dolls and let boys do the same to her. After I got into Pilgrim, she was the one who thought she was too cool for my school. I was the one in a pleated plaid skirt with no one to talk to. Vernell knew none of this.

I sat on my side of the car in silence.

“Your mother is not a people person,” she explained as we rolled over Olympic Boulevard, watching the magical palm trees of Beverly Hills turn into mangy ones. A poor man’s palm tree is just as tall but lacks the grace. Instead of swaying, the palm trees on our block slumped, the branches made heavy by dirt, not fluttering with fairy dust. “I can get along with just about anybody, but not your mom. Oh, no, not Frances. She doesn’t know how to talk to people, you know?”

Having not yet learned the definition of rhetorical, I saw my continued silence as cowardice. Vernell was first on my Chinese hit list.

A .99 Cent Store dry-erase board saved my life. I’d never given the thing much thought before using it to slash manic slaps of marker onto our Frigidaire. Prior to it becoming the major outlet of my innermost angst, the three of us used it for grocery lists and homework reminders. Some girls cut, chuck, or fuck. I transcribed.

The grown-ups were in the living room arguing during the commercials, trading insults to a sound track about sunglasses. Frances, we need to talk about this. My name is Geek I put ’em on as a shocker. Do whatever you want, Vernell, leave me out of it. Man, I love these Blublockers. I hate you. Everything is clear. Keep your voice down. They block out the sun. Why? Helena knows what a bitch you are. Oh yeah, I gotta get me some.

Escaping the dissonance meant walking through the kitchen and past the shiny plastic slab that would become my Rosetta stone.

At first it looked like fine art, all impressionist and stuff. Mimicking the moves of a painter like how people do when they conduct pretend orchestras, I used the marker like a brush, flicking quick and dirty strokes on the message board in neat Koranic lines. Subconscious calligraphy. It looked Arabic, alien, oriental, hieroglyphic. My hand was possessed. Ignorant of whatever it was I was writing, I just “wrote.”

One night, after a particularly edifying ride in the Nissan (seems Vernell wanted a baby—the old-fashioned way, with the penis and the sex and etc.), I tried to get Frances to go to her, comfort her, shut her up, with an especially pleading “Mom…” She actually said it was “grown folks’ business”—and I was shut down by a cliché.

Then the dry-erase board started doing the talking for me. Each bundle of madness represented a tiny character in my pretend alphabet. The scene was bloody, all thick black ink and serial killer-y. When it was over, I snapped the cap back on my new weapon and admired the damage I’d done. Just wait until they see this shit. When I was done I felt normal again, righted. I practiced my daily hieroglyphics for weeks, figuring madness on my part might preclude a melee on theirs. It did not.

Screams are as scarce as the monsters they allegedly shield us from. Barring East European Michael Jackson extremists, nobody screams in everyday life. It’s not something that’s done outside of amphitheaters and horror films. So when one hears an earsplitting screech not too far in the distance, it’s a singular moment. A moment that marks you for good, like a leftover fake Chinese character on a dry-erase board.

“Well, at least I’m not raising a daughter with no feelings!” I heard Vernell shriek, placing as much emphasis on the word feelings as one can when speaking in Soprano. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, too scared to go to the door but brave enough not to take this lying down. It was an insult, obviously, but I was far from offended.

I had plenty of fucking emotions. I just keep ’em between me and the fridge.

“Don’t you dare talk about my daughter,” Frances growled in a register so low I thought at first she might be joking. Like they were rehearsing lines or something for The Exorcist meets Freddy. It sounded like my mother was talking not through her teeth but against them, trying to grind them down or shatter them with her snarling. I figured she didn’t need my help.

Then there was the