Confessions Of An Angry Girl. Louise Rozett
until just now?
Yes, I decide. I should.
I click on a site dedicated to a twenty-one-year-old sergeant. There are three photos of him on the home page—his graduation photo from a military academy in California, a picture of him in uniform sitting next to a girl who seems to be laughing at something he said, a photo of a memorial service that his unit had for him, a rifle jammed into the sand, a helmet resting on the butt of the gun. There’s a link to letters from his father, his sister, his best friend—some were written while he was still alive, some after he died—and an email he sent to his sister the night before the explosion. And then there’s a page with a description of what happened to his unit the day he died, and a list of the people who were killed alongside him.
My dad was one of those people.
I close my laptop and push it away from me on the bed. I look at the clock. It’s time to call Peter. We always talk on Saturdays around eleven.
Usually when we’re on the phone, I can tell he’s fishing for information about how I’m doing. He never seems to believe it when I tell him I’m fine. But I get it—I don’t believe him when he says it, either.
Sometimes he’s not awake when I call, so I leave him a totally random, incomprehensible message in the weirdest voice I can come up with, and he calls me back later. But today he answers right away, on the first ring, which is good because I don’t have it in me to come up with a weird voice right now.
“Rosie?”
“Hey.”
“You don’t sound so good,” he says, coughing a little, his voice rough.
“You sound like you just woke up two seconds ago when your phone rang. Did you go out last night?”
“Friday nights in college rock, Rosie. So do Thursday nights. And Saturdays. And the rest of them. It’s awesome,” he says. I can tell he wants me to believe what he’s saying, but the way he sounds, he might as well be talking about doing his laundry.
“It sounds awesome,” I say, playing along anyway. I realize that even though I’m fourteen, and I’m supposed to be into the idea of going out every night of the week, I have no desire to do so. Zero. Zip. None. I guess that means I’ll be a social loser in college, too. Something to look forward to.
As Peter tells me about the party he went to last night, I lie back on my bed. The corner of Peter’s old PSAT book digs into the back of my head, and I yank it out from underneath me and start doodling on it with a blue marker I find under a pile of crap on my nightstand. My room is a mess, but my mom doesn’t say anything about it anymore. She used to tell me all the time that a messy room shows a lack of self-respect. But I don’t think she’s even set foot in here since the beginning of summer. My walls are neat, but that’s just because there’s nothing on them. After Tracy made the squad, I ripped down all the posters she’d made me buy of bands and boys I would never like in a million years, and I tore them into shreds. The shreds are still lying on the floor. I like the way they crunch under my feet when I get up in the morning.
I look at my bare walls and have the sudden urge to draw on them. I wonder if my mother would notice that. Without thinking further, I take the blue marker and draw one petal of a tiny daisy—because it’s the only thing I know how to draw—on the wall next to my bed. I wait. Nothing happens—the wall doesn’t collapse, no alarm bells go off—so I draw the rest of the flower and start to color it in while Peter continues to talk. Drawing on the wall is oddly exciting. Which means my life is pretty sad and pathetic. But I knew that already.
I look at the green light blinking slowly on and off on my closed laptop, and I think about the sergeant still on the screen. Has Peter ever done a search for Dad? I’m just about to ask him when he says, “What did you do last night?”
“Nothing.”
“You stayed home?”
“No,” I say, pausing. I know he’s not going to like it when I tell him about leaving Tracy’s party. He thinks I need to be more social; I think that’s the last thing I need. “I went to Tracy’s Halloween party.”
It’s quiet on the other end, and then I hear what sounds like a long exhale. My blue marker freezes in the middle of filling in a petal as I place the sound.
“Are you…smoking?” I ask.
“You didn’t stay, did you,” he counters.
“Are you smoking?” I ask again.
“Yeah. It helps me wake up.”
“Gross,” I say, completely thrown off by the image of Peter with a cigarette in his mouth. “Dad would kill you for that, you know.”
“Yeah, well, he’s never going to find out, is he?”
My marker falls out of my hand and down into the space between my bed and the wall. I expect him to say he’s sorry, but he doesn’t say anything at all, and the silence is weird, like he’s waiting for me to call him out for talking like that. But I can’t. I can’t even believe he said it in the first place.
“So why’d you leave Tracy’s?” he finally says.
“Because I hate her,” I say, not meaning it.
“What happened this time?”
I was expecting Peter to say, What did she do now? His neutral response pisses me off, and I immediately want to make things sound worse than they are.
“She’s become one of those idiot girls who turns her back on her real friends, and who’s obsessed with all the wrong things.”
“Like what?” he says. I can practically hear him rolling his eyes. This conversation isn’t going how I pictured it at all. Peter is always on my side, no questions asked. But now he just sounds annoyed.
“Like sex, and vodka funnels, and being a cheerleader.”
“That’s called fun, Rose. Look into it. High school is short. So is fucking life, I guess.”
I can hardly believe my ears. My brother—the guy who was so worked up about me being safe and taking care of myself and not doing anything stupid—is acting like I’m a dud for not partying like Tracy, who’s probably going to end up pregnant or diseased or both by the end of the year.
“I thought…you…” I trail off, confused about how to explain why he suddenly seems like an alien to me. He exhales loudly again. “I can’t believe you’re fucking smoking.” It feels so good to swear, even if I’m not really swearing at him.
“So why’d you leave? Did something happen?”
“The cheerleaders were forcing Tracy to drink by pouring vodka into her mouth—some stupid initiation thing. And when I tried to help her, everyone got mad at me, especially Regina Deladdo.”
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