Free Her: A Memoir by Christa Parravani Page B

is such a bitch.
    AUGUST 20, 1989
    Dear Diary,
    Mom and my stepdad have been yelling at each other a lot because he says she is never at home. My stepdad is a jerk. I hate him. He is always pinching Mom’s butt and calling my sister and me fat. He should be nice to Mom. She does everything for him but wipe his ass and for all I know she does that, too. Mom went back to college this month to get her degree. She said she is tired of waiting tables. I don’t think I’ll ever go to college. I don’t think you need a degree to be a rock star. Mom looks tired all the time.
    AUGUST 28, 1989
    Dear Diary,
    School started yesterday. One of my teacher’s names is Bunny. What kind of name is that? One of her legs is shorter than the other and she likes to pull herself up on two desks and swing back and forth in the aisle. She wears weird shoes. She is pretty okay but the rest of my teachers are idiots. By the way, I am still grounded. I took off my prison shirt for school and wore my Warrant shirt instead. I don’t want the whole world to know I am an inmate. One day I’ll get out of here.
    SEPTEMBER 12, 1989
    Dear Diary,
    My sister and I saw my mom kissing one of her teachers at the beach so we spit in his shoes and took a walk in the other direction. I am never going to tell Mom that I saw that. I think she feels guilty, though, because she gave us extra money to buy French fries and ice cream at the pier. We usually aren’t allowed to eat crap.
    MAY 1, 1990
    Dear Diary,
    Mom says our stepdad is leaving home for a little while and that we are moving back to New York, after she finishes college. She says the three of us can live with Grandma until she can save up enough money to buy a house. Mom didn’t say if our stepdad is going to live with Grandma, too. I hope not. I say don’t let the door hit him on the ass on the way out. He is not my real dad anyway. Mom has been crying a lot, especially to really bad love songs on the radio. We are not grounded anymore. Mom says she doesn’t have time right now to keep us out of trouble. If you ask me, no man is worth crying over, especially not a big Marine who walks out on his wife and kids and screams like a girl over something as small as a spider.
    Mike left our family on a North Carolina high summer afternoon. He wanted no more of the Marines, either, and didn’t reenlist; his plan was to move back to upstate New York to be nearer to family. He packed his clothes and his extensive collection of cassette tapes and paperback mystery novels into a car top carrier attached to his tan Nissan Sentra and pulled away. Cara and I did a dance in the driveway as his car crested a right toward the highway and out of our neighborhood. Mom wept on the living room sofa in a room full of boxes. He’d wanted nothing in the divorce but out.
    “Good riddance to your Ben-Gay-smelling bathrobe and beer burps,” Cara yelled at his fading taillights.

 
    Chapter 7
    We only pretended to be each other once.
    We were in seventh grade and had just moved back to Albany. We invited our boyfriends over for the evening to watch television. The room was lit by the glow of low-wattage lightbulbs and the ambient gleam of a game show. The boys ignored us and dipped their hands into the large plastic bowl of popcorn between them. Cara and I got up and went into the kitchen.
    “These guys are lame,” she said. “Let’s teach them a lesson.” Cara pulled her shirt over her head and passed it to me. I did the same. We wore matching jeans and brown oxfords.
    “Let me fix your hair,” I whispered, my heart beating hard in my chest. “Can we really do this?” I asked, a flutter of remorse caught in my throat.
    “Give me one reason we shouldn’t.”
    “It’s wrong,” I said and pulled the band from my own hair and tied hers into a tight ponytail on top of her head.
    “Don’t be so serious,” Cara scolded. “It’s all in good fun.” She fluffed my bangs with her fingers and smoothed my fly-aways.