spring

The alarm went off, blaring like a siren. Rolling over in bed, her long black locks tangled as they fell over her head, Lucita groaned. Winter vacation had been too short, too wonderful, and too shameful. She wanted nothing more than to crawl deep under her covers and hide. She didn’t want to see her friends, especially Liz. Groaning at the thought of her friend, she covered her face with her hands, groaning some more.

“Come on, Lucita,” said her mother, storming into her room, no knock, and tossing Luci the clothes she had picked out the night before. “We have to get to school early to meet with the counselor and discuss your schedule.”

Another groan escaped her as she sat up to look at her glaring mother. Her nasty habit had caught up with her, all because of her cat and her aunt. Visiting her family had been a terrible idea.

“Get up, Luci, now.” That icy edge that had driven them apart for years had returned there. Lucita wanted to scream at her, watching her storm out of the room. Luci grabbed her black and blue polo, which was just a little too tight, and showed the barest of her middrift with her jeans, which now hung a little too loose.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she wondered what bothered her mother more. That she had been so blind and missed every single sign of Lucita’s cutting, or that the vision of her perfect daughter was shattered?

Perfection was an illusion. Intangible and stupid. But her mother, the perfectionist, saw what she wanted to and ignored the rest.

In all honesty, Lucita didn’t care whether her mother saw it or not. The woman was oblivious to her own issues; why would she realize her daughter had any? But there had been a semblance of peace, and now it was all gone.

What a joyous turn her life had taken.

The ride was silent, so silent her ears burned. Lucita hated it. Her mother drove the car with both hands on the wheels, knuckles white from gripping it too tight, her mouth set in a firm line that made her look ten years older. The silence was better, she realized. It was better than the attitude, the admonishment, the disappointment and anger. Every time she spoke to her lately, her words had been laced with perfectly placed vitriol.

Her mother was always good with her words.

The car pulled into the school parking lot. Angrily, her mother got out, yelling at Luci to hurry up. Please, she thought, please don’t scream at me in front of my friends. Please don’t let them be here. Please—she stopped short, catching sight of Silvia, Rebecca, and the others near the school entrance.

“Lucita, hurry up. You’re already making me late for work.” She flinched at her mother’s voice, looking down and away from her friends as she followed her deeper into the school, ashamed and humiliated.

There was no more pretending now.

The school counselor’s office didn’t inspire much confidence in Lucita. There was a desk, two chairs, a lovely love seat in the corner with an armchair across from it, potted plants on the window, and some generic “believe” posters on the wall. There was also a degree on the back wall from Chicago.

Lucita fixated on that degree. She had a master’s degree in child development. A masters. What the hell was she doing in South Florida working at a public high school?

Trying not to fidget in her chair beside her mother, who was radiating waves of anger, she listened to the door click open and shut. The woman who sat across from her was Native American, hair braided, in a beautiful blue pinstripe suit, a beaded necklace breaking up the outfit.

“Hello, I’m Ms. Enno. Now, you called to say that your daughter Lucita here has been harming herself—”

“She’s cutting herself.”

Lucita flinched. “Okay. Well, then, my job is to figure out why. Going forward, however, I will ask that you be a little more…tactful. Relegating her self-harm to one phrase diminishes the pain she’s going through and is counterproductive.”

Lucita stared at this woman who spoke back to her mother. No one ever spoke back to her mother and put her in her place. Hesitantly, she looked at her mother from the corner of her eye.

“Fine, just fix her.”

Something in Lucita finally broke, her own rage and shame bubbling up. “Fix me?” Lucita snapped. “Are you fucking kidding me? I’m not broken! I’m not some stupid little thing that needs to be pieced back together! I’m your daughter, and I’m depressed, and you never listen when I talk to you! I’m sad almost all the time, and you…you’re just pissed that you missed it, that I’ve shattered this image you have of this perfect little daughter. You’re just mad that I ruined this delusion you had that you were a good mother. You’re not!”

