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I had to laugh.
There I was with the fuckin’ heater on, and she turned on the air conditioning.
We were not the same.
My Texas blood was just too rich for the Missouri weather.
I leaned back on my bed, clad in only a pair of sweatpants and underwear, and stared at the ceiling.
There was a large brown stain.
As in, it took up the entire ceiling.
I looked away toward the dividing door between our two rooms as the television next door turned on full blast.
Then my gaze moved to the brown notebook.
It looked old.
She’d had the thing for forever.
I picked the book up and stared at it.
She’d given me permission to read the diary, of course.
We’d given each other full disclosure when we’d had our twenty questions earlier. I knew more about her than I knew about my own brother at this point.
She promised to always be one hundred percent open and honest with me. And I’d given her the same.
She’d even given me the diary so I could hopefully understand her better.
So I could read what happened to her and she wouldn’t have to explain it.
How bad did it have to be for her to not speak about it at all?
I flipped it open and read the first entry.
The date at the top had me instantly doing math in my head.
She was fourteen years old when she wrote the first entry.
Dear new me,
I found out today that my mother never wants to speak to me again.
Apparently, I remind her too much of my father.
Which freakin’ sucks seeing as I would rather be like the devil himself than that asshole.
I called Mom after a particularly hard day.
She actually picked up, which should’ve been my first clue.
The second clue was when she actually listened to me talk. She didn’t say a word while I spilled my heart out about my day.
My day being this: get up, work my ass off cleaning up and setting up with the adult workers, and then finding out that I had the stomach flu which Keene had given me. When I’d told Dad that I couldn’t perform my act, he slapped me across the face and told me not to be such a little bitch. Needless to say, I performed, then spent the rest of the night puking. Simi gave me some fruit juice, but I couldn’t hold it down. Then when Dad found out that I didn’t help clean up for the night after my act, he grabbed me by the throat and threw me outside without shoes.
When I told Mom that I might have hypothermia and an infection in my feet, she suggested that I make friends with another adult that’s not my father.
Then she asked me to stop calling her, because every time she’s forced to talk to me, she’s reminded about how my father took everything away from her, and how I’ve been a burden on her since the day I was born.
I decided tonight after she told me that, I would no longer reach out to her.
The icing on the shit-tastic day was when Dad told me that my allowance this week wasn’t going to come because he had to clean up puke.
Fantastic.
Me.
Anger coursed through me at every single word I read.
Between her mother and father, I wanted to wrap her up in my arms and never let her go.
Was she loved at all while she was a child?
Was she ever able to be a child?
I skipped a few pages, not sure that I could handle reading anymore bad ones.
And thought I’d come to a good one.
Yet…nope. Not good at all.
The date indicated she was seventeen.
Dear future me,
One day, you’re going to look at this journal and remember that there were some good things about your life.
You’re going to realize that your sisters and brothers have your back.
But only because it’s easier to band together than to fight a foe that none of us see coming.
Dad got mad at Zip today.
Apparently, Zip was too slow getting the tigers where they needed to go.
When I walked in, it was to see him raising a hand to slap her in the back of the head.
And, since I’d been on the receiving end of a few of those slaps, I knew better than to let little Zip get clobbered by him.
I stepped into his path and took the hit.
When Zip turned around, it was to see me on the floor and Dad looking on angrily.
He’s never hit Zip before, so Zip had no clue that she’d been in the eye of the hurricane, so to speak.
She’s so naïve and thinks that this world is all perfect, when in fact, it couldn’t be further from the truth.
Dad sent her away, and then took the opportunity to take the rest of his frustration out on me.
I’m fairly sure that my arm might be broken. I have to hold it in a splint with a magazine and rubber bands.
