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Chapter 1 -
Family Portrait by:
Tegan L. Elliott
“In our family portrait
We look pretty happy
Let’s play pretend
Let's act like it comes naturally”
I
was sixteen. That horrible, inbetween age where you are no longer a child,
but not yet an adult. Everything that came with that age: confusion, fear,
insecurity, (and not a little rebelliousness) raged inside me and that day
it became too much to bear.
My shoulders hunched reflexively forward as an icy, winter wind blew at me,
stinging my eyes and ears with relentless cold. My fingers were shoved deep
into the pockets of my jeans, and my eyes gazed unseeingly at the pavement
underneath my feet. With each exhale, my breath came out as a silvery cloud
of smoke. How long had I been walking? I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t know
where I was going. My feet lead me, and I let them. My mind was otherwise
occupied.
“Well, you have to do something.” Even in my head, my mothers irritated tone
of voice lost none of its potency. “If not Clayton then ACC. SCAD is
expensive, but if you work on your art and photography portfolios you could
probably get some kind of scholarship. Have you thought any more about UGA?”
Ouggh. I just wanted her to stop and let me think things through; to slow
down and give me room to breathe a minute. I had two years before I would
have to make a decision and I didn’t want to think about college until it
was imperative.
“You can’t just slack off for the rest of your life,” she had told me. That
was about the time I stopped listening to her, although the conversation
continued without my input for another fifteen minutes.
I came to an old, wooden bench by the side of the road and sat down on it
hard. I stared blankly at my lap while my shoulders shivered from the cold.
I knew my mom was just trying to help. The logical part of me said that I
was being unreasonable and I should just give her a break. But I didn’t want
to listen to that part. Right now I wanted to be angry: angry at the world
for being such a horrible place, angry at my parents for anything and
everything, angry that I lived in a foster home, but mostly angry at myself.
My mind buzzed with all the things that had happened that day and years
before, and I was suddenly flooded with memories that I constantly struggled
to forget. Then my mind shut down. I closed my eyes and focused only on
inhaling and exhaling, swallowing my anger into nothingness, and pushing my
thoughts away until there was nothing left. “This is me,” I thought. “An
empty shell.”
“Where were you?” My mother turned away from the oven and leaned against it,
looking at me with an unreadable expression in her eyes. Her hair was pulled
back into a messy bun and loose tendrils of red hair fell down her back and
shoulders. She was in the process of making dinner.
“Outside.” I said. The tips of my fingers and ears burned from the
transition from cold air to warm. I’m sure my nose and cheeks were bright
red.
“You were gone a long time.” I bit back the response that came to my tongue,
(“Thank you Captain Obvious, for that brilliant assessment”) and shifted my
gaze to the floor, opting not to get in any more trouble tonight. “You
didn’t ask.” She crossed her arms over her chest and looked at me from
across the kitchen. She was right; I hadn’t asked if I could go outside. I
didn’t want to ask. I was sixteen. I shouldn’t have to. “I’d like you to
spend the rest of the night in your room.”
“And I’d like to win the lottery and move far, far away, but we can’t
always get what we want, can we?” Again, the words that came to my mind
were sarcastic and disrespectful. It was always that way, actually, but I
had learned to hold my tongue. This declaration of room restriction angered
me, but I didn’t show it. As I walked through the house, I saw the usual
scene and heard the usual noises: the younger boys running around fighting,
the older boys sitting around talking, and my father- oblivious to it all-
sitting in front of the computer.
It was a struggle not slamming my bedroom door as hard as I could, but I
managed to shut it with only a dull ‘thud’. I had my own room back then. It
was very small (I only call it a room because it’s too tedious to say, ‘the
hole in the wall with the bed and the dresser crammed into it’), but it was
mine and that room was my sanctuary. For as far back as I could remember I
was always sharing a room with someone and there was never any privacy. Even
when the line of duct tape was down the center of the room, fights still
occured about who’s stuff belonged to whom. But now I didn’t have to put up
with that. That night, like the one before, I threw myself onto the bed and
buried my face in my pillow.
“Dad, watch me! Look at this!” I tossed my bookbag unceremoniously to the
ground outside of Porterdale Elementary School and tripped over it in my
haste to get to the monkey bars. Jake “The Snake” Tanner had taught me just
that day how to do it. The rest of the second graders parents had already
come, picked up their kids, and gone home, but my dad and I stayed after
school like we usually did and played on the playground. I couldn’t wait for
him to see my new trick. “Are you watching?”
“Yes, I’m watching.” He reached down and picked up my tattered bookbag, then
sat down on the grass, squinting at me, trying to keep the afternoon sun out
of his eyes.
I beamed at him and jumped, reaching for the first bar, desperatley hoping I
would be able to catch it. I missed and fell to my hands and knees. “Oops.”
I said sheepishly. And then, mustering up what pride I had left, I stood and
dusted myself off.
“You okay?” My dad came forward some and patted my shoulder. “Here, let me
help you this time.”
“No!” I said firmly. “No, I can do it myself. Just watch me.” And I stomped
back to the monkey bars, a grim determination on my face as I climbed up to
the top step. I looked over my shoulder and saw that he was watching.
"Okay." I said to myself. "One, two, three!" I jumped and latched onto that
first bar with all I had. I grinned from ear to ear as I crossed all the
bars, taking two at a time. I dismounted and rushed up to my dad. “See? I
told you I could do it.” He smiled at me warmly and told me I had done very
well.
I was startled out of my daze by the harsh banging on the door and my mother
telling me that, “Dinner’s ready.”
I lifted my head up off the pillow. “What is it?”
“Cheese Soup.”
Blech. My stomach turned over just thinking about it. “I’m not
coming.” My mother’s version of cheese soup is probably not the kind you are
thinking of. The ingredience are as follows: half a block of cheese, a
handful of chicken bouilon cubes, and a very large pot of water to stew it
all in.
On good nights, she would throw some vegetables into the mix. What you end
up getting is a watery, slimy, fowl tasting liquid that, by the time it gets
dispensed into paper bowls and set out on the table, is also cold and only
mildly cheese flavored. Sometimes this was served with crackers, but because
there were fourteen of us and not that many crackers, we could only have a
few each.
I rolled over onto my side and brought my knees up to my chest. It didn’t
matter. I wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been
hungry. Over the past few weeks I had taken to skipping meals regularly,
sometimes going days without eating. I kept waiting for someone to come and
tell me that I didn’t look well, to fuss over me, to tell me that I was
getting too thin, to talk to me about eating disorders, but that didn’t
happen. Nobody noticed.....
Chapter 2
***
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Tegan L. Elliott
© Copyright 2006 Tegan L. Elliott (UN: ganlynde at
Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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