Everything Amy wants is just to be normal.
She wants to be normal as she does her bed in the mornings, read the Algebra textbook for the umpteenth time because her parents took away the Biology one, help Mom with dinner and laundry, listen to her ramble incoherently into thin air, looking somewhere far off with bright, wide eyes and a genuine smile on her face. Amy prays to Lord to finally be normal, go to high school.
She prays. And prays a lot, because what else is there to do in the middle of a forest? Her parents were harsh on her to learn prayers, even harsher than they were about schoolwork. She has a very distinct memory of reciting Hail Marys in front of her father, she couldn’t have been older than five years old, standing over her with arms crossed and a belt thwacking threateningly. Amy doesn’t even remember her offense of that day. Something just happened, and her father found it appropriate to check her memory.
So, Amy prays like a crazy woman. She has a prayer book whose pages have been breaking away from the spine for a long time now, but she can’t bring herself to buy a new one. That one was given to her by Grandma Anne for her first communion, and then Grandma Anne died, but her dedication is still scribbled in perfect cursive on the first page. Throwing it away feels like Amy is getting rid of her grandma.
The prayer book stays. Her ritual of kneeling by the bed, putting elbows on it and praying to the cross above her bed too. She’s done it since she can remember. Even in supposed kindergarten age, she would kneel and pray to Jesus for forgiveness and repentance, something her Mom drilled into her head. That if she did not know what to ask for, ask for forgiveness and repentance, because that helps get rid of the original sin.
Amy learned all the sins before she knew numbers above ten. She could recite it if you woke her up at two in the morning.
And she knows that envy is a sin, a particularly bad one from the original Ten Commandments, but she can’t help but be so envious of all those girls she sees at the clinic, in town, in church. With big hair, bright make–up, colorful dresses and shirts and acid–washed jeans, huge grins and hanging onto the arms of their boyfriends, smelling of disgustingly sweet perfume and cheap salty fries.
And Amy is just painfully awkward. She has no idea how to talk to people, not about God and church – it’s not like she has anything else going on in her life to talk about. Sometimes, the life in the house feels like solitary confinement. And life outside, the hours she has to pretend she knows how to act and look, is like being thrown into a completely different place, where no one speaks your language and you’re all alone.
Solitary confinement. That’s a word she found in one of the books Dad keeps on the highest shelves above the dresser in his and Mom’s bedroom. She’s starved of human contact that aren’t her parents. She feels it in the looks she gets at church, when her mom makes space for her younger brothers who aren’t even there, and Amy wants to scream in her face that there are no twins, there are no more kids besides her and to wake the fuck up.
After one shift at the clinic, she parks in front of the town public library to check out some psychology books, because her parents actually – miraculously, she wants to say – let her go there to acquire education other than them and the forest. Also, books, especially fantasy, provide her rare entertainment. She used to go there once a week, by a bus that arrived at seven thirty in the morning, and came back a little after five, so she had a long time to pick out, read and check out.
She doesn’t even leave the car. ‘What–ifs’ float around her head, like flies around fruit, swirling and uncatchable, and what if her parents get told what she checked out, what if someone saw her, what if she acted weird, wrong, what if someone started laughing, and what if–-
She starts the engine and speeds away, trying to run from her own head.
It's a little over three in the afternoon, and they’re both sitting at the dinner table with five chairs and four steaming portions of beef and potatoes. Amy has scrubbed her hands in the bathroom raw, under the hot water – she cleaned the boiler herself earlier today, – thinking about how she should approach it. If she should even approach it. If this is a good idea at all.
“Mom?”
Cindy does not make any indication she heard Amy. “Mother?”
“Yes, darling?”
“Do you think… Do you think I could ever go to high school? Like, public high school?”
Her mother’s eyebrows furrow, drawing down in an angle similar to a Macaroni penguin, dark and bushy, and that distant, disappointed look in her eye clouds them.
“I thought we'd already spoken about this.”
Amy swallows thickly, trying to chase away the anxiety bulging in her throat. “Yes, but–”
Cindy shakes her head. “The high school is too far away from our house. You’d have to wake up at five in the morning, Amy, to even get to the bus stop. And that’s not even talking about when you’d have to leave the house during winter. Imagine threading through the snowdrifts.” She cuts a potato in half. Steam comes out of it.
“If I could borrow your or dad’s car–”
“No.”
“I could earn money from my clinic job on my own!”
Cindy shakes her head, still not even looking at her. Amy wants to scream, yell, tear her hair out Just look at me! See what you’re doing! Feel guilty! Feel anything! “No, Amy. Discussion’s over.”
“Why?”
“I need you to help me around the house. With the cleaning and smaller jobs. And the twins still need to learn too.”
Thick resent comes up to her throat again. Burns the tender flesh like bile, almost making her gag, swallowing near damn impossible. If her mom wasn’t so ill, maybe she could go to school? Maybe she could be even a little more normal? Have friends? “Mom–”
“I already told you. Eat your dinner, darling.”
“I still want to go.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” Cindy leans forward to Amy, almost nose to nose with her now. Sheer uncomfortableness tears through Amy’s body like a lightning bolt. Cold and buzzing. Old soda. “You know what people say.”
Repressed tears suddenly spring into Amy’s eyes. She stabs the mashed potatoes into her mouth, wishing she could stab the fork into her eyes and dig out the brain matter through her nose.
Pray for forgiveness of your soul.
Amen, amen, amen.
Cindy locks Amy in her room at night.
Amy cries so loud she shakes with it. Her entire body is shivering with pain and disgust and anger and bone–deep sadness. Even her thickest, woolen blanket doesn’t help with it, she clings to the old radiator attached to her wall, and she still shakes, sobs escaping from her chest painfully. She can’t catch a breath, can’t release one, just dry heave and beat and tug at her stupid chest to finally breathe.
Cindy knocks on her door and tells her to quiet it down, that the twins are sleeping.
Amy wants out. She could kick out the window, or just go through the door, but the floor in the hallway creaks. Maybe her mom would care, or maybe she wouldn’t, maybe she’s in the kitchen or maybe she’s staring into nothingness in the twins’ room. She wants to run and stumble and feel the grass underneath her palms and the cold, midnight air, cut her hands and knees on rocks and scream and listen to the silence, drown and be alive and be dead and be everything and nothing and God and a loyal follower, all at once.
But she stays. Tears hit and wet her pillow and she screams silently into her stuffed giraffe.
Amy Martin is a coward.