January/February 2012

Sometimes I sat on my bed, seething, and thinking, Why me? Reject. That’s what I was. My parents claimed that eight children in the house was too much for them to handle, and that they couldn’t support them all, so they sent me away to live with my grandparents. That wouldn’t have been as much of a problem, except that Granny and Gramps lived in Maine, thousands of miles away from my original home in Salem, Oregon. I only ever got to see my family at holidays, birthdays, and one month in the summer. And that wasn’t all that bothered me. It’s just, being sent away by your own parents, rejected from your own home, isn’t very comforting. In fact, it made me downright mad, and sad, and homesick. Even though I’ve been living at my grandparents’ house since I was four (I’m eleven now, almost twelve), and I don’t remember much of my other house, it still hurt to think that I was the one picked to be shipped off. I felt like an outcast. Sometimes I sat on my bed, seething, and thinking, Why me? Why couldn’t it have been one of my brothers, Carl the troublemaker maybe? Why did I have to be the one with the unfortunate fate? Whenever I asked my mother this, she just tersely told me, “Because you’re mature enough to deal with it,” and then changed the subject. But I was only four at the time. How could they have known I would be “mature”? Maybe they just chose me because, being the youngest in my family, I was too young to understand and wouldn’t put up a big fuss. I probably just thought I was going to see Granny and Gramps for a visit, and that in a week or two, my parents would come to pick me up and take me home again. Unfortunately, they never did. So now I was living in a little cottage by the sea and had a tiny bedroom in the attic with a little round porthole window, which I could look out of and see the ocean with its rolling lace-trimmed waves, spraying salty sea foam up into the misty air. And the gulls waddling across the beach and soaring in the ever-cloudy sky, squawking in gull language to each other about some fish they had found. I often sat and stared out that window, across the ocean, wishing I were back home with the rest of my family, and feeling lonely. And that’s what I was doing just then, looking glumly out of the porthole and feeling sorry for myself. I turned away from the window and glanced around my room. The ceiling took the shape of the roof, pointed at the top and slanting steeply down, so that I had to bend down or bump my head on one of the thick beams running down from the tip to the floor. This was also a hazard I had to remember when waking up in the morning. Even though my bed was pushed out slightly, I could still sit up in the morning and hurt myself. On the same wall as the porthole, I had an old mahogany desk that Gramps had given me when I first came here, along with a stack of stationery and writing utensils, though I couldn’t even read yet, much less write anything but a crude and barely recognizable version of my name. Now I used the desk all the time, journaling, drawing, and writing stories. That’s another thing: I loved to write. It was a way for me to escape my troubles and write about someone else’s, or create a world all of my own, one where no one was sent away by their family or forced to live feeling regret and longing all their life. It helped me express the way I felt about the world. When I was feeling angry, resentful, sad or confused, I would sit down and write, and it helped somehow. It was like giving away all of my unwanted emotions, like lifting a load of bricks off my shoulders. I emerged from my daydream when I heard my grandmother calling my name. She was yelling something about a phone. Oh, that’s right, it was time for the daily phone call to my home in Oregon. OK, so it wasn’t always daily, more like every other day, but daily phone call sounded better than every-other-daily phone call. I sighed and started down the rickety old staircase. I reached the bottom and briskly walked through the living room and into the kitchen, where Granny was frying scallops on the stove. My grandmother is younger than most grandmothers, only in her mid-sixties. She always said that was lucky because if she had been any older, she might not have agreed to take me in. I didn’t totally think it was so great because if she and Gramps hadn’t been able to house me, I might have stayed at my own home. But then again, my parents probably would’ve found some cousin to take me. Granny is only a few inches taller than me and has gray hair tied back into a loose bun. She has soft features and a very kind smile. Her skin is pale and slightly flabby in some places, but tough like an elephant’s. She is not hunched over at all and always likes to have her fingers moving, so I usually find her knitting, sewing, finger knitting, typing on her laptop, or just drumming her fingers on the kitchen counter. I said hello to her and she smiled at me and said, “Hello, Cincinnati.” I unhooked the phone from its place on the wall and stared somberly at the keypad. I always felt excited when I called, but a bit dejected too. I stared some more, as if willing the phone to disappear in my hands, but I knew it had to be done. I slowly punched the numbers