Silence Protect Me

For many years I have watched my parent’s marriage teeter along the edge of a cliff.

Like a drunken master tightrope walker, they stumble and trip over their own feet, swinging rapidly to the side with each fight and grudgingly working back to the middle. Us kids are the audience to this strange, teetering display; our little hearts fluttering like tortured birds in our imprisoning ribcages at each little slip. We’ve been watching this stunt for so long, the anticipation-driven paranoia has almost become redundant.

Sometimes we wish they would just get the whole act over with, just so our chests would be free again.

They think they’re protecting us by staying together. Oh, how they think that, concentrating on that thought so hard that they miss the bigger picture, a jig-saw puzzle of people who are begging for them to just get divorced. Instead of keeping us whole with their pretence, they are ripping us apart, one seam for each dishonest day.

My family is as complicated as a tangled cat’s cradle. No one can really pinpoint how everything suddenly turned to shit. There are just too many things that went wrong.

Now the only truly happy faces in our home are kept in frames.

Our family looks fine to the outsiders, albeit a trifle messy. A mother, a father, their three children and the two half-siblings that come from their father’s previous wives. The eldest, a teenage boy (myself), middle sibling, an intelligent eleven-year-old girl (my sister Deedee) and the youngest, a babyish little boy of six years (Tyler, the only kid in our twisted family with a remotely normal name).

My name is Ivy Frank Wright, however much I wish it wasn’t. My mother named me after one of the bands she “liked” (now I know, when she “liked” a band it probably meant she slept with one of the members), the middle-name comes from a four-generation family tradition that every male must have “Frank” somewhere in their name and my last name is often mistakenly spelt without the “W” and makes me the butt of a lot of love jokes. Yes, I am aware my first name is that of a girl. People point this out to me all the time, and it’s a touchy subject with me. My mother says she wanted me to have an unusual name with a good reference to fall back on. My theory is that an hour after my birth she got hammered enough to think I was a girl and decided to name me right then and there.

Sorry. That hasn’t really told anything about my character. I’m like that. I’ll focus on a very insignificant detail and just keep on elaborating on it like a lazy researcher. Lots of people find it a huge liability, especially my teachers. They think I have a form of autism, or maybe even OCD. I’m inclined to think it’s more likely autism. I don’t tend to obsess over things that easily, or get random fetishes. At least, I don’t think so…

There I go again, off on another meaningless tangent. I even annoy myself with this stupid habit; try as I might to catch myself out before I end up repeating my mistakes.
I can see I’m heading around to doing the same thing again, instead of just starting on what I look like or more family history like I should’ve half a page ago.

As well as being named like a girl, I apparently also look a bit like a girl. My fault, I guess. I’m too shy of others to go and get my hair cut at a salon, and I don’t trust my mother with scissors. My sister could cut my hair, I suppose. She certainly is smart enough. But, anyway, at this moment it is longish and light brown, just tickling my shoulders and nothing like my mother or father’s. I kid that I’m not related to them a lot. My mother is a bottled redhead, liking her naturally dirty blonde locks to mach her fire-engine lipstick. My Dad’s hair changes colour a lot, usually when he’s bored. It was blonde last month. Now it’s back to his well-worn auburn brown. The colour may change a lot on my Dad’s head, but it nearly always stays in the same crested shape.

Hair is useful to hide behind when people try and take my picture. It’s surprising how much that happens. I’d think others would be more interested in my father, not me. I’m just baggage in the shot, anyway. I can’t match my Dad’s outstanding charisma, my mother’s pencilled beauty, my little brother’s “cuteness” (anyone who calls him cute clearly hasn’t had to share a house with him) or even my sister’s intelligence. I don’t have a different mother, like my half-siblings Ramona and Frankeito. No. I am the plain one in this flimsy family façade. I have nothing to put out there.

Except, of course, my natural strangeness.

My mind works differently to other people’s, I guess. I don’t express emotion, however clearly I feel it in my heart. I surround myself with objects instead of a social life. I refuse to sleep; instead pondering away at useless questions I could have googled but didn’t because I didn’t want to waste the server’s time. Ha. Look at me. I’m worried about wasting a piece of electricity-generated fabrication’s time.

My eyes are large, round and blue, slightly popping out from my blank face. Below that, my nose is large and hawkish. These are probably the only attributes I inherited from my father when he drunkenly clashed DNA with my mother. My lips are just… there. They don’t really have any distinguishing features (ha. A pun). My stature is tall. Already I am taller then my Dad, not that that’s much of an accomplishment. He jokes about it all the time, though, on the rare occasion that he’s home.

With clothes, I find it best to stay simple with worn (but clean) jeans and a plain t-shirt of any shade. Logos make me feel like I am advertising something I have no care for. I feel wafer-thin and board-like, waiting for someone to graffiti me with his or her snide remarks.

Another irksome attribute: I use too many metaphors and similes.

