Free Rule #9 by Sheri Duff

shove it back in the refrigerator, ignoring the conversation she wants me to engage in. I’m still mad at her. Nine more days and she’s shipping me off to the enemy. I shuffle through the top shelf, searching for anything that resembles real food.
    She bumps my butt, pushing me aside and grabbing a regular raspberry yogurt from the shelf on the door. “Call your Dad. Since he got back you’ve barely spoken to him. He misses you.”
    I roll my eyes. “I talked to him at school the other day. He’s got Alicia and football. He’s fine.”
    “She’s not Di—”
    “Mom,” I interrupt. My voice is firm and warning. I don’t want to hear that woman’s name ever again. It’s not allowed. I won’t allow it. My mom could care less, she’s over it. Not me. “You do just fine without him, why can’t I?” I ask.
    “He’s your dad . I’d give anything to have had more time with mine,” she says.
    Now I feel like shit. Her dad died when I was little. He was her hero.
    “Unlike your dad, my father doesn’t care. And even if he did, I’m sure she won’t let him for long.”
    “Alicia is not her ,” Mom says.
    “Just wait. She’ll turn.” I don’t have time for this today. I have to get to school. I head out the door.
    “He’s still your dad and he loves you,” she hollers.
    When my father first left, that skank hoarded his time and I rarely saw him. My mother’s excuse was, “He’s going through a selfish phase. He’s lost balance. Men don’t understand balance.” No shit, when you leave your wife for a skank you’re going to lose some balance.
    I miss my dad. Not the dad he is now, but the dad he used to be. It’s not like I want to spend tons of time with him. I have a life. But I miss going to see my dad’s artwork on display. My father, successful accountant by day and artist by night (during the off-season, of course), used to love his hobby, before he lost what my mother calls “balance.”
    My dad sketched birds, flowers, trees. Some of the birds looked like cartoon characters. One of his framed paintings hangs in my room, a blue ostrich with a long beak. The long legs make the character look like a unique stick figure. “You’d look like that if you were a bird, Massie girl,” he said as he hung the painting across from my bed.
    “Are you saying I have a long nose?” I asked him.
    “Your nose is perfect, string bean,” Dad said. “I love your pollywogs.”
    I’d wanted to be just like him. “It’s you, Daddy. See, you’re the coach pollywog helping the football players,” I said, looking up at my dad with pride. I loved when we drew together. “I’m gonna draw a whistle on a lanyard too.”
    “Just make sure the lanyard is royal blue. That’s Pine Gulch High School’s main color.”
    My father stopped drawing when the skank entered the picture. The few pieces he displayed at the library and the event center dwindled to nothing. So did the time I spent with him. Between football and his girlfriend, there wasn’t any more time for art—or me.
    What if Alicia doesn’t recognize that my dad possesses such talent? What if she tries to keep his passion for art in check? And if she finds out it is something my dad and I have in common, what will she do with that?
    I’m so scared that we’ll never go back to the way it was that it’s just better to let it go. That way I don’t have to continue to miss it.
    #
    Five more long, grueling minutes before the bell rings for lunch and we are free. The room smells stale, like someone took off their shoes after football practice. Half the class is asleep, some with their eyes open. I’m not sure what is worse, the conversation with my mother this morning or sitting in Reeves’s class, struggling to start our assigned reading, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I don’t like fictional work based off of true stories, especially when they’re about murdering an entire family. There’s enough of that on the news and it’s