Page 143 of Hello Stranger

Hiding.

I would’ve expected her to be out here, gloating. Cackling. Savoring the misery she’d wrought.

Hidingmade me wonder. Was she ashamed of herself? Could she even feel shame? Did she feel guilty? Remorseful? Even—and I shook my head, even as I thought it—sorry?

I’d overheard a few things about Parker’s life, too, during the years when we all lived in one house together. I once heard Lucinda on the phone telling a friend the whole story about how Parker’s dad walked out very dramatically one night—with his mistress waiting in the car. Parker had tried to hold on to his leg to keep him from going, but he shook her off the way you might shake off a terrier—and he had kicked so hard, Parker slammed her head against the metal doorstop and had to go to the ER.

In my more generous moments, I’d sometimes wonder if her father’s leaving like that haunted her. If she was still reckoning with that moment somehow. If she’d rather do bad things and make herself into a bad person than have to face the idea that she might’ve been unlovable just as she was.

Or maybe she was just a psychopath.

Or even a sociopath.

And yes—I’d done enough armchair research on Parker over the years to know the difference between the two. I’d once even printed out a flowchart. I guess I’d known her too long and too well to hold out hope that she might change.

That said, this moment felt like an opportunity. All our normal stories about ourselves and our family had kind of gone through a paper shredder tonight. Right now, with everything in shambles, it felt like Icould say something true. And whether or not she would hear me or understand me or use it against me, I decided right then to go ahead and say it.

For my sake, if not for hers.

“Parker,” I said, watching her shadow to see if she’d run off at the sound. “I know you’re there.”

The shadow didn’t move.

I went on, “I don’t know what drives you to go after me like you do. I once read that people who hurt others think there are only two choices in the world—to hurt or to be hurt. And so they hurt others so they can feel safe. Like, if they’re the bully, they can’t be bullied. If they’re the victimizer, they can’t be the victim. As if anything in life could ever be that simple. But maybe that’s what it is for you. Maybe it’s faulty logic. Maybe it’s something that you’ll rethink in the future and regret. Or maybe there’s—I don’t know—something wrong with your brain, and this is how it’ll always be. Me, always cast as the squirrel, and you always cast as the neighborhood pyromaniac who douses the squirrel with lighter fluid…”

I paused then, in case she might have something to say.

She didn’t.

So I went on. “The irony of it is… I always wanted a sister.”

This moment was almost over—I could feel it. And the shadow was still listening.

Then something became very clear to me: As terrible as Parker made my life, she made her own even worse. Nothing she could do to me was as soul-crushing as what she did to herself. In turning away from kindness, she’d chosen a life of torment.

Maybe I didn’t have to punish her.

Maybe she was already punishing herself.

Spoiler: I would find out the next day that my portrait came in dead last in the contest. I would get a total of zero votes from the judges. But I really would come away with a whole new understanding of what it meant to win. And standing in that dark street alone, talking to Parker’s shadow, I was already getting a glimmer of what that would feel like.

“I just want you to know,” I said then, “that it doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to be enemies. I believe you can change, and I know I’m not vindictive. If you ever decide that you want to stop acting this way… I will genuinely try to forgive you.”

Twenty-Eight

THAT NIGHT, ONtop of it all, I left the most bananas voicemail of my entire life.

Because that apology I’d gotten from my dad? It didn’t magically fix everything about my childhood—of course. We can’t go back in time.

But it did leave me thinking a little differently.

Like, hearing his side of the story changed my understanding of the story.

Hearing him apologize for the way he’d left me out in the hallway all those nights? It had never once occurred to me that what happened then had been anything other than my fault.

I’d always figured that my desperate neediness all those nights had driven him away.

My fourteen-year-old interpretation had been to assume that I’d caused that moment to unfold that way. That I’d driven my father away with my neediness. And I’d emerged from that time in our lives with a wrong lesson about how the world works, thinking that if I wanted to be loved—and who doesn’t?—I needed to make sure to never need anybody. Ever.

---