Eight
Thanksgiving break was pretty uneventful. The good folks at Facebook took the fake profile down quite quickly, but the Instagram took a little longer. Those pictures lingered there like a long forgotten corpse, stinking up the place. A couple more attempts were made to get the profile back up, always with derogatory language that got it taken down after a couple of hours. Some anonymous people managed to leave vicious messages on the profile before it got taken down. One of them even had the audacity to write "are you highway roadkill yet? LOL!" before it disappeared completely. It gave people a whole new reason to visit their long-forgotten Facebook accounts. After the third or fourth attempt the profile stopped showing up altogether. There were probably other places where they could find nasty images of me, but I didn't have the strength to go searching for them. The whole thing was wearing me down, and I didn't dare show any of it to my mother. She already thought I was a colossal foul-up, this problem just might prove her right.
The Sunday before we headed back to school there was a knock on my bedroom door. I thought I had avoided any interrogations involving the pictures or the posts; I was wrong. "Mer, can we talk?" My mom's voice was softer than usual. Uh oh, I thought. The last time my mom came into my room for a heart to heart was when I was twelve, and she thought I might need to be told about sex. What followed was an hour of embarrassing stammers and unanswered questions. All I learned that night is boys have penises and girls have vaginas, and I already knew that. The rest of it I learned through the daily gossip at school, stupid girls like Jennifer Langston and Sasha Daniels who thought sex in a stranger's bedroom was the only way to climb the social ladder in high school.
I braced myself. "Sure Mom. Shoot." I made room for her as she sat on the side of my bed. She had a bag from the pharmacy with her.
"Mer, I found out about the Facebook thing."
My heart dropped. Oh man, I wanted to handle that one on my own. I didn't want to have to deal with her anger...or her disappointment. "Mom, look..." I began, but she interrupted me.
"You should have told me." She seemed truly upset that I hadn't turned to her for help. "I could have helped you. I could have gone down to that principal's house and put my foot up his ass."
I smiled a little. "Mom, I don't have proof it was that girl or her friend. I couldn't go accusing them if I didn't have anything to back it up. Anyway, I handled it. They took down the profile. By tomorrow everyone will get tired of it."
"Regardless." She wouldn't be deterred. "If it does happen again you have to promise me you will come to me to help you. That's what I'm here for, right?"
Truthfully I didn't know why my mother was there, except to buy clothes for my sister and remind me of what a failure I was. But considering this was one of her rare moments when she actually decided to be a parent to me, I figured I'd hear her out. "Yeah, I guess. So, if they do anything else I'll come straight to you."
She grabbed for the bag beside her. "I think I know why they're picking on you. You don't look like the other girls, honey. You don't fix your hair in the mornings, you don't wear make-up and you wear those horrible black t-shirts all the time. I think I can fix that." She dumped all of her purchases out on my bed. It was enough to make my heart sink. There was a bright green blouse, a foundation compact, some mascara, blush, eyeliner and eye shadow in the pile. And what appeared to be a small box covered by the blouse was on the bottom. "We can show you how to do your make-up. Your sister has volunteered to do your hair a couple of times in the mornings, until you figure out how to do it yourself. And this little splash of color will make your outfits look so much better. You'll get addicted to trying new clothes, I guarantee it."
I was fighting the urge to shove everything off my bed and order her out. Instead I just looked at her. "You think this is my problem? Because a couple of stuck up bitches can't accept me for the way I am I'm supposed to change everything to please them?"
Mom looked genuinely hurt. "Mer, of course I'm not suggesting you change to make them happy! I'm just suggesting you try something different so you don't look so unapproachable to others! If you didn't look so...so..."
"Goth?" I finished her sentence.
"Yes, I suppose that's what they call it." She giggled, as if it was a big joke. "If you didn't look so...dark...all the time kids wouldn't think you were some sort of outsider."
"You mean 'freak.'" I responded.
"That's not true." She reassured me. "You are not a freak. You're just going through a bad phase, that's all. You just need a little help."
