before; now I was cripplingly shy, doubting myself before raising my hand in class. I didn’t have a single friend.
The algebra lessons at the new school were different from the ones at Lick-Wilmerding, based on formulas I didn’t know, more difficult. Most evenings for a couple of months I asked Laurene to help, and she would get up with a sigh, we’d go downstairs, she’d work out the problem in a businesslike way, and then tell me the procedure to follow to get the answer.
At night, after they went upstairs, I was incredibly lonely and cried myself to sleep. I was also cold. I discovered the heating didn’t work in my part of the house.
I might have asked to move into the bedroom upstairs, the one located over the garage, with slanted windows along the roof. It was the room my father had first offered to me, thinking I would like it the most because it was large, with a fireplace, and its own Juliet balcony with stairs leading down to the courtyard. When he offered it, he said I might sneak out at night, and winked. But that room had since been turned into a guest room, and when I finally asked to move, he said no.
“I’m cold,” I said to my father in the kitchen in the morning. “Would you get the heater fixed?”
He pulled an apple juice from the fridge. “Nope. Not until we renovate the kitchen,” he said, “and we’re not going to do that anytime soon.”
The next weekend, I parked my bike outside a clothing shop called Roxy, a white cube with English punk music blasting at noon, racks of clothing hanging so high the clothing brushed against my cheeks: short, loose jackets with shoulder pads, pleated pants, T-shirts in bright pastels. I’d been there with my mother, among the pleated, silky pants and patterned shirts and music, and I’d come back to feel the familiar surroundings. When I walked out of the shop, the bike was gone.
I figured my father would get me another one, now that he didn’t have to pay for the car service or the private school. Also—although I couldn’t articulate this—I had a feeling he owed me. I thought he and Laurene would come to understand that, and try to make it up to me; that he would pity me, eventually, and it would hit him.
The feeling of being owed was like a cloud darkening the air around me that would lift and disperse when my father was kind to me, but then settle again, thickly. I couldn’t get it to go away for good.
Anyway, I needed a bike now that I was supposed to get myself around.
“Lis,” he said, when I told him about the bike, “you’re not doing a great job keeping track of stuff.” It was morning at the table with my father, Laurene, Reed, and me.
“I’m trying.” I hoped Laurene would come to my rescue.
“You’re letting things slide,” he said.
“It was a mistake.”
“Well, I have an idea. I’ll get you a new bike if you do the dishes. Every night. And babysit whenever we need you.”
“Okay,” I said quickly. It was a bad deal and I knew it. I should have negotiated. I was certain he knew it was a bad deal too, but I thought that if they observed me take it anyway, they’d be more generous with me. It would compensate for the way I was absent before. It would give me a chance to prove my dedication.
The dishwasher that came with the house was built into the kitchen island and didn’t work, and my father said he wouldn’t replace it, so I did the dishes by hand with a sherbet-colored sponge. I stood on the cold terracotta tiles, seeing my reflection in the window turned into a mirror at night, and lined up the plates to dry in the slats of a wooden rack. The requests that had seemed oppressive and Sisyphean at my mother’s house—to make the bed, set the table, clean the counters, write thank-you notes—I did now, mostly, without anyone bugging me.
When I finished the dishes, I looked through the family photographs in a shoebox kept in a kitchen drawer, noticing how many pictures there were of my brother, how few of me. I flipped through the stack, removing the pictures of myself I didn’t like. Maybe they’d notice there were too few and realize their mistake in not taking more.
After they put my brother to sleep, my father would