doesn’t want to tick off my dad in anyway which means he’s seen me more than he probably has seen any of his other patients this year.
I quickly dry off. Looking in the mirror, I can see I’ve lost weight but I still look good… I think or I hope. I grab the brush to untangle my long hair. Sara bugs me to death to get it cut; it’s only to my waist. She thinks it is too long and like a hippie’s. I could care less what she thinks she looks like a plastic Barbie doll… so she shouldn’t talk. I will take my “hippie look” any day over her “fake” look.
I am told I look just like my mother and I think of that all the time. I keep a picture of her on my dresser. My grandma (I call her Grammy and sometimes Gram) gave it to me when I was five years old. I often look into the mirror and wonder if she sees me. Honestly, I hope she can’t right now. I’m not too fond of the girl looking back at me so I can’t imagine she would be either.
I am lucky that Gram still lives with us. She’s always been here for me. I would be majorly lost without her. I know Sara hates that we are so close, that’s probably because Gram doesn’t like Sara. The day they met Gram told me Sara told her she had already picked out a boarding school for me. Gram said she nearly smacked her in the face at the suggestion of sending me away after she married my father.
I try to forget that thought and quickly slip on my yellow flowered sundress. I don’t look in the mirror again. I know I’m pail and look to skinny in it (Sara told me that last week), no need to verify that fact. I head down to the kitchen to grab something to eat before my check-up. I don’t feel hungry, but if I don’t eat, I will get shaky. I hope this is the last check up for a while. I got rid of the home nurse, now I needed to stop seeing doctors. I have had to go to so many I cannot stand it anymore.
I head downstairs to the kitchen. Sara calls it her gourmet kitchen, for someone who cannot boil water its ridiculous. She spent a year designing it, and over thirty thousand dollars of my dad’s money building it. The stupidest thing about it is the only one who cooks in this house is our chef, Cam Parsons. He started cooking for us after Sara fired the last chef for using non-organic eggs.
That’s the thing around here it’s all about organics. Sara swears food chemicals are poisoning us all. I hide most of my junk food so she can’t find it. Kate and Gram have been so sweet to bring me Twinkies, donuts and other various sweet things Sara has deemed poisonous. I would starve to death if I didn’t have my food stash. Hey, a girl has to have her chocolate!
I manage to get the last donut and pour a glass of organic milk. I start thinking about what my stepmom says about chemicals in our food killing us. I go out with Todd to a party, and get mono and get attacked; milk with hormones is the least of my worries. Death by Twinkies on most days sounds really good to me…sadly.
I take what’s left of my breakfast to the media room and flip on my dad’s pride and joy, his giant flat-screen plasma TV. The room is his “man cave” as Sara calls it. The furniture is all black leather, and the windows have remote control shades, for optimum viewing of the TV. and computer screens. My pictures hang next to the ones of dad and Sara; creepily she looks like my sister and not my stepmother. The TV is on CNN naturally and of course, I channel surf to MTV.
I try to watch the videos and quit thinking of ways to torture Todd for destroying my life and making me sick. I to this very day cannot forget what he did to me. I close my eyes as I feel the panic slipping into my mind, as it always does when I think too much. Thinking has been my downfall. If I could stop, I might forget the sheer terror I felt that cold fall night in the back