I reply with the only thing I can:
- If it’s meant to be, it will be when the time is right.
I jump back on the Kiki chat to tell her we will be more careful, that I will see her in the morning, and that I love her.
I receive a notification from Brisa next.
It’s a portrait of sorts, albeit a photoshopped portrait, of her merged with a screenshot that she must have taken from Convicted Ink’s website of Ranger, and yes, added a manbun to his then short hair, along with a dog and three kids.
I am so glad we aren’t FaceTiming right now, because I can’t stop laughing at it. God Bless her, I know she actually thinks she is in love with Manbun.
As if my to-do list in life isn’t long enough, and me figuring out what it is I want to do with my life now that dance has a big-ass X over it, I am determined to add searching for an unbloodied, appropriately aged, non-felon with a manbun on the top.
A knock on the door has me looking up.
Mom peeks in, holding a fresh compress.
“Come on in. Just need to say goodnight to the girls.”
“Is Brisa okay?” she asks, pulling the blanket off my ankle, removing the now room temperature compress, and replacing it with the cold one.
I nod as I exit out of the app, lean over, and set my phone on the charging pad. “Yeah, seems so,” I blatantly lie to my mother for possibly the first time in my life.
“Okay, then.” She looks at me with concern as she pushes my hair out of my face, kisses my forehead, and whispers sadly, “I love you, Truth.”
She turns to walk out, and I feel guilt constrict my heart.
“Why do you ask?”
She turns around and cocks her head to the side, looking at my ankle then back up at me. “Your dad and I are just worried about you girls, is all.”
A few months ago, after the incident with my smashed cell phone, because Dad was angry when I got kicked out of Catholic school, and after the epic landing of the Steel toed kick to the overprotective and often times overbearing nuts of our fathers when Kiki revealed she was—gasp—pregnant, I overheard a rare chat between my parents. My mother, the sweetest, kindest being on the planet, and my father, who I’ve seen wage actual war with anything that could possibly harm her, disagreed over his overprotective ways.
Is waging war a slight exaggeration? Not on your life, or the life of any living creature anywhere on the planet.
A few years ago, I was woken from a dead sleep to smashing furniture and Dad swearing like an ex-Navy sailor, which he was, at an intruder.
Terrified, I hide under my bed as I was trained to do in such an occurrence by Sergeant Cyrus, listening to hell and furniture breaking loose just down the hallway. The breaking furniture is the lightbulb moment that this isn’t just a drill … And yes, we’ve had them.
“Cyrus, please don’t shoot him!” Mom cries.
“Fuck that, Birdie. The bastard deserves to die!”
“But my mom’s tea cups!”
What the fuck? I think.
My mother, the sweetest being on the planet, is more worried about tea cups than a life?
Peeking out from under my bed, light is revealed as Justice army-crawls over to me. “Let’s roll.”
“Cyrus, not there, either; the kids’ trophies!”
“Fuck, Birdie, what do you want me to do then?”
“He’s tiny; just catch him and let him go.”
“Fuck that! He’s gonna die.”
Army-crawling down the hall, Justice and I look at each other.
“We can help him,” Justice says as he jumps up and runs toward the living room. I nervously follow suit.
Dad is standing in his boxers, and Mom is in the middle of the dining room table, in her robe, knees to her chest.
When he sees me, he yells, “Get up there with your mother!”
He doesn’t have to tell me twice. I climb up, and Mom holds out her arms and hugs me tight.
“We didn’t mean to wake you, Truth. You okay?”
Talk about being confused. “Mom, where—”
“Justice, he’s under there.” Dad waves his handgun at the entertainment unit. “Kick the side, and when he comes out, I’m gonna kill the motherfucker!”
“Cyrus, do not shoot that gun in this house!” Mom yells as I scream, “Daddy, don’t kill a man!”
Dad looks back at me in confusion, and then he starts laughing, really laughing hard, too, which pisses me off.
I start crying, “It’s not funny! You can’t kill—”
“Little bird, it’s a damn rodent. A rat.” Dad laughs.
“Technically, a mouse.” Mom does her best not to laugh.
“The hell?” Justice groans then jacks the corner of the stand up, sending pictures sliding to the lower side.
Dad drops down and says, “Well, fuck.”
“What’s, well fuck?” I scream at him, still pissed and now worried about the poor mouse.
Standing, Dad holds the dead mouse by his tail. “He’s dead.”
“How did he die?” I yell at him in anger.
“Guessing natural causes, little bird,” he says, looking over the mouse dangling from his pinched fingers.
“Probably had a heart attack. We almost did.” Justice lowers the shelving unit then snaps, “Goodnight.”
He walks down the hall and slams his door.
At the time, it wasn’t funny, but thinking about it now, it totally was.
I smile as I look up at Mom.
She cocks her head to the other side, her eyes asking what I’m thinking.
“The mouse at the old house.”
She giggles, and I move my schoolwork out of the way so she can sit.
After she sits, she asks, “Do you miss it?”
“The mouse?” I shake my head.
She smiles. “The old house? Maybe even your old school?”
I shake my head again. “I mean, there are moments, but no, I like it here. Even though our old house was on the beach too, it really seems like we’re on vacation here most days.”
“The house is huge,” Mom sighs and looks around.
She’s right; our old house was small, much smaller than any of my cousins and frenemies.
I lean back on my pillows, and Mom lies on her side, head propped up on her hand.
“You know, the reason we never moved is because of me, right? We should have made a change a long time ago, or at least when Justice became taller than his room was wide.” She smiles. Mom has OCD, which we only learned about four or so years ago.
There are four main types of OCD and, through counseling, she found out that she has what they call Just Right OCD. She counts a lot, gets hung up on the number five, arranges things so they are in order and symmetrical. We learned that, when she was younger, she thought if the pictures weren’t arranged just right, something horrible would happen to someone she loved. We never noticed because Dad was so on the ball and overly protective that he thought of things, even before she did, that might trigger it and fixed the problem before it would even arise.
Dad told us, when she lost her parents in an accident, she needed to feel in control of something, so she chose “things.” Everything had to have its place, and although she never wigged out about a mess, she would be the first to clean it up and put things back where it belonged. Moving would have been the worst thing for her, or so Dad thought.