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ThirteenYearsOld
Sitting on the hot asphalt, I leaned my back against the low brick of the roof, gazing over the Manhattan skyline as I tried to blink away the last of my tears.
It was such bullshit. Between my parents and my brother, I was constantly getting in trouble for shit that I didn’t think was a big deal. This time it was my makeup, my mother telling me I lookedgarishandghastlybefore sending me to my room to wash it off.
It was just a little eyeliner; why did they always get so worked up about shit like that? The other girls at school all wore way more makeup than I did, and their parents never seemed to have any issue with it.
Kicking one boot against the planter before me, I tipped my head back up to the sky, blowing out a breath and trying to get myself together. My parents hated my tears as much as they hated my makeup, so going back downstairs to our apartment looking like I’d been crying would only get me into more trouble.
Wanting to distract myself, I stood, dusting off my denim shorts and looking over my small corner of the roof. The few pots my father had allowed me to get—mostly to shut me, up I guessed—were coming along nicely. My lips turned up in a half smile as I looked over my latest addition, a tomato plant. I’d picked it up at a corner stall a few weeks ago, a sickly-looking thing that was more brown than green, but I’d paid for it and brought it home, setting it up in a sunny spot on the roof and tending to it with care every day. I’d researched how to look after a tomato plant, what fertilizer to use and how much to water, and since then it had more than doubled in height and I could see several places where I’d have flowers in just a few days.
I’d been looking after plants for a few months now, starting with a fern that my mother had gotten as part of a gift basket from some charity event or another. She’d walked in the apartment door and immediately thrown it in the trash, not caring one bit that it was still alive, that it needed looking after if it was going to thrive and grow and become the best that it could be.
When I’d found it there, my heart broke for it, and I’d pulled it out, taking it to my room and caring for it, talking to it like the internet said you should do. I even played music for it when I went to school.
I’d loved that little fern, and I just knew that it loved me; the way it grew strong told me it did. So it was no wonder I was devastated when I’d gotten back from school one day to find it missing. When I asked my mom, she said she’d thrown it out. That she didn’t want something so dirty in our house, bringing in bugs and making a mess.
She’d been mad that I had kept the fern.
But she was furious when I’d cried over it.
When I’d tried to retrieve it again, my mother had grabbed me by the wrist—as she often did—yanking me away from the trash bin and hauling me back to my room, leaving bruises in her wake. I’d spent the rest of the night crying in my bed, cradling my sore wrist and missing my fern.
A few days of me moping around the house led to her calling me melodramatic and desperate for attention.
A few weeks had her calling in reinforcements in the form of my father.
My father was a busy man; he’d been working hard at building his business, making connections out of country, so he was rarely ever home. When he was, his time in the apartment mostly consisted of him hiding away in his office, making calls and ignoring the family all together. My mom did whatever she could to please him—which translated to keeping Dom and me out of his way—and she always tried to keep whatever trouble I’d managed to get into from him.
I never really knew why she did that; I guess because any time I failed at something, she saw it as a personal failure of hers, like she wasn’t a good mom if I wasn’t the best at everything.
Who knows why she did what she did? All I knew was that if she was bringing it up to my dad, she was seriously out of ideas about how to handle me.
One night, while I was laying on my bed listening to the saddest music I could find—My Chemical Romance; man, the early 2000s had been the best time for music—when my father barged into my room, his face like thunder.
“What the hell is this your mother is telling me? That you’re spending all your time crying? Crying, Enrica?”
Scrambling up on the bed, I tugged out my ear buds, blinking stupidly at my dad as he stood in my doorway, raging.
“What?” I asked dumbly.
“Your mother says that you’re being a brat. What the hell is the problem, Enrica?”
I could see my brother standing in the hall, smirking at me. Dom loved it when I was in trouble because it meant he wasn’t. He did everything he could to suck up to my father, emulating him as much as possible, and as a result, he was daddy’s favorite. A good little robot ready to do exactly what he was told, and I hated him for it.
“There’s no problem,” I lied, not wanting this conversation to go on any longer.
“There has to be, otherwise your mother would not have bothered me with this.”
Bothered. Like my feelings, my broken heart, were nothing but an inconvenience to my family.
I bit the inside of my cheek, doing my best to keep my face from showing how much those words had hurt me, and this time I answered honestly.
“I had a plant. A fern. She threw it out when I was at school.”
“A plant?” my father asked, his confusion evident on his face. “All this fucking drama over a plant?” Rubbing a hand over his head, he turned, and for the first time I could see that my mother was also in the hall, next to Dom, watching me get scolded with a satisfied smile on her face.
“I told you it was ridiculous,” she said primly, and I rounded my shoulders even more, trying to withdraw from her presence as much as I could. She always made me feel like I was a blight on our family, never more so than when I was in trouble.
