The Sunset Strip Diaries Read Online Free

I kept calling for her, but she couldn’t hear me. She was having a nervous breakdown. There was a definite problem in the family that no one was talking about. It was just eating everybody and nobody would do anything about it. It just festered, right there in our house. Right there in suburbia. Right there in a family that had gone to church and ate popsicles and had camping trips.
    I didn’t think about my weight at all until one particular overcast day. My dad was in one of his unpredictable moods and I was lagging on getting laundry out of the dryer. He angrily told to get off my fat ass and get the laundry. Then he smacked me in an angry, puppy-kicking way. I looked at his eyes and they were full of anger. Fat. He said…fat ass. Was I… fat? Is that why they were mad at me? I wished I could just be a kid again. I was hurt by my dad’s comment and immediately started to cry. Then I got angry.
    I didn’t know if I was mad about the fat thing or him smacking me. It wasn’t some big fiasco where I was being beat to a pulp, by any means. But regardless, I gathered myself by my T-shirt and went up to him and looked him straight in the eyes. I said in a thick, sobbing voice, “If you ever touch me again, I am calling the police .”
    He backed off a little and looked at me. We locked eyes. My eyes said I meant business.
    He got the picture. I saw it click in his head that I wasn’t just talking about being smacked on the butt for not getting the laundry. I was talking about him crossing a line with me. I was so scared that I started to shake uncontrollably. I thought my legs would give out. I sat down in a dirty, faded brown director’s chair on our patio and sobbed really hard. He tried to console me and I snatched my arm away from him.
    I would love to say I felt much better after standing up to him and defending myself, but I didn’t. I felt very alone. I really just wanted to end my life. I wanted to die more than anything. I went into the bathroom, took out a bottle of Windex, and thought… I should just drink this. Then I would be dead . But of course I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I tried to find other ways to hurt myself instead, like carving in my skin with a knife or a pin. I cut into my arms and cried and cried and cried. When I felt that horrible, I would repeat to myself over and over, You are not really a part of this family, you are completely separate from them and you are not even from here. You are here for future reasons that have nothing to do with today. Your reason for existence has nothing to do with this family or these times. I know, that sounds crazy. But that is the message I somehow got in the back of my brain. I used it to comfort myself when I thought I couldn’t go on. I remember not being clear on where I was supposed to be ‘from,’ so I made up that I was from Jupiter, so I could at least have a visual. But being from Jupiter was the least of my worries.
    When I look back on it, I sometimes think, Was this just puberty ? Was this what normal teens did when going through puberty? Was I getting a lot of hormones, maybe? But then I realize that it was a combination of that and something else. I couldn’t admit it or even think about it for years because it was so gross. My father had been behaving sexually toward me, before all of the anger and terror started. That was the main problem, and it was too late to take it back. Then there was the secondary problem: the lack of protection from my mother. Why wasn’t she there when I needed her? I wouldn’t let my mind think about that either, until several years later, when I told her about my suspicions in a long letter.
    The letter was five pages long, listing all of the things that I remembered about my dad’s inappropriate behavior. I pictured her reading the letter. I thought she would first have a heart attack and then wake up and become hysterical. She would climb to the top of a mountain with a rifle in her hand and vow