Bittersweet Dreams Read Free

wife, Julie. It was lucky she didn’t have a twin. She would have smothered him or her in her mother’s womb just to be sure she would get all of her parents’ attention.
    But despite what she thought, I wasn’t feeling particularly superior this morning. She was at me like this because she knew I was down and incapable of defending myself very much. That was usually when someone like her would pounce. I call them coyote cowards. They’re parasites who will only swoop down on the small, wounded, or handicapped. Otherwise, they hover in the shadows, feeding their green faces on envy with hopes for your failures, waiting for you to become crippled and weaker but too frightened to challenge or compete when you weren’t.
    â€œI don’t know how you will live with yourself,” she continued. “If I were inside you, I’d scratch and kick my way out.”
    I turned and glared at her. Despite what she claimed, I knew I could frighten her with a look like the one I had now. I had practiced it in the mirror. It was a look I often employed at school. My eyes were like darts. I had the face of someone capable of sending out curses like emails.
    Fear began to overtake her in small ways. She embraced herself quickly, swallowed hard, and took another step back.
    â€œAt last, we agree about something,” I said. “If you were inside me , I’d rip you out. You know, like a bloody cesarean section.” I held up my hands as though they had just been in a mother’s womb and were dripping with blood down my arms.
    She gasped, turned quickly, and marched out, holding her head high. She was always worried about what she looked like, even when she was alone and wouldn’t see anyone else. However, frustrating and defeating her didn’t give me as much satisfaction as she thought it had. I had long ago given up on baiting her and making her look foolish in front of my father, hoping it would open his eyes. I certainly had nothing to gain from it today. It was far too late, too late for many things. I was soaked in regrets.
    I stood by the window in my bedroom, looked out toward the Pacific Ocean, and thought it should be gray and rainy today, at least. That would fit my mood, everyone’s mood. I didn’t pay much attention to the weather. Maybe that was because we lived in Southern California and took beautiful days for granted, or maybe it was because I spent most of my time inside, my face in a book or at a computer screen. I wasn’t one of those people who stopped to smell the roses. We actually had beds of them out front, along with other flowers. If I stopped, it wouldn’t be to enjoy the scent and beauty of anything but instead to examine the flowers, looking for some microscopic genetic change. I couldn’t help it. As my teachers were fond of saying, and which was probably true, it was part of my DNA.
    Moments after Julie had stopped bitching and left, I heard someone behind me and thought she might have returned to say something else that was even nastier that had crawled into her clogged brain, a brain I imagined infested with little spiders weaving selfish, hateful webs of thought. This time, I would face her down more vehemently, not with calm sarcasm but with what she hated: cold, dirty language. When I spit back at her, she would rush to cover her ears, as if my words would stain her very soul.
    However, when I turned, I saw it was my thirteen-year-old stepsister, Allison. That surprised me. I was sure her mother had told her to stay away from me, especially this morning. She probably told her I had done her enough damage, and maybe, like Typhoid Mary, I would contaminate her further. “Stay in your room, and keep the door locked until she’s gone,” she surely had said. She was unaware of the short but honest and sweet conversation Allison and I had had the night before. Her mother was on her this morning, however. She wanted nothing to