“Here!” I shout back. Yasmín and I pick up our pace, but not fast enough.
“Yasmín!” Connie wears her full-panic face as she runs toward us, not even noticing that her heels are digging holes in the neighbors’ lawns. “What happened? What are you doing out . . .” She blinks at me. “I thought you were upstairs.”
“No, uh.” I shake my head, confused. What is the point of storming dramatically out of the house if people don’t even realize you’ve done it? “No, I went for a walk.”
“I came to get her,” Yasmín explains. As soon as she says it, Connie’s lips press together and she yanks Yasmín’s hand out of mine and pulls her away. Like I’m contagious, or explosive.
“I didn’t know she would follow,” I mumble. “I wasn’t trying to . . .”
Connie sucks in her breath, so I shut up.
“I wasn’t going to get lost, Mama,” Yasmín whines. “I know how to walk around the block.”
“Go inside,” Connie orders, giving Yasmín a push toward the house. “Practice your flute. I’ll come talk to you in a minute.”
Yasmín sulks toward the front door. I try to slink in the same direction, but Connie’s glare holds me in place.
“What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t—”
“Clearly not,” Connie scoffs. “But your recklessness is not going to endanger my family, do you understand me?”
“We were within earshot the whole time!” I try to point out. “I’m sorry you got scared, but—”
“Do you understand?”
“—but, fuck, don’t you think you’re being a little bit irrational?”
The moment after I finish my sentence is cinematic. Freeze-frame. Mute. I watch in slow motion as twin atomic bombs detonate behind Connie’s eyes.
Like any good blockbuster hero, I turn and walk away from the explosion, because what else am I going to do? I head for my room. Leaving didn’t solve anything anyway.
It worked for Connie because people wanted her back.
5
“. . . disrespectful. She’s just getting more . . .”
I pile more pillows over my head, but I can’t keep from hearing another round of Connie and Dad’s discussion downstairs, an unfortunate side effect of my room being right above the kitchen.
Dad tries to calm things down like always, but I statements are no match for Connie’s ire. Her angry words blend together as Dad’s responses fade in and out. The same circle around and around: what I did, why I did it, and what to do about me.
“. . . believe you. I just mean it doesn’t sound like . . .” Giving in to temptation, I unbury my head to hear Dad say, “She’s cranky, sure, but . . . she’s quiet.”
Compared to Connie’s rant, that shouldn’t faze me, but my stomach drops. “Quiet.” Almost everyone who wrote in my senior yearbook—other than Melissa and Xiumiao—mentioned how quiet I am. Lots of “sweet” and “nice” mixed in for good measure. It’s not like they’re wrong; I am quiet and awkward, especially with new people. But I don’t feel quiet, or sweet, or even nice. Those are non-adjectives, words to describe someone with no personality.
I can live with my classmates not knowing me, but from Dad it hurts. I am quieter when I talk to him, quicker to snap at Connie, but I thought that meant we understood each other.
“Ellen,” Dad calls, voice suddenly loud and actually intended to reach me. “Can you come down for a minute?”
I drag my socks across the carpet all the way downstairs. Maybe I can generate enough static to give Connie a shock.
Dad sits at the kitchen table, a glass of water in front of him and the rest of the dinner dishes cleared away. He keeps shifting the glass to make new rings of water on the wooden table. Connie paces the kitchen, clearing clean dishes from the drying rack.
I sit in the chair across from Dad. We start our pre-lecture silence.
“Greg,” Connie interrupts. She nods and arches her eyebrows and all but sticks her hand up my dad’s ass to work his mouth herself.
“Right. Ellen, I—we think that your attitude needs adjusting.”
“We do?”
Dad sighs.
“It sounds like some things were said in anger,” Dad continues, “and that’s not helpful for anyone.”
“Sure, yeah.” I try to match Dad’s reasonable tone. “It’s not helpful to tell me that I’m endangering the family.”
Connie slams the cabinet closed and huffs, “Greg.”
“Ellen,” Dad says.
“Rocky!”
My humor is not appreciated.
“Ellen.” Dad repeats my name without a hint of irony. “Can you please try to be serious here? You can’t be running off into the night, or sneaking out of the house, or—”
“I told you, I didn’t . . .”
Dad holds up a hand, but I see his eyes flick to Connie and back to me. Maybe he still believes me, a little.
“Or whatever,” he finishes. “You can’t be acting like this.”
He’s looking at me like I’ve broken some kind of promise, but I never promised to keep the peace. He just expected me to.
Dad keeps staring like he’s waiting for something. Eventually he sighs. “I don’t want to be the bad guy here, but you’re not giving me a lot of options. Maybe you’re acting out because we haven’t set boundaries and limits. Maybe you need structure. Maybe this is what needs to happen.”
I want to shake Dad. Actually, I want to remind him that this is not effective communication, but since I’m not part of this conversation he’s having with himself, that’s tricky to do.
“It’s not unreasonable to expect you to pitch in around the house,” Dad says. “You obviously have a lot of free time since you didn’t find a job . . .”
“I tried! I’m trying!”
Connie crashes two plates into the cabinet, and I wince at the noise.
“Okay,” I say. I’m done with this night, with this lecture. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”
Dad nods and sips his water, which I hope means that my apology is accepted.
Except . . . “Greg?”
Dad sets his glass back down. “We also think . . .”