The Way I Used to Be

THE SUMMER TOOK FOREVER to get here and now it’s here and it’s just flying. Mostly, I’ve spent the days thinking a lot about what Mara said to me. About how I was hiding. How I could be beautiful if I would just stop. Mostly, I’ve spent the whole summer trying to figure how you go about not hiding when that’s all you’ve ever done your entire life. Caelin wasn’t around. He was taking some kind of special summer sessions. It was actually better that way anyway. Because it meant Kevin would stay away too.

“Mom?” I use my I-want-something-and-I’m-such-a-good-girl-so-please-hear-me-out voice. “I was wondering . . .”

“Mm-hmm?” she murmurs, barely caffeinated, not lifting her eyes from the sales ads.

“What do you want and how much does it cost?” Dad interferes, trying to hijack the conversation.

“What, what do you need?” she asks, finally looking across the kitchen table at me.

I slowly remove my glasses.

“Don’t you think I look better without my glasses, Mom?”

“You look pretty no matter what.” She’d already gone back to the paper. Obviously that approach was not going to work.

“Okay, so school’s starting in what, like, three weeks or something, and I was thinking—I mean, well—Mara got contacts and she thinks—I mean, I think—I think that—”

“All right, Minnie, come on, just spit it out.” Dad makes this rolling, speed-it-up gesture with his un-coffee-cupped hand.

“Okay. So, um, I was wondering if I could get contacts too?”

Mom and Dad share a look, like, Oh God, why can’t she just leave us alone?

“They’re really not that much more expensive,” I try.

“I don’t know, Edy,” Mom says, nose scrunched, not wanting to disappoint me, because after all, I really am a very good girl. Except for the small detail about me smoking every single day with Mara, and blowing all the back-to-school money they gave me to buy too many clothes at the mall and makeup and hair products, but not school supplies, like they wanted. Other than that, I really am good.

“But, please. Please, please, please. I look like such a dork. I look like a loser. I look like I’m in band!”

“You are in band,” Dad says, grinning, missing the point, of course.

“But I don’t want to look like I’m in band.”

“Oh, well, now I see.” Dad rolls his eyes. Mom smirks. He shakes his head in that condescending way he always does whenever he thinks someone is an idiot.

“Mom?”

Her stock response to any and everything: “We’ll see.”

“So no?” I clarify.

“No, I said we’ll see,” she repeats sternly.

“Yeah, but that means no, right? This is so unfair! Caelin can get all kinds of new stuff and I ask for one thing, one thing, and you say no!”

“Caelin got new stuff when he left for college,” Dad says, as if Caelin went off to go cure leprosy. “He needed all those things. You don’t need contacts. You want them, you don’t need them.”

“I do need them!” I can feel the tears beginning to simmer behind my eyes. “And just so you know,” I continue, my voice falling in on itself, “I’m not wearing my glasses anymore even if you don’t get me contacts!” I throw my glasses onto the table and then I stomp off to my room.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, she has to start first thing in the morning?” I hear Mom say just before I slam my bedroom door shut.

And I hear fragments of Dad’s response: “Jesus . . . melodramatic . . . girl . . . spoiled rotten.”

Spoiled? I’m spoiled? I never ask for a thing! I never even ask for attention. That’s it. The last goddamn straw. I fling my door open and march back out there, bracing myself with both hands against the kitchen table. I open my mouth, not caring what comes out, for once not having a plan.

“I hate you both!” I growl through my teeth. “Sorry, but I’m not Caelin! Sorry I’m not Kevin! Sorry you’re stuck here all alone with me. But I’m stuck here with you too!” The words just tumble out one after the other, louder and louder.

They are stunned. They’re shocked. I had never so much as looked at them the wrong way.

Mom slams the paper down onto the table, speechless.

“Don’t you dare talk to your mother and me that way ever again!” Dad stands up, pointing his finger in my face. “Do you understand? Go to your room!”

“No!” The word claws its way up my throat. My vocal cords ache immediately, never having achieved this volume before.

“Now!” he demands, taking a step.

I stomp away, my feet like bricks. I slam my bedroom door again as hard as I can, then press my ear against it. My chest heaves with frantic breaths as I listen.

“All right, Conner,” I hear Mom say, her voice low, trying to whisper. “We have got to do something—this is crazy. What are we supposed to do?”

“It’s hormones, Vanessa. She’s a teenager. They’re all the same. We were like this too when we were her age,” he says, trying to calm her down.

“I never would have said ‘I hate you’ to my parents,” she argues.

“Yes, you would have. And I’m sure you did. And so did I. And so did Caelin, if you remember. They never mean it.”

Except maybe I do mean it. A little, at least. Because I let them push me around just like I let everyone push me around. I let them make me into a person who doesn’t know when to speak the hell up, a person who gives up control over her life, over her body, over everything. I do what they tell me to do, what everyone tells me to do. Why didn’t they ever teach me to stand up for myself?

Even though they don’t know what happened, what he did to me, they helped to create the situation. In a way, they allowed it. They let it happen by allowing him to be here and making me believe that everyone else in the entire world knows what’s good for me better than I do. If I hate them, I hate them for that. And I hate Caelin, too. Except I hate him because his loyalties are with Kevin, not me. I know that. Everyone does. Especially Kevin.

And what about Mara? Why couldn’t she be the kind of friend who would just get it out of me? Why do I feel like after all this time I still can’t tell her, that even she wouldn’t believe me, or that if she did, that she would somehow blame me? Why do I feel so completely alone when I’m with her sometimes? Why do I feel like, sometimes, I have no one in the entire world who knows me in even the slightest, most insignificant way?

Why do I feel like—God, it makes me sick to admit—that sometimes I feel like the only person in the world who knows me—really, really knows me—is Kevin? That’s sick. Demented sick. Like, I-should-be-locked-up sick. But he’s the only one who knows the truth. Not only the truth about what happened, but the truth about me, about who I really am, what I’m really made of. And that gives him tyranny over everything in this world.

Most of that hate, though, I save for me. No matter what anyone else did or didn’t do, it was ultimately me who gave them permission. I’m the one who’s lying. The coward too afraid to just stop pretending.

This is bigger than contacts. It’s not over the clarinet, Environmental Club, FBLA, French Club, Lunch-Break Book Club, Science Club, yearbook, or any of the other things I had checked off the list in my head, things in which I was no longer going to participate. It’s over my life, my identity, my sanity—these are the things at stake.

When I come out of my bedroom later that night, I force myself not to apologize to them. Because I desperately want to, want their approval—crave it. But I have to start standing up for myself. And it has to start with them, because it was with them that it began.

The next week I have my contacts. It is my first small victory in the battle over control of my life. No more Mousegirl. No more charades. No more baby games.