“Lucita—”

“Get out!” Lucita screamed, shaking. “I don’t want her here. I want her gone. You have her consent, I’ll do these sessions, but I want this woman out of here!” Her eyes were burning now, tears running down her cheeks.

“Maybe it would be best if we did these sessions privately for the time being. I will keep you appraised of her progress.” Lucita stared out the window, listening to her mother’s chair scrape, the door click, the silence that followed.

She would pay for that later.

“Lucita, she’s gone.”

It took Lucita a moment to pull away from the window and stare back at this woman.

“How pissed was she?”

Ms. Enno’s eyes widened. “She didn’t look upset. She looked…sad.”

Lucita scoffed. “Trust me, I will pay for that little outburst later. I know it.”

“How so?”

Lucita shrugged. “Silence. She’s really good at seething. She’ll make comments, tell me not to speak to her, tell me to go to my room and limit my time with my friends. I’ll be a bird in a gilded cage until I remember that I’m an ungrateful brat and beg for her forgiveness.”

“This sounds like a common occurrence.”

“It’s a pattern I’m familiar with.” She begins picking at her cuticles. “Things were okay for a while. Last year, we fought, and I ran away. It wasn’t the first time I’d done that. But my friend’s mom picked me up and then the next day brought me home and threatened my mom. I didn’t hear exactly what she said; I was in the car, but I knew. And, I mean, this summer, my family screwed up and became the target of her anger, so, for once, we were on the same side.”

“Have you tried to talk to her?”

“She’s not easy to talk to. My mom scares me. And I know most people say that about their parents, but she terrifies me. I can’t…she’s always right and never wrong, and if you tell her and show her that she’s wrong, she blows up. She just…she makes it impossible to talk to her. It’s like this fear, of stepping out of line, of saying or doing something she doesn’t like…you know, one time when I was a kid, I think I was like four or five, we were walking back to her dorm. She went to MIT, and they had family housing. We were walking, and she saw one of her friends. So we stood there for, I don’t know how long, just her chatting with her friend on the sidewalk. I told her I had to use the potty. She told me to wait and hold it in. So I did…until I couldn’t anymore.

“I wet myself, and my mom’s response was to lock me in the bathroom for an hour without any underwear or any pants.”

Lucita hated that memory, but it was the one that perfectly summed up her relationship with her mother.

“That sounds traumatic.”

“I mean, I was a kid. I told her I had to use the bathroom, and she was too busy talking with her friend to take care of me. Looking back, I’m not surprised. My mom does whatever she wants without thinking of other people. She’s a child, everyone says so, all her friends. They all called me forty when I was four.”

“Hmm. And do you feel that way? Like you’re the adult in the relationship?”

Lucita scoffed. “Yeah. I am the adult. I have to take care of her. I have to cater to all her outbursts. I have to bend my will to hers, to her mood swings. How do I talk to someone who acts like a child? Who is so quick to outbursts and anger and blows up at almost everything I do. I have to be perfect for her. I have to be perfect to keep her happy, to keep her from lashing out. I have to. Never mind that I hate looking in the mirror, that I’m angry, that everything hurts, that there are days where…where I just want the pain to stop. That is less than perfect.”

Silence filled the air between them. “Do you think that’s why you started cutting yourself? Because you were forced to grow up so quickly?”

Lucita shrugged, feeling weary. “I don’t feel like talking anymore. Can I go to class?”

Ms. Enno stared at her with unnerving grey eyes. They were soft gentle, as was her smile. “Why don’t we just hang out until the first period ends. Then you can leave. In the meantime, let’s figure out a meeting schedule.”

Lucita nodded, letting the time go by, reading her book once the schedule was set. When the bell rang, Ms. Enno gave her a hall pass and let her go. If only she’d had her cell. She’d text Cyrus, or Jason, or Blake, maybe even Francis. No, not Francis; she could never text him again. Heck, she’d text Matthew over him. But why bother any of them. They had their own problems.