Food, Cats, and Being Lazy

Two

I looked at the dress my mother had laid out for me on my bed. It was a little girl dress. I was sixteen years old. Sure, I didn’t look a whole lot like the teenager I was supposed to be. But I was a teenager. My mother liked to baby me. I blamed this on the fact that her eldest daughter had matured early. A little too mature. A little too early.

And then there was me. Piper. The one who was sixteen and still hadn’t matured. My hair was curly. Too curly. I was blonde too, but the blonde curls and leftover baby fat made me look like an overweight child. My legs were short and stumpy. My boobs were just the result of that leftover baby fat, and there wasn’t much of them even then. My face was too round, and I had a mouth full of metal. Not to mention I was the weird one who did things like wrestle the cat in the dining room.

My brother was perfect too. He hadn’t matured yet, but that’s because he was too young for puberty. His name was Philip. You got that right. We were all P’s. People used to call us the PP’s. Philip was a straight A student and had wanted to be a doctor since he was in kindergarten. Paige was the beauty, queen. Piper was just the future—disappointment.

The dress looked like it was made for a small child. It was a pretty pastel lilac color. It had ruffles on the chest and tied off with a bow at the back. It had a bit of extra fluff on the bottom that made it pop out like a one-year-old's princess outfit. Then I looked at the socks she had laid beside the dress on my bedspread. I sighed heavily. She really went overboard. They had ruffles on them too.

I dressed in the outfit anyway and then looked myself over in the mirror attached to the back of my bedroom door. I looked like a kid. I hated that I looked like a kid. I had been waiting sixteen years to look like a sixteen-year-old. I didn’t want to grow up. I mean, adults are boring. And my youthfulness came in handy when we tried to get into Disneyworld or get discounted food from the kid’s menu. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t exempt from wishing I was pretty so that I could get a hot boyfriend. Paige had a boyfriend. Even Philip had someone, and he was in elementary school. What did I have? A mean overweight cat.

But he was good for something. I looked down at my ruffled socks and noticed blood seeping through from the scratch he’d given me in the dining room. Then I smiled to myself. My mom would never let me wear bloody socks. So I cleaned up my leg in my bathroom and pulled on a different pair of socks. I didn’t have any matching ones, so I settled on one with black and white stripes and a ghost on it, and the other just had plain polka spots. My mom hated it when I called them polka spots. She also hated mismatched socks. That’s why I chose them.

I left my room just as the doorbell rang. I could hear my mom greeting her guests at the door. They were talking about how lovely our house looked and how wonderful the ham smelled. The ham smelled like ass. And my mom ordered it pre-cooked from the butcher.

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

“What are you wearing?” she asked as he guests and my entire family zeroed in on my mismatched socks with my toddler dress.

I wanted to give some snappy and witty retort, but in truth, I wasn’t really all that clever at all. Sure, later I would come up with something really cool I should have replied with. But at that moment I couldn’t think of a single thing.

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

“Why don’t your socks match?” she asked.

“I couldn’t find any matching ones.”

“I bought you a new pair yesterday!” My mother snapped very quickly. Usually just at me. But her arms flailed out, and she was really close to pelting her candle selling lady manager in the face.

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

She sighed heavily, and my sister snickered and turned toward her boyfriend. She was wearing a pretty red dress that was one inch of fabric away from being provocative. But she had the body to fill it out. Her boobs were barely contained in the top, and she looked like she was at least twenty with her matching red lips and that stupid red ribbon in her perfectly straight and manageable blonde hair.

Her boyfriend’s parents were dentists. But they weren’t like—really famous dentists or anything, so my mother didn’t like them very much. They didn’t fit in her “circle” of candle selling ladies and their golf husbands. She insisted that my sister was only infatuated with him, and she would get over it. Even though they had been together for like two years. I always liked him. He never really talked to me, but at least he was nice when he had to be.

He seemed to find the situation amusing, though. His hazel eyes were alight, and his lips were threatening to smile.

“Well, blood is better than striped Halloween socks on Easter and polka dots!” my mother continued.

“This is my favorite polka spot sock,” I told her.

“DOTS, Piper! DOTS!”

“Dots and spots are the same things!”

My mother does this thing where she leans on one leg, pinches the bridge of her nose between her perfectly manicured index finger and thumb, and then takes three very deep and measured 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 irritated her. But it was the only way I could get through the situation without showing her how hurt I was about being called a fruit loop.

My lips curled up, and I struggled 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. When we all looked at him, he pinched his eyes shut. Then Paige followed along. Then all the younger kids. Then everyone else. Pretty soon my entire family and the guest list was standing in the foyer laughing at me and my socks.

I decided it would be best just to keep laughing along with them. Better to make a joke out of it than get offended and start crying.

Eventually, my mother wiped her eyes and turned back to me. “Get to the table before I make you change,” she said sternly. So I hurried out of there as fast as I could.