Serial Reading: Just Like Suicide pt. 24

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[cont.]
The month before my sixth birthday, my family moved into the big house which my dad had been remodeling since lightning struck it and it burned pretty much flat to the ground. While I remember the fire and all the water hoses trying to put it out, I don’t really remember the original house. The new house took almost two years to build because my dad ran out of money at one point. In the end, it ended up almost twice the size of the original. We now had two stories, five bedrooms, four bathrooms, a formal dining room next to a veranda with a floor perfect for dancing or prayer meetings, and a full-sized pool table in the basement where deer heads were mounted on one wall and the other walls had large shelves stuffed with rations in case of emergencies. I remember my mother was ecstatic about the new place because she liked throwing parties and you really couldn’t do that in a double-wide trailer sitting out near the barn. They decided to celebrate its completion with a huge party to coincide with my twin sister’s and my birthday.
“We’re all going to dress up like princesses,” my twin taunted me. “You and Daddy will just be cowboys.” My dad’s idea of dressing up was to change into his alligator boots, gold belt buckle and cleanest Stetson. On really special occasions which required him to be bareheaded, he would slick down his hair with a cream that stank to high heaven. My two sisters and mom, on the other hand, spent weeks shopping, trying on every dress in town, hemming the ones they bought to the perfect length. My mom gave them lessons on how to walk like ladies, a book on their heads to keep their posture perfect, how to apply makeup. The morning of the party they all had their hair done. They wouldn’t even let me help select the right color of fingernail polish or which perfume to use. Lavender, lilac, gardenia, all of them in the prettiest bottles in a row on Mom’s dresser. My twin even got to wear lip gloss, a pale pink like the flouncy dress she was wearing. Mom made sure my dad and I had clean shirts and jeans laid out neatly on our beds. I was supposed to wear black leather shoes a size too big for me. It didn’t seem fair.
As they were all downstairs greeting the first of the guests to arrive, I snuck into Mom’s dressing room and pulled out a beautiful pale pink silk shirt with ruffles at the neck and wrists. The shirt was long enough on me it could pass as a dress. I tied some scarves around my waist, used pink lipstick around my mouth and shuffled down the hallway in a pair of her gold sandals. Half way down the stairs one of the sandals fell off and made a racket. My dad spotted me and ran to grab me. I thought he meant to save me from falling. Hanging over his shoulder, I could see all the guests pointing and laughing at me as I was hauled roughly upstairs. Dad scrubbed my face with a washrag and thrashed my rear end until my mom came up to tell him my screams were upsetting the guests downstairs. He had scrubbed my face so hard it was chafed beet red and some of the skin peeled off a week later. I couldn’t sit down for days afterward. My dad set the tone that night. I was the laughingstock of the town for the next twelve years. Even though I was the debate team captain and the fastest runner in the region, the high school yearbook mentioned my love of pink before any of my accomplishments. In small communities, differences are deadly. It wasn’t until I was in college after meeting Hondo, Tommy and Lori that I resumed wearing pink. Pale pink. I try to wear it at least once a week to commemorate that little boy.


Return on Monday for the next chapters of Just Like Suicide.

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