I am in my room, wearing a steel smirk. I threw a glass Cinderella shoe at Alex earlier tonight for chasing me around our house. It’s the first time I have and will ever make him cry. Glory is mine.
Brandon holds me over the staircase threatening me that if I don’t stop singing I will be dropped. Fine, drop me, and then Mom and Dad will be in the hospital room with me and only me for days.
Dad carries me out of bed early Sunday morning and buckles me into the car. David has a shifter kart race an hour away. Why, Dad, would I want to wake up this early to watch a boring race won again and again by my boring brother? He’s too busy with his social life these days, why can’t I be too busy with sleeping to care about him?
I am standing outside on the deck overlooking our backyard on a bright, early summer day when my mom calls me inside. “Lilibet,” her soft, high voice chimes as I hesitantly sit down, “David’s girlfriend, Annie, has a surprise in her tummy.” They wait, anxious for my reaction. Oh, no! Annie has a tummy ache? And it clicked. Annie is 8 months pregnant, not even showing yet.
It’s a cold morning on December 1st, 2002. I get in the front seat of the car and put my rabbit cage, dogs, and birds in the backseat with angry, desperate tears clogging up my vision. It’s a two hour drive to our new home in Sacramento. David, Annie, and the new 3 month old attention-stealing baby, William, get to stay in Reno, along with Brandon, in their new house. Alex and I are stuck together for another four years. Two down, one to go.
Four years later in Chicago, my mom tells me we lost the house in California, due to the housing market. A few months later, my dad will lose his job. 5 months earlier, David lost his job. Brandon lost his house and moved up to Seattle after he lost his job. Alex will be unemployed until a few months from now. Another 30 lbs of stress is dropped onto my shoulders.
It’s Christmas Eve in Chicago, and the boys are still on the west coast with their wives. None of us can afford a flight. I stare, envious, at the Christmas village my dad builds every year, and the chorus music fills the silence that the short-talk leaves at the table. “So, what are you thinking about?” My dad asks. I’d tell him that I’m thinking that I’m desperate for our family and their families to start over and reunite in the same city, no, on the same block next year after I graduate high school, just like the families in the Christmas village. Instead, I reply with a sarcastic smirk on my face, “I’m thinking about how much I love that it’s just us three”. They both know that’s not what I was thinking about.
