Chapter One
Marion
How did I end up here, broken legged and broken hearted?
I was Valedictorian.
Also, the best ballerina in Atlanta.
Better than Samantha Cocker.
That’s for fucking sure.
Throughout my school years, my nose was in books and my toes were en pointe. I hardly had any friends because I cared about studying and dancing too much. Also, I don’t like people. I don’t trust them. They can’t be trusted, that’s been proven.
By my own mom.
My parents were overachievers. Their ambition was the reason I was tossed into ballet classes at age three. In the beginning, I didn’t really care about dance for dancing’s sake.
I did it to please them.
And only them.
It never occurred to me to please myself. I worshipped my parents. Those were the days. Sigh.
My frigging Mom was the most beautiful woman in the entire world with sheets of gorgeous dark hair that hung to the small of her back and skin that shined like glitter was its main ingredient.
Her curves are the one thing I didn’t inherit, thank God. You can’t have curves in ballet. Taut lines, perfect arches, yes. Curves, however, must be done away with by starving yourself and working yourself to the bone. Literally.
It wasn’t just Mom I wanted to please with my ballerina skills back then in the earliest of my days. My father was like Zeus to me, albeit not as intimidating as the Greek god is said to have been. But to me, Daddy was everything. And the two of them together were so in love that I felt it my duty to not be the one thing they didn’t do right.
So I danced and studied and followed their life code.
They believed in work hard, work hard, work hard, and that’s pretty much all they believed in. Your parents pass down everything they know to you. They’re your foundation for how you view the world.
What if what they know, and what they pass down, is utter and complete shit?
I mean, how much expertise could they have had, considering the fact that she’d been cheating on him for ten whole years? Not the best foundation for relationship-success in my future, if I followed their lead.
Who really knows what they’re doing, anyway? Why do we all have to follow a pattern set down by other humans who were just as lost as the humans before them? What is this ‘normal’ anyway?
I don’t want it.
Normal people don’t look happy to me. They look bored. That’s why they watch their neighbors and gossip about this or that drama someone else is going through—because they don’t create any of their own.
I want drama.
Chaos.
Excitement.
Not that I’ve found it yet.
I’m stuck here on the couch with my leg in a cast, my dream thrown out the window by…who…fate?
This injury has given me too much time to rethink my life. What I’ve figured out so far is pretty simple.
I’m not happy.
Dad found out about the affair when I was eight, back when it started. They fought. He forced her to end it. I felt my whole world vanish in a puff of fantasy-smoke.
One minute I think my parents are in love, the next I realize Mom has been kissing other men. That’s all I understood then…kissing.
Sex wasn’t even on my radar.
Storks brought babies.
But from their screaming and yelling, I learned kissing other men when you loved one man, was wrong.
The foundation I lived on crumbled during that rough time, and I no longer felt safe in my own home. I didn’t know these people anymore. They weren’t who I thought they were. Dad didn’t call Mom a whore before. Mom didn’t call him rabbit-dick before. But now these and a whole slew of other weird words were thrown around like invisible knives that left real tears behind.
To hide, I threw myself into dance, and simultaneously learned not to trust anyone. My studying at school I kept at, too, because it gave me something to think about other than fear, confusion and isolation.
They stayed together and we all lived a lie. Mom didn’t seem that interested in my father, though in public she kept up airs. I heard her tell Nana that they were staying together for me. I didn’t have the vocabulary or the courage to tell them not to. The idea of living with my parents separated was too terrifying to me. What would that be like?
I wish I’d told her to leave.
I wish I’d told him to leave.
Years of fights were worse.
I wish.
I wish.
I wish.
But I was just a kid.
Their workaholism escalated. Years passed. I snapped at people and kept them at arm’s length so they’d never hurt me.
Mom and Dad smiled to the public and went on with the facade of normalcy so many aim for. But then we discovered she’d never gotten rid of her boyfriend like she’d promised Dad. That was revealed to us one Christmas when her secret boyfriend decided he’d had enough of being hidden from her husband.
Imagine my surprise when some guy named Kyle burst into my lumpy mashed potatoes and turkey feast proclaiming that he absolutely loved my mother, needed her, ached for her, yearned for her.
Even worse was that Lorraine Bogdonavitz, my once-imagined-perfect mother, burst from her chair and rushed into his arms, sobbing.
Happy Holidays.
We eat the same thing on Thanksgiving as we do on Christmas because Mom always said she didn’t think one turkey feast was enough. Apparently she didn’t think one man was enough, either.
To say that my father didn’t handle it well is an understatement from my worst nightmares. He started coming onto my also-eighteen-year-old friends.
Immediately.
I used to have girlfriends.
Until Dad tried to bang them.
There are tumbleweeds rolling through my phone now.
And a sneering buzzard.
It sucks, because over junior high and high school it took time to earn those friendships. I never found them in dance. I tried with Samantha Cocker and Logan Clark, but they were just too damn entwined to let me into their buddy-buddy fest. Sam and I always butted heads anyway.
She was my competition.
Is.
Was.
Oh, I don’t know!
Maybe she bested me this time.
I can’t even think about it. Dad called me whining about his love life again, blaming Mom for the millionth time and I really need it to stop. Which is worse? Mom leaving with some dude named Kyle, or Dad stalking my hot friends in response, and when that didn’t work, continuing to search in my age range?
Great role models, people.
Thanks for the inspiration.
To.
Never.
Be.
You.
I have my roommate.
Teeka’s pretty much it for me.
And she’s a basket case. But that personality flaw makes home-life interesting, so hey, what the fuck? Better than a snooze-fest who goes to bed at nine and asks me to turn the volume down on my favorite movies. Teeka really falls into the not-normal category. I never know when she’s coming home, what she’s up to, who she’s dating.
As I shove Rocky Road into my gullet, thinking about my Dad, I groan, “Have some dignity!”
This broken leg has finally worn me down. No longer able to worry about his mid-life crisis, my future, and my failed love life, I’ve called in reinforcements.
Jack, can you help me?
If anyone could, it’s him.