Oh.
Without logging in, the laptop’s wallpaper is blurred, but I don’t need a clear image to know what it is.
The vague outline of a man in a black tux and a woman in a flowing white gown fills the screen. It’s obviously my father in the photograph, but that isn’t Blythe with him. The long waves of black hair make that painfully evident.
The portrait of this very photograph used to hang in the main hallway just off the foyer.
It’s my parents’ wedding day.
Jase also hands me another photograph from the bureau. It shows a group of kids no older than ten, but I still spot my mom immediately.
Because she looks an awful lot likeme.
Unlike the pictures of her from high school, Mom obviously hasn’t gone through puberty here, showcasing familiar gangly limbs and rail-thin body. Add in the long curtain of black hair and light blue eyes, and the resemblance is uncanny.
“If she wasn’t such a bitch, I’d actually feel bad for her,” says Jase.
I startle, whirling around to face him.
When he sees my expression, he laughs, taking the frame back. “I mean about your stepmom. Not only did she marry a guy who never got over his first wife, but their youngest child is a spitting image of his dead spouse, serving as a constant reminder of what he lost. If you’re petty enough, you might just come to resent that child.”
For the next several hours,I try to mull over what Jase has shown me. As much as I want to say I can’t reconcile any of it with what I’ve experienced…I find that Jase is onto something. Sure, your parents don’t treat you the way they should all the time, but the more I ask him, the sicker I become.
When I was twelve, Blythe grounded me for two weeks after she said I’d been going through too much shampoo and conditioner in the shower. She expected me to use the same amount as my sister, despite Vanessa’s hair being only half the length of mine. And Blythe told me if I didn’t make the necessary changes, she’d cut my waist-length hair off to above the shoulders.
My hair was (and is) very important to me. It’s always been the perfect curtain to hide behind, and the thought of not having it is enough to make me break out into a cold sweat.
Blythe gave me specified bottles and marked the level after every shower to make sure I wasn’t refilling it with the communal bottles everyone else used. So I either had to skip hair washes—which was just gross—or I had to find an alternative.
What did I do?
For the past three years, I’ve had to skimp ever so slightly on my lunch at school to save up for visits to the drugstore, where I buy what I need and then smuggle the hair products into thehouse. They’re currently stashed away in an old shoe box at the bottom of my closet.
To my horror, when I told Jase this, his expression told me something I should have already known:
That…
Is.
Not.
Normal.
Neither is flinching whenever there’s a loud noise, assuming it’s your stepmom ready to yell at you.
Or having your stepmom call an actress a “butterface,” only then to say that you remind her of that actress ten minutes later.
Or having your stepmom belittle you for crying, because it’s a sign of “immaturity.”
It’s not even normal for a child to learn where all the loose floorboards are in the house, because if you get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and you so much as make a peep, you’ll get yelled at in the morning and be blamed for your stepmom “not getting any sleep.”
By the time evening arrives, I’m practically shaking with the worst kind of cocktail: anxiety and adrenaline. All I can do is lie in wait for my dad to get home, praying I can talk to him before Blythe does.
Unfortunately, Mr. Walker and his wife arrive first. It takes another ten minutes for Dad to arrive, and though I’m right at the top of the staircase in the foyer, my stepmom greets him at the front door before he even reaches out to open it.
Blythe whispers something to him, and after he introduces himself to their dinner guests, he follows my stepmom back into the kitchen.
Crap.
