4. Heavy Is The Head That Wears The Crown
HEAVY IS THE HEAD THAT WEARS THE CROWN
LAKE
Here I am again.
Jail isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. I mean, jail isn’t an experience people really encourage, but it’s definitely heavily glamorized in television.
They stuck me—an innocent girl in her early twenties—in here with a crack addict who stabbed her own dealer with a needle because the “shadow man” told her to, a beefy woman with a face that resembles bloody pulp—courtesy of a bar brawl—and a teenager with heavy eyeliner who thought that vandalizing a billboard would be a great use of their time.
My crime was way tamer! You can hardly even call it a crime!
I was peacefully protesting at a NO MORE ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION rally and simply refused to disperse when law enforcement shut everything down.
Sure, I may have cussed them out and accused them of being complicit in killing our furry little compadres, but that was a conscious decision on my end.
I’m passionate about protesting, and I hate how the government views it as opposition rather than taking the time to really hear the public’s concerns.
It’s not hurting anyone. In fact, I’d argue that it’s a great way to bring the community together.
Protesting stimulates cooperation, creativity, and communication.
If people like me aren’t making our voices heard, then we aren’t using our privilege for the right reasons.
I’m a rule breaker. Have been ever since I started to think for myself.
I speak my mind and challenge the authorities when there’s a gaping, immoral hole in the fabric of ethics.
I want to make a difference. I want to mean something.
Fighting for what’s right has been threaded into my DNA since I was five and saw Dusty McShepard stealing Penny Loper’s Barbie on the playground.
Dusty was one of those…difficult…kids. Communicated in grunts, had an aversion to teachers and being told “no,” and would use his extra muscle mass to instill fear across the greater population of Ms. Elizabeth’s class.
He was strongheaded, and he didn’t care about the consequences of his actions when building that alarmingly stark moral repertoire of his.
So, when I was the only one who had the balls to stand up to him, I made sure he never thought about touching another kid’s toy ever again.
Pretty sure I gave the dude some childhood trauma.
I sigh histrionically, making a show of dragging my finger back and forth across the bars like an inmate rattling a tin cup against heavy-duty steel.
I didn’t do anything wrong in my eyes, but arguing about the legality of it all would be fruitless.
Plus, the officer babysitting my ragtag team of misfits has a perpetual deadpan look and jowls that hang lower than an easily miffed bulldog’s.
I haven’t been in here very long—probably three hours—but I’ve been holding my pee, my stomach is eating itself from hunger, and I have a raging headache.
My mom should just be glad it’s not that serious of a charge. I could’ve chosen the violent route, but I refrained. That’s a lot of character development for little ol’ me.
Suddenly, a lean officer pops into my periphery and jiggles his stacked key ring into the lock, sighing in exasperation at the frequency of my visits. “Capitano, your bail has been paid. You’re free to go.”
“Finally,” I mutter beneath my breath, waving goodbye to the goth teenager who flips me off in response, the bar brute with half her face hanging off, and the old woman speaking in tongues.
Chest puffed out in pride, I strut to the front of the building like I own the place, only to have my satisfaction stamped out by my overbearing mother. Who, unfortunately, is accompanied by my younger brother, Max.
Shit. This is surely going to send some mixed messages. Max and I get along like two peas in a pod, so seeing his sister as the brunt of a protest gone wrong will a hundred percent alter his little brain chemistry.
I wipe the arrogant grin right off my face.
My mother leaves me in the dust and starts her trek toward the door. “How many times am I going to have to bail you out, Lake?” she growls, disappointment brimming on her tongue.
“Third time’s the charm?”
I use humor and sarcasm as a defense mechanism because it’s easier than dealing with all the barely repressed feelings of inadequacy that infect my body like rot beneath otherwise pristine floorboards.
Her condescension doesn’t just bank—it swells.
It swells until it pours over, and I’m the clear target of the impending tsunami that’s about to burst through her poorly constructed seawalls.
“This is why I asked you to stop doing protests. Not only are you being reckless with your future, but you’re setting a terrible example for your brother. ”
As we step over the threshold of the police department, Max looks back at me with tears glossing over his large eyes. It feels like a hydraulic press is squeezing all the blood out of my heart, and nausea begins to curdle the empty contents of my belly.
Can’t my mom see that I’m actually trying to set a good example? I’m trying to show Max that he has the power to stand up for what he believes in, and he shouldn’t have to place his faith in the government if said government is doing something shady.
The walk to my mom’s humble SUV is never-ending, and it certainly doesn’t help that the sun is hell-bent on scorching my retinas. I create a makeshift visor with my hand, grimacing at the spotlight exposing all my unspoken, degenerate truths.
“It’s not my fault the world is fucked up and I’m trying to do the right thing,” I retort, realizing three seconds too late that my prohibited swearing is the last straw that fully lets my mother off her leash. Her fang-bitten, mangled leash.
She towers over me, her red face screwed into a countenance of sheer rage. Poor Max ducks behind her leg to evade the foreseeable fallout.
“You’ve been arrested three times, Lake.
Three. Do you think this is some kind of game?
Do you think this doesn’t stay on your permanent record just because I come and bail you out every time?
The decisions you make have consequences, and you haven’t bothered to take them seriously.
You’re lucky that nothing worse has happened to you. You get that, don’t you?”
