Food, Cats, and Being Lazy

The dress my mother laid out for me was a little girl dress. I was sixteen years old. Sure, I didn’t look like a teenager most of the time. But I was. My mom liked to baby me. I blamed this on the fact that her first daughter had matured early. Too early. Too mature. Like she was stealing all the maturity and good genes and leaving nothing behind for the second daughter.

The second daughter was me. Piper. I was sixteen years old and still hadn’t matured beyond having to deal with cramps every month. My hair was curly. Paige’s was straight. My hair was also blonde. But her hair was that pretty golden blonde, and mine was more “dishwater” than golden. The curls, coupled with the leftover baby fat, made me look like a cherub. My legs were short and stumpy, where hers were long and toned. My boobs were nothing more than leftover baby fat, where hers were—well, boobs. My face was too round, and I had a mouth full of metal. Not to mention, Paige was the kind of girl who had a gaggle of friends everywhere she went. And I wrestled cats on the dining room floor.

Our brother was also perfect. He hadn’t matured yet because he was a child. But he was a straight-A student and had wanted to be a doctor since kindergarten. Phillip was the boy genius, Paige was the beauty queen, and Piper was just the future—disappointment?

The dress looked like it was made for a small child. It was a pretty pastel lilac color. But it had ruffles on the chest and tied off with an enormous bow on the back. It had more tulle than any dress needed, and it was going to make me look like one of the porcelain dolls my sister used to collect as a kid. And then I made the mistake of lifting the socks my mom had left on my bedspread. I sighed heavily. She really went overboard. They had ruffles on them too. I was willing to bet ten bucks the shoes had little buckles.

I dressed in the awful outfit anyway and then looked myself over in the mirror on the back of my bedroom door. I looked like a kid. I hated that I looked like a kid. I’d been waiting sixteen years to look sixteen. And then when I finally got to sixteen? I look ten. I didn’t want to grow up exactly. All the adults I knew were kind of boring. And my youthfulness came in handy when we wanted to get kid’s discounts. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t silently hoping I’d turn pretty overnight. Mostly so I could get a cute boyfriend. Paige had a cute boyfriend. Even Phillip had someone, and he was in elementary school. It probably wasn’t real, but it was still more than I had. What did I have? An overweight housecat.

But my overweight housecat was good for some things. For instance—scratching my legs so bad that I bled all over the ruffled socks. Then I smiled to myself. My mom would never let me wear bloody socks. So I cleaned up my leg in the bathroom and found a better pair of socks. One was covered in dancing hotdogs, and the other had polka spots. My mom hated when I called them polka spots. She also hated mismatched socks. So it was going to work out perfectly.

I left my room upstairs just as the doorbell rang. I could hear my mom greeting her guests in the foyer. They talked about how lovely our house was, how shiny the chandelier was, and how great the ham smelled. I, personally, thought the ham smelled like ass. Because my mom ordered it pre-cooked from the grocery store.

When I reached the stairs, my mom turned to look up at me. Her blonde hair had been straightened and hung pin-straight and silky on her shoulders. It was as smooth and fluid as my sister’s was naturally. She looked up at me with her nose curled up as if all the Easter eggs had suddenly rotted. Her red upper lip curled, her eyebrows furrowed, and she got little creases beside her nose.

“What are you wearing?” she asked. So naturally, the guests and my entire family immediately zeroed in on me in my mismatched socks and toddler dress.

I wanted to reply with something snappy and witty. But the truth was that I wasn’t that clever at all. Maybe later, hours after everyone forgot, I would come up with some really cool retort. But at that moment, my mind was blank and empty.

“Yes,” is what came out of my mouth instead. I don’t even know why I said yes.

“Why don’t your socks match?”

“I couldn’t find any matching ones.”

“I bought you a new pair yesterday.” She was verging on rage. She snapped very quickly, usually just at me. But her arms flailed out when she said it like she was doing everything she could to not yell at me in front of all her fancy friends. She was really close to whacking her candle-selling lady manager in the face.

“There was blood on them! Reggie scratched me.”

She sighed heavily. My sister snickered and turned to whisper something to her boyfriend. She was wearing a pretty wine purple dress that was one inch of fabric away from being provocative. But she had the body to fill it out. She looked more like twenty than seventeen. Her lips were the same color as the dress. She had a pretty ribbon in her straight and manageable blonde hair.

Her boyfriend, on the other hand, looked almost as out of place as I was. He was wearing a nice shirt with a tie he’d borrowed from my dad. But otherwise, he was wearing jeans and really scuffed-up sneakers. His parents were dentists. But not like famous dentists or anything. So my mother didn’t like them very much and never invited them over beyond the initial first meeting. They didn’t fit into her circle of candle-selling ladies and their golf husbands. She insisted that my sister was just infatuated, and they’d get over it once the teen hormones wore off. But they’d been together for like two years, and I genuinely liked him. We didn’t talk much, but he was always nice to me.

But right now, he looked like he was trying really hard not to laugh.

“Well, I would rather you wear bloody socks than hotdogs and polka dots!” my mother continued, finally losing control.

“This is my favorite polka spot sock.”

“Dots, Piper! DOTS!”

“Dots and spots are the same things!”

My mother did this thing where she’d lean on one leg, pinch the bridge of her nose between her perfectly manicured index finger and thumb, and take three very deep breaths. She only ever did this with me.

“Piper,” she said slowly. “You look like a fruit loop.”

Instead of being offended, I decided to be amused. It wasn’t easy because my mother irritated me as much as I did her. But the only way I could get out of the situation was to not show her how hurt I was that she’d called me a fruit loop in front of all her friends.

I took a deep breath, struggling to hold in a snort of laughter. But then he did it. Vincent. My sister’s boyfriend. He snorted through his nose and covered his mouth with his hand. We all looked at him, and he pinched his eyes shut. Unable to even apologize for the outburst. But then Paige followed along. And the younger kids. And then everyone else. And the next thing I knew, the entire Easter party was standing in the foyer laughing at me.

It was a nightmare.

So I decided to just laugh along with them. Better to join in on the fun than get offended and start crying.

Eventually, my mother wiped the tears from her eyes and waved me toward the dining room. “Go to the table before I make you change,” she said. So I hurried out of there as fast as I could.