A Reason to Exist

Chapter 48

Mum was sitting on the L-seater couch in the living room watching a documentary about gut health when I returned home twenty minutes late. As soon as I walked in, she called out 'Macy'. She took off her amber sunglasses and turned the TV off.

'Sit down,' she said. I sat on the couch. Her voice sounded stern, so I began to arrange an apology.

'Sorry, time got away from us down there. We walked back together. We crossed at the lights. The sunset was beautiful.'

'That boy is an idiot.'

'What?'

'He's a death wish waiting to happen. I watched some of his YouTube videos. I've never seen such idiocy. I don't understand what you see in him. Jumping from a petrol station roof? Does he want to end up a cripple?'

Her disapproval was death by a thousand cuts. She was taking my affection for Tucker and turning it into doubt.

'I can't understand what you see in him,' she said again. 'He's common and stupid and an attention seeker. The worst type of attention seeker. I knew boys like him when I was your age. They are nothing but trouble. Someone who displays such reckless behaviour doesn't care if they live or die.' She folded the arms of the sunglasses. 'I thought you were smarter than that, Macy.'

I was so surprised by this attack on my sweetheart.

'I love him,' I said at last.

'You don't know what love is.'

'You don't. You screw love. Dad loved you and you spat on it. And you're still making him suffer. And you've screwed up Tate. That's what your love is.'

My anger was felt in my chest, in my ears, in the palm of my hands. It was in the breath I couldn't control, the ascendency of my voice, my fists that had an urge to punch a wall.

'This has nothing to do with Tucker. This is you,' I shouted. 'You are overprotective. You've made me scared of everything. I love him, because he's not scared of anything.'

'Go to bed Macy,' she said slowly and steadily. She dropped her voice. 'You're a very hurtful girl. I should never be spoken to like that, after everything I do for you.'

She was taking the victim role and turning me into the perpetrator. Soon she'd start crying and I'd be forced to say 'Guilty your honour.' I didn't feel guilty. I felt vindicated. I'm innocent. I adore Tucker and he adores me. And I will not let this woman ruin it. She sees love as a threat. She doesn't want us to love our dad and now she doesn't want me to love anyone else.

'I can still love you, even if I love someone else,' I said, rising from the couch.

'That's not what I'm worried about.'

'Yes it is.'

I walked to my room. Tate called out 'What's going on?' I poked my head through his door and said 'Nothing, shitface.'

His eyes widened. I rarely talked to him like that. But he'd gone from being my mother's accomplice to a full on crook. 'Stick out of it,' I warned, before closing the door.

I went to my room, shut the door, and lay down on the bed. Life has become unbecoming. I am wound up so tightly, inflation is my breath, unease the chilli on my tongue. Hate is a hateful word. I dislike my mother and brother. If this were a share house, I'd move out.

Tucker and I could escape to the country, a log cabin, where we can live out the rest of our days in isolation. We can live with each other's mouths as the air that we breathe, with each other's bodies as the only way to move, with each other's psyches as the only way to think.

I want to grow up and away. I want to eat Coco Pops for breakfast and a jam sandwich on white bread for lunch. I want to walk on St Kilda Beach with my shoes off and jaywalk on Swanston Street. I want to not hand my homework in and be scolded by a teacher. I want to bump into someone at school and not apologise. I want to get in a moonlighting Uber driver's car, who doesn't indicate and drives with self-entitlement, and not shit my pants. I want to dye my hair without worrying about dying. I want to catch a tram without a ticket and not look for an inspector. I want to stop following all the rules. I want to stop trying to please the one person I can never please and start pleasing myself.