The Diary of Darcy J. Rhone (8 page)

BOOK: The Diary of Darcy J. Rhone
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The only person who seemed to respect and accept me was Mr. Tully, our school guidance counselor, who I was required to visit about my falling grades and the fact that I was, in everyone’s words, not living up to my potential. I pretended to be annoyed when the pink counselor slips came, but I secretly loved spending time in his office, even though he constantly nagged me to sing in the school liturgical choir, join the symphonic or jazz band, or at least play the percussion in our high school musical. (
Not
gonna happen—any of it.) Mr. Tully was young and funny and handsome with light brown eyes and dimples that showed up even when he wasn’t smiling. But more than his looks or fun personality, he was the only member of the faculty—the only adult, for that matter—who really seemed to get that being a teenager generally sucked and that it certainly wasn’t the best time of your life the way my parents always said it should be and the way it seemed to be for Charlotte. When pressed, I could even get him to admit that some of our school rules were overkill, such as the requirement that every class start with a prayer (although he was an alum himself and promised that one day I’d be proud of it, and if I put my mind to it, this place could be a launching pad for greatness as it had been for the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey). But for all his coolness, I never opened up to him completely. I believed he liked me, but I was well aware that he was getting
paid
to have empathy—so just in case, I wasn’t about to admit to him just how shitty I felt on the inside.

To that point, during one counselor visit about my failing grade in chemistry, the subject of my sister came up, and Mr. Tully came right out and asked me the question nobody else had ever dared ask: Did it ever bother me that I was adopted and Charlotte wasn’t? I thought hard about the answer, waited a beat longer than felt comfortable before I shook my head no. I wondered if it was the truth. I honestly didn’t think that was the problem. Charlotte never lorded this over me, or mentioned it at all, and we had very little sibling rivalry, kind of weird given that we were only eleven months and one grade apart.

I still found myself resenting her for reasons I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Yes, she had a great figure (or at least
a
figure while I was scrawny, flat-chested, and barely five feet two), more classic features, and the best, thick, curly hair. But I preferred my gray-blue eyes and blond hair to her muddy brown combination. She did better in school, but only because she worked twice as hard and cared three times more. She was a far superior athlete; I was a middling, retired-from-the-JV-squad volleyball player, while she was a star swimmer, breaking all kinds of school and even citywide records, routinely making headlines in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Our dining room table doubled as a scrapbook center, a newspaper-clipping shrine to Charlotte’s prowess in the pool. But even that didn’t faze me. I had no desire to train twenty hours a week at anything, even drumming, and jumping into a cold pool on dark winter mornings seemed like a sick form of torture.

So if it wasn’t her miraculous conception, her looks, her brains, or her athletic ability, I wondered why I was jealous, sometimes even wishing to be her. I wasn’t sure, but had the feeling it had something to do with the way Charlotte felt on the inside. She genuinely seemed to like who she was—or at least had the luxury of giving it no thought whatsoever, all of which translated to massive popularity. Everyone knew her and loved her regardless of clique—the jocks, geeks, burn-outs, and hoosiers—while I felt downright invisible most of the time.

On one particularly bad day during my junior year, the gulf between Charlotte and me was illustrated in dramatic fashion. First, I failed an American history pop quiz on the one day that week I had blown off my homework. Then, I got my period all over my khaki pants, which was called to my attention as I did a problem
wrong
on the whiteboard in trig. Third, I heard that Tricia Henry had started a rumor that I was a lesbian (which wouldn’t matter if it was true, although she was too much of an ignoramus to realize that distinction) simply based on the fact that I play the drums.

