Free The Finer Points of Becoming Machine by Emily Andrews Page B

that order.
    I’m thinking, remembering, but I’m on full alert just sitting there, ready to listen when I have to.
    My dad continues, unaware that anything is running through my head. ‘Do you have any idea what it was like for me to get a phone call saying that you were in this…’ he looks around distastefully ‘…place?’
    Again, I feel ashamed at being here. I don’t say anything. And then I feel his eyes staring at me. He is expecting a response.
    ‘No Dad. I don’t know what it was like for you. I’m sorry.’
    Our relationship is always going to be like this, I think to myself. I am never going to be good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, or well behaved enough to make him proud of me.
    At school I was the weird kid, and since I had no friends and my home life was miserable, I began to escape into books. I was fascinated with a character in one of my science fiction books. An android. I loved how he didn’t feel anything, how he was so human but didn’t have the same pesky emotions that I couldn’t seem to control within myself.
    I decided that I wanted to be an android. Whenever I got upset, I would repeat certain phrases to myself, over and over and over again, like a mechanical thing, until I felt calm and emotionless and in control once more.
    And if I couldn’t control my home life, I could control other things; like whether I ate or not, or even whether I wanted to have feelings for anything at all.
    The worse the fighting got, the less I ate and the less I allowed myself to feel. In exasperation one day, my mom finally started screaming at me and crying, ‘What is wrong with you Emma? You’re like a
machine; you don’t eat, you don’t feel, you don’t smile. What is wrong?’
    My dad runs his hands through his hair and sighs deeply. I wonder if maybe he knows that I hadn’t been thinking of what kind of phone call he’d get when I was admitted to this place. I don’t want to dwell on that though. Thankfully, he changes the subject.
    ‘Jesus Emma, you look like hell. They have you all doped up, don’t they? What do they have you on?’
    I try to remember the names of the medications, but my mind is swirling from the meds and from sitting in this room with him. I just can’t remember. I begin to panic when I realise that I am unable to answer his question, and I start to hyperventilate.
    Back to my memories, back to my memories, back to my memories. They finally tired of 
fighting all the time and I started to see the change in my mother. Despite the bruises, she had reached the point where either she was going to die, or
he
was.
    When I was thirteen, they sat us down at the table and told us that they couldn’t get along any more, and that they thought it was best for everyone if they got a divorce. They said something about how they had
agreed
to
disagree
and told us that everything was going to be fine. Just words, telling us that they’d take care of us and not put us in the middle, and that it wasn’t our fault. I actually thanked God when they told me the news. At least I had the hope that something was going to change.
    And oh, change did happen. My father threw my mother out of the house with nothing more than the clothes on her back. We didn’t see her except on the weekends, and more often than not, my father would make one of us stay behind to keep him company.
    My parents kept fighting though, and it became scary. One minute my father
was drunk and screaming death threats at my mother, the next day they had
decided to call off the divorce and pretend like we were suddenly going to become some perfect family. It never lasted. It would all fall apart a few weeks later in some new violent and dramatic argument. Repeat
ad nauseam.
    It came to the point where they hated each other so much that they tried to push their hatred of each other on us.
I never bought it though, which pissed them both off. I couldn’t understand why they, as adults, couldn’t understand that I