“I don’t care about any of the things you want to teach me,” I said, and I heard a hiss in the back of my throat, like air escaping from an overinflated ball.
“That’s not a luxury you’re afforded,” she said, the faintest hint of dark clouds beginning to gather around her head. I was steaming, though, and I wanted to push; I could feel the heat boiling off my skin. “You’re edging closer and closer to testing the boundaries,” she said. “Do you need a reminder of what happens when you push the limits in this house?”
“What limits?” I snapped back. “Nothing is allowed in this house! Oh, wow, I get an hour of TV per day after all my schoolwork and chores and if I haven’t offended the warden! Wow, that hour of TV really makes my other twenty-three worth living; it’s a standard of living one step above life in a French prison a couple centuries ago.”
“If you’d like, I can take away your TV and your copy of ‘The Man in the Iron Mask’ as well,” my mom snarked. “Then you wouldn’t have a frame of comparison for the tragic cruelties of your life, and maybe you’d realize that you’ve got a bed to sleep in and enough food to eat, somewhere warm to live, and safety from all the other dangers you don’t even know exist out in the world—”
“Because you won’t let me out in the world to see.” I glared at her. “It’s all a big mystery, and when you walk out the door every day and shut it behind you so I can’t see what’s going on, you leave me here in the dark – unless we’re talking about the times you lock me in the box, because then you REALLY leave me in the dark—”
“Someday you’ll understand,” she said, a fire taking over in her, her hair bobbing as she shook her head. “Someday you’ll see, and realize how lucky you were I protected you all these years, kept you safe, even if you don’t like the way I do it—”
“You always say that, you self-righteous bitch!” I let it fly before I could stop myself. My shoulders and chest heaved with the reckless emotion. Mother blanched almost imperceptibly. “Protect me from what? Keep me safe from what? You won’t tell me, you won’t say a damned word about what it is that you’re saving me from. You just throw me in a metal box in order to keep me here,” I gestured at the walls around us, “in this box so we can’t talk about what goes on outside it—”
“We don’t discuss what happens outside these walls,” she almost hissed.
“I’m talking about what happens inside them,” I said. “About you locking me in. Unless it’s all a desolate, post-apocalyptic world outside, you’re keeping me away from something.” I smiled in small triumph. “You can’t keep me in here forever, Mother. Someday—”
She moved fast, faster even than she did when we would spar in the basement while she taught me martial arts. “Not today,” she said, her face a mask and her hand gripping my upper arm, pinching into the flesh and causing me to cry out as she jerked me off-balance. “And I’ve had enough of your smart mouth, your casual disdain, your insolence—”
“And I’ve had enough of you!” I yelled, and she jerked my arm again, dragging me along behind her toward the basement. “I hate you! I hate you!”
I couldn’t see her face, but her dark hair swayed as she pulled me down the steps. I tried to resist, and halfway down I caught the railing. She pulled me so hard my sweaty fingers slipped off of it and my knee hit the floorboard. I felt the skin tear and cried out, but she never stopped. I was forced back to my feet as she half-walked, half-carried me down the stairs. When we reached the landing I tried to pull away again. I could feel the tears coursing down my cheeks, partly from rage, partly from the humiliation of having my whole person violated by being treated so roughly. I could feel the trickle of blood running down my shin under my pants.
“Someday you’ll realize,” she said, dragging me around in front of her as she stopped at the foot of the wooden stairs, “all this is for you.”
“I don’t care about someday! I hate you!”
“So be it,” she said, unflinching, unreacting, emotionless. “But you will still respect me – and the rules. And you will obey.”
She twisted my arm again and I cried out as she pulled me the last few steps toward the box. It stood a hair over six feet in height, metal, a couple feet deep and a few feet wide – big enough to imprison me easily enough – and with enough space that I could slide to my haunches and sit with my knees folded in front of me, so I could rest my head on them and fall asleep. “I’ll never respect you,” I said. “I hate you and I always will.”