The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,22
to go to bed so you can go to bed, even though I’d like to finish watching this movie.
Except for the year I was with Nicholas, I’d been living like that since I left home. Even before that, I felt like an invisible guest in Mom’s house. Our house had always been cluttered with her stuff, but it got a lot worse after Dad went to prison. By the time LaReigne graduated from high school, Mom was off the deep end into hoarding. Like if she couldn’t keep LaReigne at home, she was going to collect stuff that couldn’t leave her.
LaReigne went off to Seward County Community College on a cheerleading scholarship, while I stayed at home trying to keep Mom’s stuff at bay. My living space was a twin bed, while the rest of my room got taken over by boxes of collectibles and books and craft projects. I had to start keeping my clothes in a canvas bag hung on a hook from the ceiling above my bed. Otherwise, I’d come home from school and have to dig it out from under whatever new treasures Mom was “just storing” in my bedroom.
When the sink faucet stopped working, Mom wouldn’t let a plumber in the house, and we couldn’t take showers, because of the stuff stacked in one end of the tub. I’d fill up a bucket from the kitchen sink to brush my teeth and take what Mom called a whore’s bath with a washrag.
Then one day at the beginning of my junior year, I came home from school and, after squeezing through the gap in my bedroom door and crawling over the beaver dam of clothes and magazines, I found that my bed had been taken over by three plastic bins of old bridesmaids dresses and half a dozen cardboard shipping boxes. Mom had put them there because my bed was one of the last empty spaces in the house.
At first my friend Mindy and her family were cool with the fact that I was “having trouble at home,” but that only lasted a week. Then I was out on my ass, toting my sleeping bag back to my mother’s house, where I slept one night in the hallway, wedged in between the wall and stacks of magazines all the way up to the ceiling. I couldn’t even turn over, so I laid there all night like a mummy with my arms tucked across my chest, listening to mice scurry around.
I burned through eleven friendships in high school. Eight my junior year. Three my senior year. Those were the early days, before I figured out that people didn’t mean I could stay as long as I needed. Before I figured out that sex made a difference. It’s harder for people to kick you out when you’re having sex with them. Or their dad. Or whatever.
One of the first things you learn from sleeping over at people’s houses is that everybody’s family is weird. Maybe not your family’s kind of weird, but weird.
So Gentry’s family was super nice, and it was great to have my own bed, and for Marcus and me to have our own room, but I knew Charlene didn’t really mean we could stay as long as we needed. Plus, living with LaReigne for the past two years, I’d forgotten how much hard work it was being a guest.
I missed having the option of going back to sleep. That was the trade-off to being a perpetual guest. You got to eat and not worry about where it came from, but you didn’t get to lie in somebody’s guest bed all day and cry. You had to get up.
I had to get up.
I guessed Gentry had just come home from work, because he was wearing steel-toed work boots and jeans instead of cargo shorts. I was wearing the T-shirt and panties I slept in. So that was awkward. After he finished in the bathroom, I took a shower and put on the last pair of clean clothes I had. That was the first thing I needed to do: go by the apartment to get clean clothes for me and Marcus. Before that, I had to get Marcus up, which, considering he’d been up half the night crying and having bad dreams, was almost impossible. It was only eight o’clock, though, so I had a couple hours before work. If I could get him up and take him to Mom’s house by then, it would be okay.