2024

It was a frigid Friday in a frigid Massachusetts winter, snow clumping along bare deciduous branches and muddying along the banks of roads. It was Jamie’s sixteenth birthday, and he wanted an ice cream cake.

For months, my older brother had been in the midst of a severe relapse, spending his days confined to his bed, too fatigued to walk, to stand, to even watch Netflix. With eating a near-impossible task, he subsisted largely on Canada Dry ginger ale sipped through a bendy-necked straw.

I bought him a minifridge from Target so he could keep the little green cans right there in his room, rather than have to ask my mom to fetch them for him from the kitchen every time. I sheathed the minifridge, a little red plastic thing decorated with a cartoon polar bear holding a coke bottle, in polka-dotted wrapping paper. I used scotch-tape donuts to attach my handmade card, whose body concluded with “Hope you have a good one!” – a line my brother and I jokingly included in all our epistolary exchanges, precisely because of its vacuousness.

As my mom drove me to school that morning, she informed me of her dessert acquisition. “I got Jamie an ice cream cake,” she announced, eyes on the road. “You will eat it. As an act of celebration.”

“Um, no thanks,” I mumbled.

“This isn’t a negotiation.” 

“Mom, I don’t want the cake.” 

She slammed the side of the steering wheel. “I’m so sick of your ‘healthy eating’ bullshit!” 

“Mom! It’s not about that! I literally won’t be able to digest it!” Yes, part of my resistance did stem from my fear of demons: processed sugar and chemicals and fat. But mainly, it was the lactose intolerance. Did she forget that I had spent the majority of my childhood in unbearable gastrointestinal pain, spending hours at a time crying on the toilet, which had only abated when I stopped eating dairy?

“If you want to show that you’re part of this family, you will eat the cake.”

Fuming, I said nothing, scrambling immediately out of the passenger seat as she pulled up to the main entrance. 

“Mom really wants me to eat your cake tonight for some reason,” I confided in Jamie upon my return home from school. “Do you care if I eat it or not?”

He shrugged, indifferent. “If you don’t, just leaves more for me.” 

“Get plates and utensils,” my mom commanded after dinner, gesturing toward the white cardboard box thawing on the kitchen counter. Oh shit. Here it goes. My stomach in knots, I returned to the dining room with two cerulean-blue plates and two little spoons with ridged handles.

“Where’s yours?” she demanded.

“Oh I’m, uh – I’m not having any,” I replied with feigned casualness, my voice an octave too high. I turned quickly, intending to retreat to my room. 

The slamming of her fist on wood was a bomb detonated. She shoved her chair into the table with such force I feared both would splinter. “If you’re not having any,” she seethed, dripping with vitriol, “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE! MOVE OUT! CALL YOUR FATHER AND TELL HIM I DON’T WANT YOU ANYMORE.”

I stood there, eardrums ringing, frozen and open-mouthed, unable to think. Shaking and stunned, I wandered to my bedroom and shut the door. Before I even had a chance to catch my breath, the door burst open, knob violently colliding with wall. Jamie’s quiet sobs echoed through the hallway. 

“SEE! LOOK WHAT YOU DID!” she howled. “YOU’RE RUINING HIS BIRTHDAY!”

I snapped. For the first time in my life, I decided to fight back. “I’m ruining his birthday? I’m the one who got him a present! I’m the one who wrote him a card! What do you fucking want from me?”

 She waved her hands in a frenzy. “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE! GET OUT!”

“I FUCKING HATE THIS PLACE ANYWAY!” I lobbed back. 

“SHUT UP, BOTH OF YOU!” Jamie shrieked from the dining room. 

I slipped past my mom and raced to the family room, at the opposite end of the house. Finding refuge in a crevice between the couch and the wall, I buried my face into a pillow and screamed until my throat was raw, lungs gasping for air in the space between sobs. Drained and dizzy, I huddled into fetal position, hiccupping and choking on my tears.

After half an hour, I heard footsteps approach my balled-up body. I lifted my head. My mom towered over me, her hand outstretched, and I dared to hope.

“Give me your phone,” she spat, ice lacing her voice. My heart broke once more. “You’re never getting it back, just so you know.” As she walked away, leaving me sniffling on the floor, my resolve hardened. I scrambled into the kitchen and uncovered our landline phone, dusty and decrepit from years of neglect. With the receiver clutched to my ear, each ring a song of uncertainty, I closed my eyes and did something akin to praying.

“Hello?” said the muffled voice of my father. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I cried, and I told him, and he probably didn’t understand what I was saying because I was crying so hard. 

“Okay, okay. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” Thank you.

I tiptoed back to my room, then flung open my closet doors and began indiscriminately freeing articles of clothing from their protesting hangers, shoving them hastily into my rainbow-striped suitcase. When the suitcase bulged and balked, zippers putting up a fight, I retrieved a duffel bag and stuffed it full too. I had no plan. I didn’t know how long it would be until I came back. Half my closet would be adequate for forever, right?

“Where do you think you’re going?” 

I jumped. Swallowing, I kept my gaze trained on the dark pink carpet. “To Dad’s. Like you told me to.” 

My mother’s face twisted in shocked outrage – that I had the audacity to heed her venemous order literally, rather than repent and beg for her to let me stay. “Just be prepared to never come back,” she hissed.

The doorbell rang. I was saved. 