I will describe my family in order of loyalty, just to prioritise who’s on my side. My Dad will be left ‘til last, just to create some anticipation. After all, he is… famous…

Deedee Fiona Wright is a genius, a bona-fied true child prodigy. I’m not being kind on this one. She’s skipped two grades, is already coming top of her class and speaks like she’s currently digesting an encyclopaedia. I may be smarter then the average male my age, but she can and will beat me in anything academically if challenged. I have a slight edge on her in matters of creative writing but that is about it mentally. Physically, I’m always going to win on issues of height. Deedee is short, her puppy fat making her appear like she’s an eight-year-old in the seventh grade instead of an eleven-year-old. She also inherited the trademark popping blue eyes and hawkish nose, along with my missing asset: the jutting chin. Her hair, well, the nicest thing to say about it is that it exists. She usually scrapes it behind a headband and squeezes the blonde mass into a pony tail, stating she would rather not waste her time on appearance when she could be working on intellectual studies (that’s exactly how she said it too). Her personality is snappish and easily irritated, her concentration already spent on absorbing mass amounts of knowledge. Also, she has never quite forgiven Dad for giving her such a stupid name.

Tyler Frank (yes, we have the same middle name) Wright is the baby of the family and he knows it. He milks his spoilt situation with glee, using his position at every opportunity to get what he wants. Probably this is why he’s overweight. Getting snacks is as simple to him as making up a good metaphor is to me. My mother, too busy to care about raising a child properly any more, leaves him to incapable college student nannies, who know the only way to easily shut him up is to shove something edible in his gob. I pity my little brother. Once he is past the tender age of six his cute poundage will turn into something grotesque that needs to be destroyed. Right now the extra weight is hidden behind his strange black fluffy hair, his wide hazel eyes inherited from our mother drawing attention away from his wobbling cheeks. Although six, he acts about three, still refusing to abandon his stroller and pronounce words properly. He hates being shunted out of the spotlight, instead wanting to be in the full glare all the time. As far as I know, he’s inherited Dad’s charisma and nothing else.

Now to my mother, Teresa Dominique Wright, a new famous wife with a past as shady as Angelina Jolie’s. Her name may be fit for a saint, but she’s far from being holy, if you excuse the clichéd explanation. She’s an ex professional groupie (yes, I’m being totally honest and serious about this), and is no stranger to drugs, alcohol and showing more skin then clothes. I’m not supposed to know about her old job. Then again, to be ignorant of it would mean I’d be illiterate, seeing as she’s published her diaries kept from the time she was “a working girl”. Luckily I never thought highly of her in the first place. Anyway, she’s given all that up. Now she’s a media whore instead of a band one, trading tailing would-be rock stars for trapping fame. Maybe the groupie thing isn’t even true, and everything about her disgusting past was fabricated for more fame. After all, the only reason why she married my Dad was because the wedding would make her a star. That and he was the only man she’d slept with who had managed to get her pregnant without her knowing. Twice.
My mother is tall, toned and a true vamp. Everything about her is false, from her bosom to her eyelashes. As well as marrying my Dad for fame, his money gave her an opportunity to completely reinvent herself. Dad wasn’t happy but he didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to screw up us kids any more then we already were. I was eight when they got married and my sister was only four (she doesn’t remember anything from before our mother married Dad, funnily enough). I hid the entire ceremony, confused and frightened by all the unfamiliar people. Dad came to find me later, after my mother headed straight for the champagne. My mother gave up looking after her own kids as soon as she got money.

And last, but in no way least, my father, the one that changed everything. He conceived us. He married our mother. He’s famous and rich.

My father’s name is Frank Edwin Wright III. But to his fans, friends and band members he is more commonly known as “Tre Cool”, of Green Day.

I don’t need to describe my father, really. There are so many pictures of him on the Internet that anyone reading this could just search his name and get a thousand times a likeness. His personality is pretty well known too. Loud, outgoing, crazy- well, his public personality anyway. I don’t see him that much at home. Sometimes I confuse his public personality with the one he uses around us. He’s silent around my mother, encouraging and overwhelmed around Deedee (he keeps asking her where she got the genius gene from), excitable with Tyler and… well… awkward around me.

I don’t blame him. I mean; I’m not much of a conventional person. That’s probably over circumstance. For the first eight years of my life I lived in a dirty three-roomed apartment, sharing with many strange roommates (they helped pay the rent). That’s all I can really remember about my past, along with a few fragments of how my family came together and some stories. My mind blanked out the rest, swish, swish with the eraser. I have no idea what caused this. All I know is that I don’t really want to remember. Sometimes I have nightmares about what may have happened. That’s why I always sleep on my front, so I can suffocate my noise.

I’m quiet and unassuming. Usually. That’s what people expect. That’s what I want them to expect. That way I can get away with more things.

But the thing is, the state my family’s in doesn’t need to be kept quiet. Everyone already knows what a woeful state we’re in.

They’re just too polite to say anything.