Meanwhile, Charlotte made the homecoming court. As a
sophomore
—virtually unheard of at DuBourg. To her credit, she looked genuinely surprised, and completely humble as she elegantly made her way down from the bleachers to the center of the gym where Seth O’Malley, the most beautiful boy in the entire school, gave her a high five and threw his muscled arm around her neck. I didn’t want to be on the homecoming court, nor did I want our entire class body watching me, in bloodstained pants or otherwise, but I ached with envy over how effortless it all was for her. How she could stand there with no trace of self-consciousness, even waving at a group of obnoxious freshmen boys bellowing, “Hottie Lottie!” It didn’t help matters that Belinda shot me sympathetic stares during the pep rally and asked me no fewer than four times if I was jealous of my little sister, a more direct version of Mr. Tully’s question. Clearly, I was
supposed
to feel that way, even in the eyes of my guidance counselor and best friend.

Later that day, I passed Charlotte in the hall in a pack of happy, pretty girls. She was still wearing her red sash from the assembly over her long-sleeved, button-down white blouse and red plaid kilt. (I could never understand how she could make a uniform look good when I looked like crap every day. Then again maybe it was because I typically went with the more comfortable but decidedly unstylish polo shirt and khaki pants option.) We made eye contact, and she eagerly smiled at me, pausing as if on the verge of breaking free of her posse. But I didn’t give her the chance. I put my head down and kept walking. I glanced back just long enough to tell I had hurt her feelings, maybe even tarnished her big day. Instead of feeling guilty, I felt a dark, shameful satisfaction that I had managed to wipe that near-constant grin off her face.

It was short-lived, though, as she was back to her same old cheery self that evening, chatting with our mother in the kitchen like the best friends they were. The two had heart-to-hearts all the time, if you can call surface revelations such as “if only green beans tasted as good as chocolate cake” and “isn’t Suri Cruise precious?!” heart-to-hearts, while she and my father bonded over her swimming. There were few things as sacred as sports to my dad, and I watched him brimming with pride whenever they returned from her meets, memorizing every boring race, then rehashing the details, over and over and over. So I guess it was inevitable that our parents would come to like her better, all but saying the words they were thinking: “Why can’t you be more like your sister?”

Deep down, I knew they
loved
us both equally, and that any favoritism had to do with the fact that she brought them daily pleasure and was just plain easier to live with—not that she was their biological kid. Yet over time, that fact certainly didn’t help matters in my head. Nor did the fact that they all looked alike. Even my parents could pass for siblings, with their athletic builds, curly brown hair, and perky Irish noses complete with a smattering of outdoorsy freckles. Their personalities were similar, too, all of them hardwired to be cheerful and outgoing, even with strangers. The three of them all talked nonstop about anything and everything and nothing. They could talk to a freakin’ wall while I couldn’t conceive of making small talk just for the heck of it, especially with a stranger (much to the annoyance of my boss at Schnuck’s who seemed to think that chatting up the customer while I bagged their groceries was crucial to their shopping experience). It was just another example of me feeling like an outsider.

 

 

Things went downhill my senior year, the chilly standoff with my parents escalating to an outright war—and believe me, my parents didn’t subscribe to the “choose your battles” strategy.
Everything
was a battle with them. We fought over the volume of my music (my iPod was going to make me go deaf; my drums disturbed the neighbors). We fought over my decision to be a vegetarian (unwise for a growing girl). We fought over my Facebook page (somehow they found the status update “my parents suck” offensive). We fought about my messy room (that they weren’t supposed to go into in the first place). We fought about the cigarettes and bottle of vodka they “found”
in
my messy room (earning them another status update comparing them to the Gestapo). We fought over the Catholic church, my attendance at mass, the fact that I was agnostic (okay, maybe this was just to piss them off—I did
sorta
believe in Him). We fought over Belinda after she got busted at school with a dime bag (thank God they didn’t find my dime bag during their unconstitutional search and seizure). We fought over my ten o’clock curfew that I broke more in protest of how stupidly early it was than because I had anything that interesting to do (translation:
nothing
interesting to do and certainly nothing that involved boys—only the lame ones liked me). We fought over my shitty grades (and shittier attitude). We even managed to fight over my shockingly high SAT score—because, in their words, it was further evidence that I wasn’t living up to my potential. And most of all, we fought over the fact that I wasn’t going to college—not even to the School of Music at the University of Missouri, Mr. Tully’s grand plan for me (which I might have considered if I didn’t have to study any other subject or see anyone else from my high school while I was there). We fought over
everything.