My mom intercepted him so she could have the first word. As I stumbled toward the door, weighed down by my distended bags, I overheard fragments: “...she thinks she did nothing wrong…I need to smooth over her rough spikes like the ocean smooths a rough stone…it’s a matter of principle…”

I recounted the full story to my dad as I stared out the car window into the night, its blackness interrupted by neon streaks of garish illuminated store signs. When I finished, he shook his head and sighed. 

“See? This is why I divorced her.”

I snorted. Thanks Dad, so helpful, I wanted to say. You really have excellent taste in women, Dad, I wanted to say. 

The weekend passed by in an anxious blur. My dad urged me to go back – it would be too hard for him to drive me half an hour to and from school every day. Using his phone, I called my mom twice and texted a lengthy apology, hoping to clear the air before my return. No response.

Sunday night, cold tears carved salty stinging trails into my face and pooled in the hollows of my ears as I laid in bed gasping for breath, willing the sun not to rise. 

Monday morning, I awoke in a shivering sweat, chest compressed by a heavy kettlebell of panic, wishing I could disappear forever beneath my blankets.

The sun rose. My dad took me to school.

I drifted from class to class like a specter, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. With each passing period, the terror grew. I could not go home. I was not safe at home. Not that I thought I was at risk of any physical harm – besides the spankings in childhood that would leave me unable to sit for hours, my mother had never laid a hand on me. But when things got like this, my head would always pound with a throbbing refrain: I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. A violent distress would well up in my gut, a fear that she would drive me so mad that I would throw myself suddenly into oncoming traffic. A fear that the tension itself might materialize into a pair of grasping hands and squeeze the breath from my lungs. 

Mia’s house became my temporary refuge. We both attended a youth leadership development program at 7:00 p.m. on Mondays at the public library. Her mom said of course I could come over, of course they would feed me, of course they would give me a ride.

We lay on the floor of her lavender-walled bedroom studying for our upcoming physics test, and I tried to calm my turbulent mind with yawn-inducing friction coefficients. But then my laptop pinged.

“Go home,” the long-awaited text from my mother read. “We’ll talk about it when I get back.”

No. I can’t go back. My palms turned clammy and my heart began to stampede. I can’t go back. I can’t go back. 

I decided to pretend I never saw it. 

Waiting for the clock to strike seven, Mia and I settled into an enclave of clustered couches, cozily nestled between towering bookshelves teeming with colorful spines. We gossiped about who was dating whom and how Dr. Kovalevsky was so scary and the tennis tryouts that awaited us in the spring. 

My laptop pinged again. From Dad: “Please respond if you see this message.”

Another ping, this one from Jamie: “Where are you?”

“Wait what,” I texted back to my dad.  

From Dad: “Your mom said that you are not home!!”

From Dad: “Your mom called the police.” 

I stood trembling, staring blankly out the glass pane of the library’s front door. The blur of flashing blue and red approached closer, and closer, until a slender, uniformed white man loomed above me, scribbling intensely into his notebook. No domestic abuse here, sir. Yes sir, I’m sure. I smiled widely and nodded as he deemed the whole ordeal a miscommunication.

I was shocked when, minutes later, I saw my mother hurrying toward the library entrance. She clutched a paper plate holding four misshapen falafels I had cooked earlier that week. Tears glimmered in the corners of her eyes. 

“Baby, I was so worried about you,” she choked, hugging me tightly. Then she stepped back and looked at me sternly. “Don’t you ever do that again.” 

I nodded, crying now too.

“Never forget that I always love you, no matter what.” 

I sniffled loudly. “I love you too, Mommy.”

We stood beneath the library parapet, silent but for our muffled tears, lost in each other’s arms. After a long while, she finally pulled away.

“Okay, go to your library thing now. I’ll pick you up at eight-thirty.”

As her figure receded down the paved walkway, my insides quaked with relief. It’s over. I can breathe now.

“What do you have to say about today?” my mom demanded as I swung open the car door, her voice like dangling icicles threatening to break loose. 

I was taken aback by the suddenness of her transformation, then exasperated at myself for my surprise. You really thought it was over, just like that? So stupid. So gullible. I stared silently at my hands. 

“Hmm? Answer me! Tell me what you did wrong!”

“I – I’m sorry I didn’t tell you where I was…?” I mustered, weakly. 

“Sorry means nothing to me. Do you have no moral compass? Do you have no sense of right and wrong?” she exploded. “Hitler thought he was doing the right thing.” This was news to me: I hadn't realized eschewing ice cream was equivalent to genocide.

“You – you never replied to my texts or calls,” I whispered. 

She laughed bitterly. “Do you think I live my life to reply to your texts?”

My head shook vigorously.

I stared out the window while she glared at the road, gears turning and turning in her head. “You will write me an apology letter analyzing your wrongdoings,” she finally proclaimed. “Five pages. Eleven-point font, single-spaced, one-inch margins.”

​

I sank down into the passenger seat, wishing desperately it would swallow me.​​

​

In the ensuing days, mother essentially stopped speaking to me. I found myself hiding, desperate to evade the searing venom of her silence. I tiptoed across the creaking wooden planks of the hallway and slid the printed and stapled papers under the door of her bedroom in the quiet of night. 

I would ultimately write three versions. She excoriated each for inadequate sincerity, insufficient remorse. A merciless professor demanding revisions on an impossible assignment.

​

“Not good enough. This is no apology – you’re just trying to appease me. You take no real responsibility for what you did wrong. And I told you single-spaced. You never fucking listen.”