Attempting to placate her, I examined the different shades of eye shadow she had purchased, looked at the blush and deigned interest. After all, this sort of attention from my mother didn't happen all that often. "This is all really nice, Mom. I promise I'll try to..."
I was pulling up on the blouse to look at it when the box underneath tumbled free. I looked down at the package: Dr. Joe's Fat-Burning Formula. My mother had bought me diet pills. I just sat there unblinking, staring at the box of pills as if someone had defecated on my bed. I had always been slightly overweight, at least in comparison to my little sister. And now I probably weighed an extra twenty-five pounds or so, but it hadn't really bothered me, until now. Because here was my mother, basically calling me fat. Being overweight made me a disgrace. And taking these suspect pills and losing weight would make me perfect, just like Aurora. Just like her. Tears began welling up inside me. I couldn't tell if they were tears of sadness or tears of rage.
"Now sweetie, you know you could use a little help." She saw my horrified reaction to the pills and tried to explain. "If you could just lay off the sodas for a little while, not eat so much junk food, take these pills for a month or so, I'm certain that extra weight would just fly off. Then we could go shopping, I could buy you some clothes that fit instead of those ugly t-shirts and you could go to school with your head held high! They wouldn't pick on you. You could actually be popular! Just think about that!"
I jumped off my bed. Yes, they were tears of rage. "I already walked into that school with my head held high! I already know who I am and how I want to live my life! I know I'm not perfect, nobody is. But I didn't really worry about that. Now thanks to you I know what a big disappointment I am!"
"Mer, that's not..." she tried to say, but I was pissed. She wasn't going to stop me.
"You can't slap blonde hair on my head, slather that crap on my face and make me into another Aurora!" I shouted. "I'm not supposed to be Aurora's clone; I'm supposed to be Medora! Medora, the girl you hate because she's a boy! Medora, the daughter you treated like crap because some man ditched you! Medora, the child whose ARM YOU BROKE because you were too damn busy living your own life to realize you had a daughter raising herself!"
Now it was my mother's turn to jump up. "Now just one minute! I have apologized about that so many damn times, I'm not going to apologize anymore!"
"Not to me!" I yelled back. "Not once have you apologized to me for the crap you put me through! And I'm sick of you trying to make me into something I'm not! Hell, I accepted the fact that you hate me. I accepted the fact that I would never be as good as Little Miss Barbie Doll in the next room! Now why can't you just leave me alone and let me be me? Stop trying to change me into her!"
Her eyes turned into slits, giving me a glare that could have stopped my heart. "Because if you were like your sister I wouldn't have to constantly fight your battles for you. If you were normal you'd have friends and maybe I could love you. But you're nothing but trouble Medora. All of my problems come from you. And to be quite honest I'm sick of it! I'm sick of you!"
I tried to argue back, to tell her she was the cause of her own problems, not me. But the venom in her words took all the fight out of me. I flopped down on the bed and began to cry. Not because she was right, but because I was tired. We had been through this before. She had blamed me for so many things going wrong in her life and I couldn't take another ill word. I had done everything in my power to make her happy. Maybe I wanted to have new clothes and nice things, but there was never anything left for me once they were finished. I had lived off the crumbs they had tossed me for all these years. She had taken my best friend away from me and turned her into an evil miniature version of herself. I always gave, she always took. But in that moment I realized all of my efforts were in vain. She was never going to love me the way I was. And I just couldn't fight anymore. I just sat on the bed and sobbed.
My mom, taking it as a sign of her victory, crossed her arms and smiled. "Now, you can start taking those pills and I'll stop bringing junk into the house so you'll stick to your diet. Wear the new blouse and the make up tomorrow. We'll look into doing something different to your hair later. And don't ever, ever talk to me that way again. Is that clear?" With that, she turned on her heel and walked out the door, slamming it behind her. I could hear her and Aurora getting into a huge fight, even heard my little sister exclaim, "Mom, lay off her, all right?" But I didn't pay it much attention. I was mired in my own pain. I was still that little girl who wanted desperately for her mother to love her, but that little girl was slapped in the face with cold, harsh reality. My mom did, and would always, hate me.