Then one freezing January night (we fought over the thermostat, too—there was frost on the inside of my windows, for Christ’s sake), I woke up to go the bathroom and overheard my parents talking in the kitchen. As I crept down the hall, I felt oddly soothed by the cadence of their voices and the sound of my mother’s teaspoon clinking against her cup, just as I secretly loved the sound of Charlotte snoring on the nights she had a bad dream and asked to sleep in my room. For one second, I felt like my little-girl self again—and wondered why I couldn’t just will myself to be happy.

That’s when I overheard the word “adoption.” Then: “her mother.”

I froze, my cheeks burning despite the fact that I was shivering, then crept closer to the banister, craning to listen, hoping I had heard them wrong.

But no. My mother continued, “Who knows what
she
was like. Who knows what really happened.”

“I know,” my father said. “The agency could have lied.”

My heart pounded as I kept listening.
Depression

mental illness

alcohol and drugs

teen pregnancy.

Their words slashed through me, filling me with rage. I knew I was a difficult, moody disappointment, but in a lot of ways, it all seemed like typical teenager stuff—hardly a big enough crime for them to start casting stones at the woman who birthed me and had given them the “treasure” they always claimed I was. Yet the worst part was that suddenly, it all rang true to me. Their theories about my birth mother would certainly explain a few things, that’s for sure. Maybe she was the root of my problem—she
and
my birth dad. And so now, along with the rage, I realized I was feeling shame, too. A lovely combination.

“Do you think we can talk her into going to college?” I heard my mother say.

“If she even gets in.”

My mother said even if I did, it made no sense to pay all that money if I wasn’t going to try. It was bad enough that they had to pull teeth to get me to fill out the application for Missouri. They weren’t going to keep spoon-feeding me. I’d have to find out on my own what the world was like.

That’s when they took it to a whole new level, saying you couldn’t really make someone change. My dad said he would have killed to go to college. My mom said if only I tried half as hard as Charlotte. Then they circled right back to where they started, blaming my biology, coming right out and saying
it’s the only thing that explains the difference between the girls.
In other words, nature over nurture. I wasn’t
their
fault; I was
her
fault. I felt myself blaming her, too, while a sad irony washed over me. Even though she had given me away, this was the first time in my life that I had truly felt rejected, disowned, downright unloved. And it was my own parents’ fault.

Devastated, I returned to bed, putting my face under the covers, clenching my fists, telling myself not to cry if only because it would make me look like shit in the morning. I couldn’t afford to be one drop more ugly than I already was.

I squeezed my eyes shut, thinking of her as I often did at night, a rapid succession of faces flashing in my brain, until I settled where I usually did: on a cross between Meryl Streep and Laura Linney. But this time, she was a sickly, crackhead version of the two actresses, my fantasies of a glamorous, successful mother quickly fading.

In that moment, I decided I was going to find her. I was going to find out the truth about who she was and why she had given me away. I would turn eighteen in just a few months, and the day I did, the very
morning
I did, I would call the agency and get her name and address. Until then, I would save up for a ticket to wherever she was. I would show my parents, show
everyone
. Show them what, I wasn’t exactly sure, but I would figure that out once I got there.

 

 

So on April Fools’ Day (the biggest
joke
of a birthday), I called the agency, then, as directed, sent them a fax with my social security number and signature. Two minutes later, I had an answer in my in-box. My hands shaking, I read:
Marian Caldwell,
along with a New York City address. It took everything I had not to Google her, but I worried that if I did, I’d somehow find an excuse to chicken out, even if it was as simple as her looking mean in her picture. I didn’t want anything to sway me from my plan. I didn’t want to write her a letter and wait for months for it to be answered—or worse,
not
answered. I didn’t want anything to be on her terms when everything had been on her terms in the beginning. It was my turn. And this was my way.

BOOK: The Diary of Darcy J. Rhone
5.13Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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