Special: selling the house

I stayed up late helping my mom. Real late, 'till well after two-thirty: long after the other kids, I was working. I was doing things that needed to be done. Mom stayed up much later, all the way until four a.m. It's not that our house is destroyed, it's just that mom wants it absolutely perfect. Her standards--unlike normally--are very high for a showing. Why show anyone anything but the best of your house? I guess that makes sense.

This morning, my mom wasn't happy. By 'wasn't happy,' what I really mean was livid. She listed a fault of everything I'd worked for the previous night (into the morning), she snarled how exhausted she was, did we think this was a joke, why were we fucking with her life, ruining everybody's life, and so on, getting louder and more angry all the time; especially since Taylor continued to be so obnoxiously loud-mouthed. I tried to get her to quiet down, 'cuz that's what you oughta do when your momma starts to get angry; she needs to vent it out. If she can't, she'll chuck a whisky bottle at you, like Emmie Hubbard in A Northern light.

So when Taylor wouldn't shut it, mom started screaming, pounding the frail hands against the car.

There were no words to it.... it was just a scream, an ear-splattering blat of anger, just in case we missed it, just in case we could ever have mistaken that she was, in some way, proud of us; in case we'd believed the illusion that it was just stress from her multitde of life-tasks. No, no such kindness from my mother. My mom made sure to impress that her destroyed life was our fault. If we didn't like that very obvious fact, well, "after June 12th, I [she] didn't care what [we] you do, you[we] can get the flying fuck out for all I [she] cared."

I feel like my mom doesn't want me, that if I--the spectacular evidence of the fuck-up that was her first marriage--wasn't around; well, her life would be great. Just in case I didn't feel useless, just in case you've forgotten that I'm a fucking freak, I could feel what my mother felt.

I could feel what my mother felt.

Moreover, I absorbed as much of it as I could, with no thoughts to my own self-regard. I feel sick with that now, especially since that emotion is smothered by my mother's hate and my own love.... my poor, poor endless love, churning around inside me like a river in a hurricane. More than anything else right now, I don't wnat to be alone.

She's kicking Taylor out, if I don't get my act together, me, too. At least, she said that...

Welcome to school, Payton.

I couldn't get to Finley, though he's at school; I couldn't get to Katie....

So I found Kate. I lent her a pen, but she didn't ask about me. After all, who wouldn't be preoccupied at a graduation rehearsal? Kellie Grob managed to notice th tears tearing the gold on my eye lids; Lauren, too.

...But all I wanted was my friend....

I don't want to be alone.

Tell me she was wrong, world.

Anybody?

 Everybody?

.....Please?