My pathetic admission scrapes up my throat, and my vision—now overrun with tears—resembles something of a warped pool mosaic, chlorine filling my lungs and subsequently burning my sinuses. “I—”
“No, you haven’t thought about that, because I minimize all the blame for you. I lift the weight off your shoulders and carry your burdens. Your bail money comes out of my pocket.”
My mother and I rarely fight, especially not in front of Max. If she’s so angry that upholding her composure isn’t at the forefront of her very busy mind, then I’ve grossly underestimated the gravity of my fuckup.
How can she ask me to do nothing when the things I’m passionate about are under constant fire? Although these protests have plenty of support, I need to be out there on the frontlines to feel like I’m making a difference. It’s what my sister would’ve wanted.
Every other day of the week, I feel so helpless. Out of control. As if I’m riding in an elevator when the cables snap, and I’m left to freefall down an endless flight of stories with nothing to cushion my well-deserved descent from heaven.
My mom’s never going to understand because she’s never going to put herself in my shoes.
She just thinks I’m some lost twenty-something with an identity crisis who steadily drains the money from her wallet.
She doesn’t care about understanding the things that matter to me.
She arrives at the scene, deploys her fix-it instincts, then rights my delinquency in ten minutes flat.
Indignation is a summit fever inside my head—blisteringly hot—but I choose the uncharacteristic decision and lean all my weight on an apology. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”
She can barely even look at me. She just clicks the key fob to her car, opens the passenger door for my little brother, then waits until I get into my metaphorical holding cell.
I crawl into the back seat, blinking away an influx of tears that threaten to incriminate me more than my unbridled tongue has.
Max’s pity is cloying. It chokes my esophagus before tucking itself up beneath my ribs, near my heart, where some bitter, resentful creature bares its fangs in defense.
I’ve always been the architect of my own destruction.
I self-sabotage my life when things are going well because secretly, deep down, I don’t think I deserve to be happy.
And, like with every foolish decision I make in my life, it all spans back to the accident that took place on July fourth many years ago.
It wasn’t my fault.
Everyone was distracted by the fireworks show.
It wasn’t my fault.
Audie was running around the perimeter of the living room. We were playing tag.
It wasn’t my fault.
I looked away for one second and didn’t hear the crash of her body over the explosions outside.
I don’t know how long she was on the ground, bleeding out from the aperture in her skull from when I accidentally tripped her and she hit her head on the corner of the coffee table.
While the rest of my family was outside, drinking the night away, my only job was to keep my little sister safe.
And I fucking failed.
Something inside of me faltered in that moment when I saw her paling, lifeless body sprawled in a pool of ichor. Everything was a blur. I rushed over to her and tried to apply pressure on the wound, but she’d already lost so much blood. It was everywhere—my hands, the table, the hardwood.
I screamed for my mom to come. I screamed for anyone to hear me, but nobody did. It was like I had no voice. All while the sky was being polluted with stupid fucking light shows that nobody would even remember a week later.
I still remember how cold she was. How her big eyes used to revere me until that night, when her wobbly stare implored me in a different way entirely. I called an ambulance right away. Five minutes, they said. It would take five minutes to save my fucking sister.
I didn’t let go of her hand. I was spouting gibberish to keep her calm.
The panic inside me was metastasizing into some descendant of cold-blooded fear, and they both worked in tandem to sour my throat with bile.
As much as I tried focusing on my sister, there was an equal part of me that wanted to look away.
Deep down, I knew that she would die before the ambulance arrived. The adrenaline crash paired with the surrealness of flashing sirens made me numb to the whole ordeal. The party guests only started to file in when they saw the paramedics arrive.
And my mother, she—I’ll never forget the look on her face.
I was only a teenager.
“Funny how you’re always sorry after the fact,” my mother scoffs, craning her head back to properly look at me for the first time in minutes, pure rage smoldering in her eyes, along with a morsel of something less noticeable—fear, maybe.
An emotion she’s had to water down again and again because it becomes more unruly in the shadows, waiting for its perfect lightning-strike moment to reach its zenith.
I guess the reason behind my outbursts is because I feel this astronomical need to do something to amend my past wrongs.
I look for absolution in tear gas and handcuffs and don’t care what lengths I have to go to find it.
I’m the one who should’ve died that night, not my innocent, seven-year-old sister.
Eight years later, and our broken family feels her absence every day.
My dad is estranged; we haven’t talked since the accident.
He’s not in any of our lives. And it’s not because he’s so overwrought with grief.
No, it’s because he blames me. Fuck, I’m sure Max does too, but he’s just too nice of a kid to say anything.
As we pull out of the parking lot, my mother’s tone quivers, no longer tempered by that spit-shined, perfect persona that she feigns for the rest of the world.
“You’re playing with your life, and I’m not going to lose you too, Lake. Not ever,” she tells me, the slight nasal quality to her voice forewarning a cascade of tears that are just waiting to defile her cheeks.
My throat cinches on a fractured inhale as my pulse rabbits against the thin skin of my wrist.
She just wants me to be safe. She’s acting like this out of fear. She’s acting like this because she has a chance to protect her only daughter, and nothing in this world could get her to let her guard down.
There’s an invisible chasm between the two of us—one she refuses to acknowledge. The longer we keep feeding it, the larger it grows. And at some point, a clumsy-footed lunge won’t be enough to traverse stratified layers of pain. Volcanic, molten.
“You won’t, Mom. I promise.”
A lie.
I already died with my sister that night.