Pretty as a Car Crash

Jessica Belvidere


made by heartofthevampire @ the Quizilla! Forums

Most sixteen year olds consider their family to be weird. I don't consider my family weird; I know they're twisted.

“When life gives you lemons, set up a lemonade stand.” My grandpa would always quote weird sayings like that.

When he would come to visit, I would have to wear this annoying, white, frilly dress – one that a china doll would wear. I would rather be playing with snakes and bugs in the mud instead of have to worry about keeping that dress clean. I would never wear that dress for anyone, but if my grandpa would to visit, I would wear the world’s entire stock of frilly, white, china doll dresses; my grandpa, or Papa as I called him, was my favorite person in the world.

Grandma died when I was one year old, and after her passing, Papa threw himself into his work and he didn’t visit for what seemed like an eternity – a very sad eternity – deprived of his funny and silly quotes.

He was a photographer and he had tons of pictures. Somewhere, most likely under my Grandpa’s bed, was a shoe box of pictures just waiting to be opened and rediscovered. No matter where he went or who he was with, he had his trusty camera. For a while, he had one of those cameras where you take a picture and it pops out of a slot in the front of the camera a few seconds later and it takes about 30 seconds to actually see the picture. I would always refer to it as his “smiley-face camera”; the flash bulb was an eye, the slit where the picture comes out, a mouth, and the wonderful moment captured on a piece of paper, the tongue. When Papa decided to “get with the times”, I inherited the smiley-face camera.

When I opened that old shoe box on the day of my Papa’s funeral, all of the memories came rushing back to me along with all of the emotions. Papa loved to take nature pictures – whether it was a blue jay sitting on a green, leafy branch being drowned in sunshine or a flower just beginning to blossom.

He wasn’t one for the photography of people, but the few pictures that he had of the family were amazing. When he would take photos of us, he insisted on us posing, yet being candid. Tears twinkled down my face while I looked at those few photographs and I laughed at each of our faces and each of our stances. As I continued to dig through the worn and fragile dress-shoe's box, I found a note at the bottom.

“Jessie Bear!
When I found this box of memories, I knew you had to have it. Now that I pass these memories onto you, I hope you make your own and add them.
Love,
Papa”

I’m sure that this was his way of saying that it’s my turn to take those wacky, candid pictures. It was my turn; it was expected.

Then one day I received this package in the mail; it was from Spain. Where is Spain? my four year old mind had wondered as I held the tan package in my small hands. When mom opened the package for me, out fell a frilly, white dress – a folded-up note with it.
“Dear Jessie Bear,” Mom read in her soothing voice, “I’m sorry I haven’t visited for a very long time. I hope to be visiting very soon, though. As we speak, or should I say as I write and you read, I’m in Spain on a business trip. When I saw this dress, I immediately thought of you, my little Jessie Bear! I hope you love it a fraction of how much I love you.
Papa”

When I had heard that, I went running out of the dining room in a flash, leaving my mom still holding the letter. I came out of my room and ran back into the dining room just as fast as before – if not faster – wearing that china doll dress with the white frills from Spain.
Two weeks later, I was playing in the garden while mama was trimming the rose bushes and Dad came into the back yard with someone else. Since I was hiding under one of the rose bushes my mother was trimming – in an attempt to get her to play hide-and-go-seek – all I could see was a pair of shiny black dress shoes. When mama had squealed “Dad!”, I realized that it was Papa who finally came to visit.

One year later, when I was just five years old, I loved to go to school. I was one of those always smiling, happy and laughing, optimistic children. When I was in pre-school, I loved to wear jumpers. My favorite jumper was my red one with the big red buttons at the beginning of the straps. My curly, brown hair would always cover up those buttons, so Mom would always put my hair in pigtails on the days that I insisted that the buttons had to show, which was every time I wore my favorite red jumper. As Mama was making an endeavor to pull my rat’s nest of curly brown hair into pigtails, I was making an effort to eat my frosted flakes without spilling them all over my jumper. “Darling, please hold still!” my mama would say every two seconds. Being five years old and trying to eat my delicious frosted flakes while not spilling them, I obviously did not listen.

I think it’s in the nature of most little kids to do the opposite of what they're told; reverse psychology is what my mother called it.

Anyway, when both of us were finished with our frivolities, Mom drove me to school in our ugly, lime-green minivan; whoever had the idea to make a lime green minivan should be shot.

My teacher, Mrs. Ashby, was one of the nicest people I had ever met. She was just as smiley, happy, and optimistic as I was – which is probably why we got along so well. When Mother and I arrived at school, Mrs. Ashby was outside greeting two parents and their child, who I had never seen before.

“It looks like you have a new class mate.” My Mom said in an elated tone of voice, as she smiled out the window at Mrs. Ashby and her new acquaintances.

I just sat in my toddler car seat, quietly humming to myself. When I was younger, I would always hum to myself when I was bored. I still have a tendency to hum to myself, especially when I’m eating something that is amazingly delicious!

As we climbed out of that attention-drawing, disgustingly-green minivan, Mrs. Ashby looked over at us. That was the moment that changed my life. Yeah, I know. That sounds corny, but it’s completely true. If Mrs. Ashby hadn’t asked me to show Nanyamka around that day, then we might not had ever met, which, in turn, would mean that we most likely would not be friends today.

Danielle and Natasha’s birth wasn’t much of a surprise, but it still caught me off-guard. It wasn’t much of a surprise because we – my dad and I – were preparing for this moment for the last nine months. When I say I was caught off guard, I mean that I wasn’t expecting the twins to come home and keep all of us up for over half of the night.

When Dan and Nat were 8, along with Lisha – Nan’s eight year old sister – and Gyasi – Nan’s seven year old brother – they were convinced that they were cannibals; they would walk around in their little pack of cannibalistic heathens attempting to bite anyone they saw. They never did any damage, but it was pretty weird. They even had tribal dances and songs that they would do in the rose garden. My mom and Nan’s mom were very similar. They both kept telling our fathers that it was natural, that they were just kids being kids. My father and Nan’s father were also very similar. They would insist that this was beyond weird behavior or kids just being kids. I agreed with the dads on this one.

The day that put a stop to their cannibalistic behavior was the day that I asked the question of all questions. When they heard it, they just looked confused for a few minutes, waiting for me to elaborate.

“Well,” I had said, “Cannibals eat members of their own species, right? All of you are of the same species, so why don’t you eat each other?”

At first, they just stared at each other quietly, looking at me every so often. Then they started wrestling, randomly biting each other and sending shrill wails in to the air, but once that was over, they were back to their semi-normal, non-cannibalistic selves.

My mother is “twisted” in a completely different way from the rest of my family. Not only is she literally twisted – she had gotten into the yoga fad – but metaphorically twisted or, at least, what I consider twisted. She is one of those nature/hippie types. She is utterly awesome, but most of the time she doesn’t make any sense to me. I remember when I was seven and she made my family live outside for a few weeks, insisting that living the way that we were was bad for the environment. I agree, the way we were living inside the house was bad for the environment, but we didn’t need to go live out in the wilderness for almost a month; we didn’t recycle; we kept lights on even when we weren’t using them, stuff like that.
So, after much deliberation, my mother let us move back into our house as long as we did our best to conserve energy, conserve water, recycle, et cetera. It’s not as weird as what other members of my family have done, but it’s still up there.

So, there you have it. That is my amazingly twisted family, which, I guess, makes me just as or, possibly, even more twisted than they are. Personally, I’d go with more twisted, but you can decide that on your own.