Library of Trees

I'm starting to think my parents moved to Vermont just to torture me. When I say parents, I mean my mother. My father passed away when I was five years old from brain cancer. Six years later, when I was fourteen, my mother met an older man named Bob. Bob is at least forty (at the most sixty) and has a grizzly gray beard that's always filled with crumbs. My mother is only thirty, my father and her married out of highschool, and her hair is dyed a dark brown. Her hair is naturally ginger, but she changed it after my father's death. She couldn't look at herself in the mirror with red hair, because father always complimented it. It reminded her too much of him. She bleached my hair once when she was in her manic stage of despair, and it took years before I could grow it out to the point where my color came back.

That's why my mother ended up with Bob. Without my father, she fell apart mentally. For five painstaking years I dealt with my mother's unstable emotions leading to mood swings, and periodic depression. And he brought her happiness, so I should be happy for her, right? The weight of her sorrow no longer burdened me. But, I hate Bob.

Bob is a potbellied hunter. Every November, before we moved to Vermont, he'd travel away to a hunting resort and do everything from bow-hunting, through rifle season. At the least, he'd be gone for weeks on end. My mother would connect with him via facetime or those Facebook live videos (because face it, it's the 21st century) and spend her Sunday mornings at the break of dawn her face illuminated by her phone screen and giggling like a teenager.

When my mom and Bob first hooked up, I was hoping it would work in my favor. My birthday is November ninth, and by then, Bob would be out of the house and I could celebrate alone with my mother. This worked for the first few years, but then my mom got pregnant. She spent my birthday on the phone with Bob, who left me to deal with a cranky pregnant lady.

They named their child Sammie. I remember when my mom brought him home from the hospital and he never left her arms. Once his brown hair started to sprout from his head I was in charge of babysitting him. He has the same hair color of my mother's boyfriend, but he has my eyes. I always would stick my tongue out at him and scare him until he sobbed and wet the bed. One thing I never did was put him in danger. For some reason he still adores me as his older sister.

Once Sammie came into the family, it was easy for me to fade into the background. I was no longer the only child. I just became the burden that attached my mother to her deceased husband. My mother no longer paid attention to me or what I was doing. I could have done drugs and alcohol, and my mother wouldn't have noticed. I wouldn't because I care for myself. And when we moved, I got the smallest room upstairs that was supposed to be an office.

The main reason I hate Bob is the fact he brings game into this house. Not games like Monopoly or Twister, he isn't that fun type of stepfather. I mean game as in the dead animals he killed. I cannot stand animals. I am allergic to every shedding mammal around. I can't have a puppy like my friends do, and as a child I couldn't sleep over at my friends house because they'd have a cat. I always keep an inhaler in my back pocket, even through school. I'm also allergic to pollen, dust, and hay. I'm basically a walking sneeze.

I always wanted a pet, and we once got one, a Labrador, for my birthday. I was only six years old. It was supposed to be a companion to help my mother and I through the loss of my father, but instead it brought me a running nose and a trip to the hospital. This was the moment we found out about my allergy.

Bob always brings in what he has hunted for dinner, rabbits, deer, ducks, you name it. I will sit on the top of the stairwell while my mom beckons me down, "Honey, Bobby's back, he brought dinner!"

Sometimes I believe she has forgotten about my allergies. Probably because I am so cautious that I don't leave my room. My skin is naturally pale, but now every shade, except my freckles, has washed away, leaving me a ghost. Mother will fawn over him and his accomplishment while Sammie pushes past me down the stairs. That four-year-old has a stomach of a bear. Normally, I recede into my room, but today was different.