to drag me to the sink by the scruff of my neck and fix my hair himself.
So I keep talking before that can happen.
“We just started talking. She’s really smart. And funny.”
“Smart and funny, huh?” A smirk tugs at his mouth. “Probably likes your bow tie.” He leans back a little, too busy enjoying what he thinks is still his control to notice me slipping out from under it. “Just make sure it doesn’t affect your grades. Academy’s got higher standards than here.”
“I know, Dad.”
Under the table, I cross my fingers hard enough to hurt while we stare at each other across my cereal bowl. The lie pulses through my veins. Then he lifts the paper again and puts it back between us.
And just like that, I win. Or, someone else wins for me. A boy with a girl in English class who likes his hair this way. A boy with a little more nerve than I had five minutes ago.
The lie tastes sweeter than cereal. Soon it becomes the only thing I really trust. I lie my way onto a field trip and into my first real friendship.
I lie so I can stay late at school, then find my way into the weight room and sweat the day’s fury out through my skin.
Each lie gives me a little more air, a little more room, a little more distance between the person he’s trying to force me to be and the person I might become if he ever loosens his grip.
That’s the seduction of it. Lies may protect me, but they also open doors.
They let me walk a tightrope between who I am and who I want to be, and I get good enough at balancing there that the danger starts to thrill me.
I love the risk of it, the precision, the constant calculation.
Even the first time I get caught, some part of me enjoys the drop.
One secret gives way beneath my feet, and I learn I can survive the fall.
After that, getting caught only proves how much strain I can survive.
Lies become the only language I speak fluently, but they still fall short of magic. No lie gets me to homecoming. No lie gets me laid senior year. No lie gets me out of that uniform.
Berkeley is what finally breaks him. Once I fail to get the congressional nomination, he has to admit West Point is never happening. I celebrate following in Mom’s footsteps while he blames me for everything that happened to her.
But by then it doesn’t matter. I’m out of his house.
I’m burying the locked room under roommates, friends, professors, and classes that teach me how to turn passion into justice, how to point all that rage somewhere useful.
I tell myself distance is the same thing as freedom. Sometimes I even believe it.
Then, the morning after sophomore midterms, my phone rings. It’s the police. Their voices are practiced and somber.
He’s dead.
Maybe other kids would feel sad, or relieved, or guiltily happy. Maybe with the right therapist and enough time I could have sorted myself into one of those categories. But I feel none of it. When my father dies, something dies inside me too. I just don’t know what part.
I fly home for answers, absolutely certain I’ll find them at the funeral. But the church gives me nothing. The empty pews don’t surprise me. Neither does the open casket or the damn military uniform arranged one final time into the shape of authority.
I look first at his folded hands, because they’re easier than his face. The knuckles are waxy and still, no longer capable of pointing me toward a door or snapping me upright from across a room.
Then I make myself look higher.
Death has softened the grooves between his brows, but not erased them. His lips are pressed into the same thin line they always found before a correction, except now the corners sag beneath the mortician’s work. I know that mouth. I know every command it ever shaped.
And I realize his voice has never stopped.
Straighten up. Stand still. Don’t speak. Don’t be.
Even dead, he goes on correcting my posture, dictating my routines, rejecting me in a hundred small commands that have lived in my body so long they no longer sound like him. They sound like me.
That’s what finally breaks something.
Everyone thinks I fall apart from grief, but that isn’t what happens. I fall apart because something moves behind the locked door to the room where I keep him. The room I built for my father and sealed shut so I could exist at all.
His voice is still in there, arranging the lines for me to stand inside. His rules are still there. His disappointment. His endless corrections.
But he isn’t alone. Something smaller stirs in the dark.
A boy. Me, before the lies.
My knees buckle beside my father’s casket. I thought I’d built that room to hold my father. I didn’t know I’d locked myself inside with him.
I reach for the boy, for that last untouched piece of me, but the room takes him back. The door seals. His gasp disappears into the dark, swallowed by all the things I put there to survive.
I hate my father. I do. And yet… I need him.
I’ve survived so long on lies I no longer remember how to walk anywhere but that tightrope. He changed me by force. He made me mold myself around him until the shape held, and now I can’t remember what I was before him.
With my father dead and that boy swallowed by the room, there’s only the dark behind the door, growing deeper with every lie I pile against it.