Innocent and naive
THE KITCHEN FELT TOO?full when I went to grab breakfast the next morning. It was early and Dad was drinking his coffee with a newspaper spread out in front of him, while mom clinged and clanged with about anything in—and out of—her reach. Henry, already energised like a Duracell bunny, ran circles around the island, chasing Drixie for whatever naughty plan he had for the cat this time. I wished he’d leave her alone, and I bet she thought the same when she bolted past me and slipped through my ajar bedroom door.
“There you are, Haylee,” Mum said, not looking up from scraping sandwiches together, while Dad gave me a sweet smile. I cringed from the expectation of where this would go. “We made plans with Beckleys this weekend so I’ll need you to babysit on Saturday. You weren’t here last night so I decided it for you.”
I stopped in my tracks, flipping my gaze to my brother, who now stood just outside my bedroom, trying to coax the cat out. Giving up, he prepared himself to tiptoe into my room, thinking I wouldn’t see it.
“Henry!” I shouted. “You know the rules. Get your filthy feet out of my room!”
He flinched, yet did what I told him to. Once he dragged his feet back into the kitchen, I turned my attention to Mum. She was looking at me with a furrowed brow that said, ‘be nice to your brother,’ without her lips needing to move.
“I can’t.” I set my jaw and opted to stay firm in my decision.
Mum’s eyebrows furrowed even further as she took in my rebellious stance. “What do you mean, you can’t? As long as you’re living under this roof you are expected to contribute. We’ve talked about this.”
“Are you not familiar with the term? It’s when something isn’t possible for the person saying it.”
“Don’t get cross with me, young lady.”
I sighed and my shoulders drooped slightly. “I have plans, I am moving out this weekend.”
Glen and I hadn’t really decided whether it would be this weekend or the next, but I could arrange it in two days if it meant getting out of here sooner.
“Moving out?” My mum asked, incredulous. “That’s a bit short notice, don’t you think?”
“Just like your request to babysit,” I retorted. I only said ‘request’ because I didn’t like the thought of her ordering me around. “Did you ever stop to consider that I, too, have plans?”
“Not very often, you don’t,” my dad chirped in helpfully, and I gave him a side-eye. “At least not something that can’t be rearranged.”
“You go rearranging your plans this time,” I huffed.
Mum didn’t even pay attention to the side conversation and continued as if Dad hadn’t said anything at all. “Yes, but moving out? Shouldn’t that come with a longer notice than two days?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “You know I’ve been looking around for flats.”
“So nice of you to find something so quickly,” Dad said, “but can’t you postpone it until next weekend? What’s the rush?”
Nah, nope, not gonna happen. What’s the rush, he asked? It was born from the suffocating feeling growing in my lungs the longer this conversation kept going. The way they treated me as if I was still a child because, at twenty-five, I was still stuck under their roof, unable to escape their judgement. It was the fact that I had offered to contribute to the household with my hard earned money, but the only currency they took was the hours wasted looking after Henry, or cleaning after Henry, or worse yet, listening to how it somehow still wasn’t good enough.
Having to arrange my life around their expectations of me and not my own wants and needs wasn’t how I planned on spending my entire adulthood. Especially since I’d already failed to become an attorney like my mother always wanted for me. Instead, I’d fallen in love with dancing and broken her heart. Now she tried to get me under her command in every other way possible.
She’d stopped packing sandwiches all together to give me a hawk-eyed stare. “When did you get the confirmation? Is it closer to the studio?”
“Yesterday,” I said because it was true, “and it is not really closer, but it is easier to get to.”
To get to the dance studio from here, I had to take a bus, change twice, and worry about the arrival times. From Glen’s, I could take the Tube, even if it was a twenty-minute trip and a five-minute walk thereafter. The peace of mind it would come with surely was worth it, wasn’t it?
Mum’s mouth fell open before she screeched, “Yesterday? Honey, no respectable broker makes transactions that quickly. Are you sure this isn’t a scam? Did you pay already? Let me have a look at the contract.”
“If it’s not closer, hon, maybe you should stay here longer and find something better suited,” Dad chirped. Having discarded his newspaper, he was now sipping his coffee.
