Rachel was not going to be like her mother.

Rachel was not going to be like her mother.

Pacing frenetically across her messy bedroom, Rachel grabbed a seemingly random assortment of things, and stuffed them into a faded black backpack with duct tape on the strap. She skirted around the sturdy oak-framed bed, with blue dingy sheets and a faded quilt. Clothes were strewn about the room. On the floor. On the dresser. On her old Chemistry textbook. Hanging out of the hastily half-opened drawers. She shook a bottle of Bath & Body Works peony body spray with barely any liquid left. Not enough to bring with, but she couldn’t bring herself to throw it out either. She darted past the posters from magazines tacked to the walls, her attempt to decorate the room without spending any money. Past the old boom box with a case full of burned CDs. The soundtracks she’d often used to drown out the explosive fights that punctuated the deafening silence.

Rachel’s mom left. She couldn’t stand the rainy small town with one mall and even fewer opportunities. One day Rachel had woken up and quietly walked down the carpeted hallway to pour herself a bowl of cereal. She hadn’t hit her growth spurt yet so she couldn’t reach the top cabinet. She hoisted herself onto the counter like she did every morning and reached up for the Captain Crunch. That’s when she saw it out of the corner of her eye. On the hook by the door, the keys were gone. Her mom had put that hook up after a particularly loud fight. After searching high and low like a tornado in the chaos looking for her keys, she had been late to her shift at Chevron. Larry the manager threatened to fire her on the spot if she was ever late again. She’d come home from her shift and drilled a hole in the wall and hung up that hook. No matter how messy the house got after that, the keys were always on the hook. But that day they were gone.

It was too early for her to be at work. She worked the swing shift and preferred to sleep in. Sometimes she would wake up and kiss Rachel on the head as she sat in front of the tv watching Scooby-Doo and head straight into the kitchen to light up a cigarette and brew a pot of Folgers coffee. But most days Rachel would get up by herself, eat her cereal in front of the tv, get dressed, and head out to the bus stop at the end of the street all before her mother had woken up. Rachel would always peak in and say “Bye mommy” before she left. Sometimes her mom would say “Bye baby, have a good day at school”, but usually she got a grunt before she was told to close the door. The worst were the days that Rachel could tell that her mom had been crying.

Rachel’s dad worked construction and his day started well before Rachel was up for school. He was gone before the sun was up, and Rachel didn’t mind. Dad never hung his keys for the company truck on that hook. He kept them in a dish on the nightstand along with loose change and sometimes a pack of smokes. He was a quiet man. Not in a shy way though. He looked like he had a lot to say, but no one he deemed worthwhile enough to share it with. Rachel knew that his eyes hadn’t always been so devoid of life though. She had seen the old polaroid buried in her mom’s nightstand, underneath the Lexapro, and the expired condoms, and the maxed-out credit cards. There, in the pile of depression was her mother’s most favorite possession. A blurry photo, taken out by the north end of the lake. On one of those days where the sun feels like it’s never going to set and the mosquitos beat the darkness to telling you that it’s faded from day to night. Her dad was sitting on a giant log so big that his legs dangled off the ground. Her mom sat on his lap, her head tilted back in uncontrollable laughter. But her dad was staring straight at her mom, focused so intensely on her. His face displayed an unfamiliar smile. In this picture, it was clear that he had once loved her. Rachel had often wondered if this was taken the night she was conceived. She was born in March, and she knew that her parents had been teenagers when she was born. Not much older than Rachel was now. But there was no date written on the back of the picture, and she knew better than to ask about such a happy memory. There weren’t many of them, and even though she hadn’t been there to experience it, she still felt an innate need to protect it.

The morning the keys were missing, Rachel knew something was off. But, again, she knew better than to ask questions. Who was there to ask anyway? So, she got herself ready for school, hand trembling as she tried to brush all of the knots out of her hair. Once she was dressed she walked to the bus stop, grateful for the rain that camouflaged the tears that were streaming down her face. She wasn’t mad that her mom was gone, but she couldn’t believe that she didn’t take her with her.

Dad tried for a little while after that. He upgraded his usual grunts with actual words and started buying Rachel the kind of cereal that she liked. He didn’t get upset when he came home one day to find a hole in the wall where mom’s key hook had hung. Rachel didn’t mean to make such a big mess of it, but the one handheld screwdriver she could find kept falling out of her inexperienced hands, and eventually, she had resorted to hitting the hook with a rock from the backyard until she was able to get it off of the wall. She refused to let it taunt her any longer, a constant reminder that her mom wasn’t coming back.

Rachel was not going to be like her mom, but she couldn’t stay either. Dad had stayed single for a little while, but that all changed when Sheila got hired as a flagger at the construction company. Rachel didn’t understand what her dad could possibly see in her besides easy sex. But couldn’t he get that without inviting her to live with them? Sheila smelled like mildew and stale cigarettes. Her pack-a-day habit aged her voice, although Rachel doubted Sheila had ever sounded nice. Rachel maybe could have put up with dad, but Sheila was too much. Between the drunken outbursts and the snide comments that were always aimed in Rachel’s direction, the final straw had been a piece of chocolate cake.

Rachel walked into the house after school and took off her soggy shoes and wet sweatshirt to find a single piece of chocolate cake on a Styrofoam plate on the counter. Rachel was surprised, no one had made her a birthday cake in years. But it had been a particularly shit birthday with a Calculus test she probably failed, and friends who mostly ignored her. The cake brought an involuntary smile to her face. She grabbed a bent fork from the drawer and took a bite. No sooner had the chocolate frosting and rainbow sprinkles hit her lips when Sheila walked into the kitchen and said, “You fucking bitch! Why are you eating my cake?”.

Rachel tried to apologize, but it was too late. She felt the sting of the back of Sheila’s ring-clad hand strike her across the face.

Rachel was not going to be like her mom. She wasn’t going to stay past her prime, waiting for it to get better. She wasn’t going to be anyone’s punching bag. She fled to her bedroom, clutching her throbbing cheek in her hand. She knew she needed to pack quickly before Sheila burst into the room, ready to fight. She grabbed her backpack, opened her bedroom window, and jumped out directly into a muddy puddle. As her feet crunched along the rain-soaked gravel driveway, she didn’t know where they were headed, but she knew that they needed to keep moving.