Lorraine shrank back into the cushions, looking wide-eyed between me and our parents. My mother was casually perched on the coffee table, invading our space, while Dad was standing over by the fireplace mantle, deliberately avoiding my gaze. Instead, he was staring at the framed pictures lined up like sitting ducks on the mantle. We hadn’t printed new ones or replaced any frames—besides our yearly school portraits and my soccer camp pictures—since I was nine years old. Before Jamie left. We looked like a perfectly nice, happy family in all those photos.
What a lie.
“Molly, this isn’t your decision...” My mother lets out a heavy sigh, looking at me like I’m the most inconvenient daughter in the world.
I know she thinks I am. Of course she does. She wouldn’t have left me if she didn’t think so.
“It’s what your father and I think isbest for the family,” she concludes. A firm, unyielding paraphrase of how she started this nightmare of a conversation.Your father and I think it would be best for the family if you girls...
“We aren’t a family!” I snap. “Youare not my family.”
They made Lorraine go to her room so we could talk alone, and I was given the first of many tag-team “give me a break, Molly” lectures. And all it did was end with me locked in my room, letting myself cry hot, angry tears into my pillow.
I was beyond angry. Angry barely covered it. I was furious, irate, vexed, exasperated, indignant, irked, piqued, displeased, galled, and enraged.
No single word, or even a whole dictionary cluster of them, could properly capture the amount of venom I held for my mother right then.
And I had just as much reserved for my father, who was letting this happen. Just like he let her leave, he was letting her take us all the way to the bumfuck of potato island, without even pushing back.
What about my friends? School? Soccer?
The only arguments I was given was the age-old song and dance about making new friends and being able to do those things in Ireland. But it wouldn’t be the same, I knew it.
Why did things have to change? There’s nothing wrong with the way things have been.
But Hurricane Mom always seems to know exactly when to blow back into town and ruin everything that’s going good for me.
2
Stranger Danger
Molly
August, 2007
THE WORST PARTabout a dream is that it ends.
But the ending is the best part of a nightmare.
It’s a—what’s the word? Paradox? No, that’s not right. An oxymoron, maybe?
We learnt about it in English last year. It’s two things, like two ideas or words or something, that don’t seem like they’d go together. But when you shove them together, they make sense. Like bittersweet. Jumbo shrimp.
Deafening silence.
When I wake up in a cold sweat, I panic. I’m frightened by the unfamiliar shadows on the unfamiliar wall before the wave of reality crashes back over me. The same one that has come every morning for the past two weeks.
Right. I’m in Ireland.
I snuggle back under the stupid pastel-colored duvet, trying not to shiver. Not just because of the nightmare about being back at camp withhim, but because it is freezing as shit in this house. House is really a soft word. I’ve been calling it a Manor—because it basically is.
Mom comes from money, so the house itself is no surprise. I guess neither is the fact that she tried to be “nice” and decorate our rooms for us. Since she hasn’t really known me properly since grade school, my lavender-walled bedroom reflects as such. It has cream-colored furniture, and the only things on the shelves are stuffed animals and this little snowglobe with a penguin inside of it.
Lucky him. Trapped in a perfect world. I, however, didn’t get so lucky.
The only thing that hasn’t changed about me since I was a kid is soccer. Back at Barretts High, I had just been promised the captain’s armband for my upcoming junior year—which is now obviously void thanks to my mother moving ushere.
To me, soccer isn’t just a game or a hobby—it’s my life, and it’s my future. I’d do anything to play. Anything.