I'd Rather Burn Than Bloom by Shannon C. F. Rogers

Author:Shannon C. F. Rogers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

Chapter Thirteen

THEN

“You ready, Short Stack?”

Dad’s standing in the doorway to my bedroom, wearing a tie, which just looks ridiculous. There’s nobody who looks more unnatural wearing a tie than him. It doesn’t match his shirt and it isn’t even straight, but he is wearing it. For her.

I glare at his reflection in my mirror, where I’m swiping at my eyes with a cotton ball doused in makeup remover, because my mascara and eyeliner are all smeared and running down my cheeks because I have just been crying, and screaming, while my mom cried and screamed right back at me.

She was screaming at me because I had too much mascara on, and too much eyeliner, so it’s ironic that both are now so commingled with tears that they are the consistency of sludge and I have to take it all off, anyway.

We’re late.

Mom is getting an award tonight, from the Filipino-American Association, for her community service.

Yvonne is also getting an award. The Outstanding Youth Award. Now that we’re freshmen, I would feel kind of dorky to be called a youth, and what she is being awarded for, exactly, I do not know.

Probably for her outstanding ability to put on enough eyeliner to look pretty but not quite enough to look like a dead person, which is how much eyeliner I had put on for the awards ceremony, according to my mom.

“Maybe we can just enjoy the night,” he says.

I look at him, in his tie, which I know he hates wearing, and nod.

But then Mom appears beside him in the doorway. She barely comes up to his shoulder. She’s wearing a dress that I’ve never seen before. The bags under her eyes are caked with makeup two shades too light for her.

She has that face on, her determined face, determined not to let this die, not yet.

“And why,” she asks, “can’t you wear that dress we got you for confirmation?”

My blood turns to acid. It feels like we’re always picking up in the middle of an argument. In the middle of a sentence. In the middle of a long debate that will never end and I can never win.

She pushes past Dad, into my room, which I hate. Dad knows better than to enter. He stays behind the invisible line at the doorframe.

“Mom, get out of my room!”

“You never wear that dress, and it was expensive.”

Ignoring me, like I don’t even exist, she pries open my closet doors, and a pile of neglected dirty laundry spills out.

“Mom, stop!”

“Oh my God,” she says, bending at the waist and scooping up all the dirty shirts, and, horrifyingly, underwear, that have fallen out of the hamper.

“Asawa, we need to get going,” Dad says.

“Let me just put a load of laundry in, because our daughter can’t even take care of herself.”

“I can do it later, Mom. Let’s just go!”

“Are you going to change?” she asks.

I smooth down the front of my shirt, which is actually Dad’s. Something that he never wears and he was going to give away, but he said I could have it.

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