Baby Teeth

It was hard to pour endless love into someone who wouldn't love you back. No one could do it forever

She resented her body's betrayal. She still couldn't express how insecure it made her, how she lived on a precipice. The most basic parts of her could fail, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Sometimes she struggled with resentment watching her family eat a meal that she prepared. People took eating and shitting for granted, like the continuous beating of their hearts, the inevitable protection of their skin. They didn't think about their intestines doing everything wrong, fucking up the basic process of digestion.

. . . her energy existed in precious spools that came unwound faster than she liked.

How much had her young brain already misconstrued? Observing, absorbing. Warping, twisting. Drawing conclusions about everything they did.

She needed to disconnect a few times a day, like a battery in reverse that recharged when it wasn’t plugged in.

The baby wasn't supposed to remind her of an internal mass of pooling waste.

Sociopaths are liars who manipulate toward a desired outcome, but they tend not be as callous as psychopaths. Psychopathy can be genetic, the structure of the brain, and it can include chemical and physical components—a lesion on a particular part of the brain, not unlike the sociopath—but it’s marked by more-aggressive, remorseless traits: where a sociopath might manipulate, the psychopath attacks

Words, ever unreliable, were no one’s friend.

Now that she knew the name of the game - Scare Mommy - she should be able to defend herself. But goosebumps rose on her skin, even under the heat of the water, when she thought about her creepy daughter. The whites of her eyes. Her ability to sneak up on her as she slept.

It was hard to pour endless love into someone who wouldn’t love you back. No one could do it forever.

But she knew how adults thought. They liked what they could see right in front of them, solid things. They encouraged imagination but hated anything imaginary.

Hanna kept her words to herself because they gave her power. Inside her, they retained their purity. She scrutinized Mommy and other adults, studied them. Their words fell like dead bugs from their mouths. A rare person, like Daddy, spoke in butterflies, whispering colors that made her gasp. Inside, she was a kaleidoscope of racing, popping, bursting exclamations, full of wonder and question marks. Patterns swirled, and within every secret pocket she’d stashed a treasure, some stolen, some found.

Hanna loved how the pencils and crayons looked, with their pointy unused tips. She liked the quarter-size circles of watercolor paint, like frozen puddles from a dripping rainbow.

We had an accident--' Suzette cut Alex off. 'Hanna's trying to kill me.

She dreaded all the necessary doctor appointments where she was supposed to surrender her own privacy and fears of being tortured for the benefit of the baby. Like it was already someone else's body and their needs superseded her own.

To think that children everywhere sat at similar desks in similar rooms following similar routines like they were all supposed to grow up and become the same person.

Being a mom can be a lonely job too, sometimes other people don’t see that. The child’s the center of your universe.

She felt unhinged, like any large noise would force her body parts to separate and trail off into space in a slow-motion explosion. She wanted sleep. Real sleep.

She told herself it wasn't wrong to do what she most felt like doing in that moment.

She would have killed for anything with Julius the Monkey on it.

She couldn’t understand why she was supposed to be a robot and follow endless hours of obeying an evil master’s routine—even more rigid than Mommy’s. She wanted to be master of her own schedule, decide on her own when and where she sat. To think that children everywhere sat at similar desks in similar rooms following similar routines like they were all supposed to grow up and become the same person.

She’d expected her heavy-duty medication—an injectable biological drug—to eliminate the worst of her Crohn’s symptoms. And it did. But as the inflammation receded, scar tissue built up around a narrowing in her intestine.

As they made their way up the walk, Hanna spoke again, in her soft new voice. “Do you trust me?” Suzette considered how to respond. It seemed wrong to lie when asked so directly—and it being their first real conversation. “No,” she said. “Good. They were right to burn me.

He didn’t see what she did, and she could never tell him what was really wrong—that it had all been a mistake: She didn’t know how to be a mother; why had that ever seemed like a good idea?

Daddy didn’t really sound like he believed Mommy, but it didn’t matter. She’d never prove her mother right, and then Daddy would have to choose whose side he was on.

Alex, for fuck’s sake, how can you be in such denial?

Her French sounded exaggerated, like the puppets on Sesame Street.

FRESHLY FUCKED AND the sun was shining;