“Is that what you do? You analyze all my expressions?” she asked, amazed. “You judge my every word and do a critique behind my back?”
I shrugged and turned away. “Believe me, it’s not brain surgery,” I said, hiding my smile.
“What else have you criticized about me? Well? Let me have the whole bag of ugliness you’re so capable of filling and flinging in my direction before you leave us. We already know some of the distortions and lies about me that you spread, and don’t think I was ever unaware of what you had told your father about me. You never understood how important I’ve become to him and how much we trust each other now. Well? Go on. What else? What other things have you told my daughter? You might as well get it all out before you leave.”
I acted as if I didn’t hear her anymore. I knew that was one of the things she hated the most. A woman like Julie couldn’t tolerate being made to feel as if nothing she said or did mattered. She couldn’t stand being ignored. Her ego would stamp its feet, pull its hair, and scream.
The truth was that most of the time, I didn’t really listen to the things she said, even if I gave her the satisfaction of pretending I was listening. I didn’t do it only to her. I could shut people out as quickly as I could shut off a light, especially someone like her. I didn’t go into a trance. There was no faraway look in my eyes that would reveal that I was gone. It was almost impossible to know when I was listening and when I was not. Sometimes I imagined that I had two sets of ears and two brains. You know, like an extra hard drive in the computer that she thought was my brain? My mind had a zoom lens. I could just focus on some interesting thing and cut out the distraction.
But this morning, unfortunately, I did hear her every mean-spirited word. To be truthful, I welcomed her verbal whipping, even though she was certainly no one to accuse anyone else of being mean and selfish and had no right to assume the role of judge and jury. If there ever was someone who should be restrained by being without sin before casting the first stone, it was my father’s wife, Julie. It was lucky she didn’t have a twin. She would have smothered him or her in her mother’s womb just to be sure she would get all of her parents’ attention.
But despite what she thought, I wasn’t feeling particularly superior this morning. She was at me like this because she knew I was down and incapable of defending myself very much. That was usually when someone like her would pounce. I called them “coyote cowards.” They’re parasites that will only swoop down on the small, wounded, or handicapped. Otherwise, they hovered in the shadows, feeding their green faces on envy with hopes for your failures, waiting for you to become crippled and weaker, but too frightened to challenge or compete when you weren’t.
“I don’t know how you will live with yourself,” she continued. “If I were inside you, I’d scratch and kick my way out.”
I turned and glared at her. Despite what she claimed, I knew I could frighten her with a look like the one I had now. I had practiced it facing a mirror. It was a look I often employed at school. My eyes were like darts. I had the face of someone capable of sending curses out like e-mails.
Fear began to overtake her in small ways. She embraced herself quickly, swallowed hard, and took another step back.
“At last, we agree about something,” I said. “If you were inside me, I’d rip you out. You know, like a bloody cesarean section?”
I held up my hands as though they had just been in a mother’s womb and were dripping with blood down my arms.
She gasped, turned quickly, and marched out, holding her head high. She was always worried about what she looked like, even when she was alone and wouldn’t see anyone else. However, frustrating and defeating her didn’t give me as much satisfaction as she thought it had. I had long ago given up on baiting her and making her look foolish in front of my father, hoping it would open his eyes. I certainly had nothing to gain from it today. It was far too late, too late for many things. I was soaked in regrets.
I stood by the window in my bedroom, looked out toward the Pacific Ocean, and thought it should be gray and rainy today, at least. That would fit my mood, everyone’s mood. I didn’t pay much attention to the weather. Maybe that was because we lived in Southern California and took beautiful days for granted, or maybe it was because I spent most of my time inside, my face in a book or at a computer screen. I wasn’t one of those people who stopped to smell the roses. We actually had beds of them out front, along with other flowers. If I stopped, it wouldn’t be to enjoy the scent and beauty of anything but instead to examine the flowers, looking for some microscopic genetic change. I couldn’t help it. As my teachers were fond of saying, and which was probably true, it was part of my DNA.
Moments after Julie had stopped bitching and left, I heard someone behind me and thought she might have returned to say something else that was even nastier, something that had crawled into her clogged brain, a brain I imagined infested with little spiders weaving selfish, hateful webs of thought. This time, I would face her down more vehemently, not with calm sarcasm. And I wasn’t going to stop with just bitch, the one profane word she permitted herself to use, at least in my and her daughter’s presence, but with what she hated—cold, dirty language. When I spit back at her, she would rush to cover her ears as if my words would stain her very soul.
However, when I turned, I saw it was my thirteen-year-old stepsister, Allison. That surprised me. I was sure her mother had told her to stay away from me, especially this morning. She probably told her I had done her enough damage, and maybe, like Typhoid Mary, I would contaminate her further. “Stay in your room, and keep the door locked until she’s gone,” she surely had said. She was unaware of the short but honest and sweet conversation Allison and I had had the night before. Her mother was on her this morning, however. She wanted nothing to happen to change anything now.
Allison did look very nervous sneaking in here, but, like last night, she looked very sad, too, sad for both of us. She stood there staring at me.
“What is it, Allison? I thought we said our good-byes last night.”
“I know, but I remembered something. My father gave me this the last time I saw him,” she said, holding up a silver pen. “He said it was a special pen, the ones the astronauts used in space. You could write upside down or sideways with it, everything. I wanted to give it to you to use.” She stepped forward to hand it to me.
“You want to give it to me? Why? Do you think I’ll be upside down or sideways?”
“No,” she said, smiling. “It’s just a very special pen.”
I looked at it. On the surface, it didn’t look like anything terribly unusual, but I did make out the word NASA.
“Please take it,” she said, waving it. She looked as if she would cry if I didn’t.
“Your father gave it to you? Are you sure you want to give it to me?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The words you’ll write with it will be better than the words I’ll write.”
The way she said the obvious truth, with no self-deprecation or self-pity, made me laugh. In some ways, Allison was already head and shoulders above her mother.
I took the pen.
“Okay. Thanks. Who knows, maybe I will hang from my feet in my closet when I do my homework up there. Some people think I’m a vampire.”