Page 63 of Life of the Party

I shrugged silently. They weren’t getting anything from me.

Mom sighed again. “Okay, I tried. Mitch.” She waved her hand at him like he was tagging in or something. “Go ahead.”

Dad nodded. He had on his ‘insurance’ face now, the one he used when he was determined to sell something. “You don’t want to talk? Have it your way.” He shrugged like it didn’t matter. “From here on out, we’re going to have some rules inplace, and like it or not, you’re going to obey them.”

I looked up at him, my eyes narrowing defiantly.

“One. No more staying out all hours of the night. You’re going to have a curfew like every other teenager, home by eleven during the week, midnight on weekends.”

“Dad.” I glared. “You can’t be serious. Midnight on the weekends?” I was incredulous. “You can’t just start treating me like a little kid!”

“Then you should stop acting like one.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

I stared at him a moment. Neither of us would back down, we were too similar in temperament. “Ugh, you know what? No.” I stood up and shook my head at them. “No, this is bullshit. You’ve been home all of what—a week, and suddenly you get to judge me?”

“I’m only on rule one, kiddo. Can I keep going?”

“No. No.” My racing heartbeat was suddenly fuelled by more than cocaine. Anger pushed it even harder. I felt a surge of furious adrenaline shoot through my veins, my fingernails pressing into my clenched palms as I struggled to keep it together. Vaguely, I remembered all the stories I’d heard of people freaking out when they were high on coke. I suddenly understood. My emotions were so intense I nearly saw red.

“I don’t give a shit about your stupid rules,” I concluded. “You can’t just ignore me for years and then suddenly start trying to make decisions for me.”

“We never ignored you.” Mom looked appalled by the accusation.

“Really? I’m alone all the time. I could be doing anything, and no one would know. But it never seemed to bother you, leaving me like that. You let me do whatever I wanted to for years.”

“Did you ever think maybe we trusted you?” Dad interjected.

“Trust? Yeah, right.” I scoffed. “That had nothing to do with trust. You just didn’t care. You had your golden child already.”

“What?” Mom sat up in her chair. She stared at me for a long moment, trying to rationalize my words. They seemed to disturb her. “Is that really how you feel?”

I shrugged, staring hard at the red woven area rug beneath my feet. I could’ve proved my point; God knows I had enough material, but why should I bother? There was no way they’d sympathize. I’d just come off sounding immature and jealous and petty and then they’d have even another reason to like Marcy more than me.

“I’m sorry you feel that way. Really sorry.” Mom looked truly repentant, hereyebrows knit together in sincere apology. “That was never our intention; of course it wasn’t. We just felt you were more capable, I guess, of being alone. Marcy was always so dependent on me—but you, you’ve always been braver than her. Always.”

I shrugged again. “Whatever.” I sighed. I could feel myself softening but resolved not to let it happen. Mom wasn’t going to talk her way out of the last few years of total indifference, no matter how sweet her words were now. I drudged up a memory to keep me focused on anger. The memory that worked every time.

It was back when I was chubby. I was wearing a red and black plaid skirt with a white tucked-in blouse, black Mary-Jane shoes, and knee-high white tights. My skirt wouldn’t zip over my tummy. I had to safety-pin it up.

It was my second year playing flute in Band. It was the night of our recital, and I was nervous because I had a solo in one of the songs. I had beat out the other five flautists to win that honour. Grade eight Mackenzie was a bit of an over-achiever.

But Marcy also had a recital that night—she’d taken ballet for most of her life. My parents hadn’t decided who would go where, but one was going to watch Marcy dance, and one was coming to watch me play.

Except neither of them was at my recital. I missed playing a good twelve bars in my desperation to see my mom or dad in the crowd, but they were nowhere to be found. When the time came for my solo, I played an F instead of an E and was so flustered by my mistake I botched the whole thing.

I locked myself in a bathroom stall after, crying hot, humiliated tears. Not just because I messed up the solo—because I knew where my parents ended up.

I was right in the end. When the three of them came to pick me up from school, my parents apologized profusely for their ‘miscommunication’.

They bought me an ice cream on the way home and kept wondering why I was so quiet, why I didn’t tell them how it went. It was something in the way Marcy gloated—the little half-smile she gave me as she flipped back her perfect, shiny hair.

That look said it all: give it up before you totally humiliate yourself, Mackenzie. There’s no way you can compete with me.

I dropped band that year. And advanced science. And the yearbook committee.

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