Free The Voice inside My Head by S.J. Laidlaw

to the job of parenting us was when she forgot to pick me up from kindergarten on my first day of school. Pat was only six, but she showed up at the classroom door and made the teacher let me go home with her. I threw a tantrum, wanting to wait for my mom, but Pat insisted Mom wasn’t coming. Turns out she was right. Mom had fallen asleep watching her daytime soaps. It was years of that kind of thing before I realized she had a drinking problem, but I think Pat always knew.”
    “My daddy died a few months ago,” says Reesie quietly. “He was working on a ship off the coast of West Africa and took a fever.”
    I turn to her but she’s staring down at the water, so I flip my hand over and curl my fingers through hers.
    “How old are you?” I ask.
    “Sixteen.” She says it like a challenge, like it might be too old for something or too young.
    “Don’t you go to school?”
    She looks at me then, her eyes blazing.
    “You really are dumb, aren’t you?” She snatches her hand away. “Didn’t I just tell you my daddy died? You think my family’s got money to send me to school now?” She scrambles to her feet.
    I leap to mine, ready with an apology. My towel does not leap with me.
    “Ah,” I say.
    “You dropped something,” she says.
    “Right.” I snatch up my towel and hastily wrap it around my waist.
    The first attempt only somewhat covers my butt, and one end hangs ineffectively down my leg. My equipment is still feeling the cooling breeze off the Caribbean. I turn my back on her to make some strategic adjustments.
    “Everything all right over there?” she asks sweetly. I can tell she’s enjoying this.
    Would it be ungallant to shove her off the dock? She’s an islander; I’m sure she can swim.
    “Fine,” I snap.
    When I turn around, she’s sitting down again, swinging her bare feet and grinning.
    I hesitate. I don’t much feel like sitting with her anymore, but I don’t have anything else to do. I thump down and resume my fish watch.
    “So why did your sister come out here if that wasn’t in her plan?” she asks.
    “She and my mom fought all the time. Mom was always pushing her. Nothing Pat did was ever good enough.” I’mnot sure how to explain why Mom was so hard on Pat when I never really understood it myself. “Don’t get me wrong. She’s proud of Pat. She used to brag about her all the time when Pat wasn’t around. She had a box in her room where she saved every one of Pat’s report cards and every award. I found it once when I was looking through her closet.” I don’t mention I was rifling through Mom’s pockets for cash to buy drugs. “I don’t think Pat ever knew about the box, and I never told her either. I wish I’d told her, but I don’t know if it would have made any difference. As angry as Mom was at Pat, Pat gave it back a hundred times over. I think it might have enraged Pat more to think Mom was hoarding proof of her achievements — like Mom was trying to share credit for her success.”
    “It must have been hard to be in the middle of that,” Reesie says sympathetically, taking my hand again.
    I give her a crooked smile. “I don’t know if I’d say I was in the middle, exactly; more like on the sidelines, worrying about how it was all going to play out.” I don’t tell her that sometimes I envied Pat her battles with Mom. How twisted is that? But at least Mom noticed her.
    “So you supported Pat coming here to get away from your mom?”
    “Something like that,” I say, feeling my face heat up. I look away.
    “I’m really sorry I said mean things about her,” Reesie says. “I only saw her drunk once or twice and, even then, she wasn’t really drunk. And she was always nice to me, not like some. She gave me a book once. Sounds stupid, but that really meant something to me. I came in to clean herroom and she was reading it. I asked her if it was good and she offered to give it to me when she was done. Didn’t occur to her I might not be much of a