"We are going to Disney World." Courtney was standing by Odelia's mattresses, holding a Barbie in each fist in an attitude uncannily reminiscent of her mother clutching the diamond-tipped pencils.
"I know, baby," Odelia murmured. She knew, all right; she just couldn't believe it.
How could she have let such a thing happen? It didn't seem possible. It didn't feel real.
As crammed with impossibilities as the past year had been, the most inconceivable of all was that she had delivered herself to her torturer, to her slave owner, and done so via sheer carelessness!
Courtney was staring steadily at her, as if waiting for something, but Odelia didn't have it in her to play Barbies at the moment. She was so exhausted from the past thirty-five hours of sleepless self-castigation that she could barely blink enough to keep her eyeballs from drying out.
"COURTNEY! YOUR MOTHER WILL BE HOME ANY MINUTE—HAVE YOU FINISHED PACKING?" Jackson's pompous, booming voice echoed down the hallway, temporarily penetrating Odelia's fog of humiliation.
"He expects you to do your own packing? Does he not know you're five?"
Rather than reply to either adult, Courtney and her Barbie attendants continued to stare steadily at Odelia, who sank back into her misery.
She should have been eating apples and carrots while watching whatever she wanted on television, and instead she was sucking on swill and staring at bare walls, while the family packed for yet another vacation without her. It's all a hallucination, she thought for the thousandth time, staring at the Barbies in Courtney's fists, willing them to become carrot sticks. Not real, not real, not real, not real...
The Barbies stayed Barbies.
Maybe if she bit one's head off, anyway...?
"MOM'S HOME!" Brian yelled excitedly, and his sneakers pounded across the floorboards as he hurried to let Mommy Dearest in.
Courtney's Barbie dolls twisted toward the noise as the front door flew open, but she didn't turn her own face, or make any other sign of having noticed her mother's arrival, instead continuing to stare steadily at Odelia. Maybe she wanted to be told how to pack...?
"If you don't know how to fold your clothes, just lay each piece down flat, smooth all the wrinkles out, and then you start at an edge—like this," she plucked at her toga-blouse, rolling the hem between her fingers to demonstrate, "and roll. Roll them up, tight, into tube shapes. If you fold things, they'll be creased when you get where you're going, but rolling doesn't put creases in anything, it's faster and easier, and you'll be able to get more stuff in your suitcase."
Courtney looked thoughtful. "When you packeted the suitcases, you did not roll stuff."
"Mommy always made me fold the clothes instead because Mommy always has to have everything done her way, no matter how stupid it is."
Odelia chewed her lip. It was probably a bad idea to bad-mouth the girl's mother. After all, she would have to live with the woman until she turned eighteen.
"Mommy isn't stupid," she added, "and she isn't always wrong. She just isn't always right, either."
"Mommy is mean," Courtney said. Her expression and tone remained impassive; it was a statement of fact rather than a judgment, and one that was hardly open to refutation.
Odelia didn't know what to say. Finally she settled on, "I'm sure she loves you and your brother."
In lieu of a reply, Courtney's dolls turned away from the noise of Melanie's triumphant arrival, so Odelia could once again be stared at in triplicate.
YOU ARE READING
Tipping the Scales
ChickLitOdelia has spent most of her life so firmly under her brother's thumb that she might as well have been an insect trapped in a chunk of amber, but now, at long last, something is happening to her. Too bad it's not a nice, normal, something, like a '...
