Dirty Little Secrets

I looked around the room, trying to concentrate on all the horizontal surfaces where a pair of scissors could be set down and never seen again, like some crazy picture from one of those I Spy books. I inched my way over to the recliner. “I think I might have put them back over here,” I said, as cheerfully as I could manage. I picked up a plastic bag from the drugstore and looked inside.

Mom leaned over and snatched the bag from my hands. “Don’t touch that,” she said. “I need those things for work.”

It always came down to trying to find the right answer in a game where I didn’t know any of the rules. If I didn’t help look for the thing I supposedly lost, she’d be mad. If I touched any of her stuff, she’d be mad. It was just a question of what was going to make her less mad at any given moment. The exhaustion I always felt in these situations began creeping into my bones. “Okay,” I said in my most patient voice. “I’m going to retrace my steps back to the dining room.”

As I tried to turn in the narrow pathway, my backpack clipped the corner of a box that was stacked on top of some newspapers. It wobbled and started to fall, but I caught it in time and eased it back.

“Watch out!” Mom yelled. “I swear, you are such a klutz! Can’t you even walk through a room without sending half the contents to the floor?”

No matter how many times she said stuff like that, it still settled heavily onto my chest. I dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands, hoping the pain would distract me from crying. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

Mom shook her head and sighed, as if the world’s problems had been placed on her shoulders. “That’s the best you can do? Always knocking everything over, losing my things. You never lift a finger—”

She was just warming up when Kaylie’s signature two short beeps followed by one long beep sounded out front. It was like the cavalry had come to rescue me from hell.

“I have to go,” I said. I pulled my backpack tight against my shoulders and inched carefully along the path toward the front door. The relief I always felt when I stepped out of the house was like plunging into a cold pool on a hundred-degree day.

“I hope you have a lovely time,” Mom said, turning back to the pile of photos, the saga of the lost scissors temporarily forgotten. I said nothing, but shut the door just a little more forcefully than was necessary as I left, hopefully dislodging a pile or two to give her something to do for the night.

Now, as I stood in front of my bedroom door the next morning, I wondered if she’d ever found those stupid scissors. I pushed it open and stepped inside, leaving the rest of the house behind me. Compared to everywhere else in this place, my room was like paradise, with surfaces that weren’t covered with bags of useless garbage, and with a bed you could actually sleep in.

The first time I’d really cleaned my room a couple of years ago, she’d totally freaked. I’d been babysitting at the Callans’ when I got the idea to clean my room. I wanted my bedroom to look the same as the ones their kids had—carpet on the floor you could see and a desk you could reach without having to wade through drifts of crap. A room that could be dusted on occasion because there wasn’t so much clutter, with a bed that didn’t have to be cleared to be slept in. It’s not like anyone else would see it, but still it would be nice. I’d started one morning when Mom was at work, and by the time she got home you could really see the difference. Despite my better judgment, I thought she might be happy about it, might be glad that for once I’d done some work around here. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The whole neighborhood could hear her ranting out by the garbage cans as she dug through them for the dirty stuffed animals, clothes that were too small, games with missing pieces, and everything else I had thrown out. I got the usual lecture about starving people in Africa who didn’t have anything nice at all as she marched the garbage bags back into my room. Not that I could ever figure out what a starving African child would do with a one-eyed Care Bear. After she’d fallen asleep in the recliner, I’d taken the bags back out of my room and shoved them deep into the dining room where they quickly got absorbed into the mess and disappeared. From then on, I cleaned my room by relocating the junk to other parts of the house.

Soon after that first time, she made Phil take my door off the hinges and put it in the garage so she could keep an eye on me. At least that’s what she said. Phil never said anything, but I could tell he felt bad about it. He was a senior in high school by then and did whatever it took to get by—just marking time until he could move out and be on his own like Sara had done years before.