To Have and to Hold, to Take and to Own

My mom loves me like a girl loves her doll. I know this because she used to carry me around on her hip after dressing me up in the latest knock-off designer baby clothes while I carried my toy-baby which I dressed up in the scraps my grandma made for me. My mom matched me to her, to the season or holiday, or to whatever was in style at the time— bringing to life her dream of me, teaching me how to be.

I’m pretty, I know. My mom has told me so. She used to pinch my cheeks and stroke my hair, telling me I looked just like her when she was young. Now that I’m older, she tells me boys will chase me the way they chased her. She’s right.

I’m pretty even with the bruises on my arms and jaw and dried blood between my thighs. In the shower, blood from in between my legs swirl down the drain, taking with it the evidence of my misdeed. I cry, my chest constricting, a scream that won’t come out blocks my throat. I have become someone my mom doesn’t want me to be. I don’t feel alone. I feel phantom hands, yanking through my hair, grabbing at my limbs to position me, stroking me all over, the hot water unable to wash away these touches.

The house we live in is small and only has one floor. My mom takes the master bedroom, my brothers split the living room, while I share the second bedroom with my grandma. When my dad is here, he sleeps with my mom, but he never stays long. 

I hate both of my brothers. They don’t understand how easy their life is. They get to be boys being boys. When I was little, I never minded sharing space. I fit myself into small corners, used the edges of blankets, pressed myself against walls just to fit where I am needed. My family does not dote on me the way they laud Liam for his grades or Logan for his wit. 

I lift the kettle off of the stove before it starts to scream from unreleased pressure. In the dim light of the kitchen, I move nimbly to get my breakfast and lunch together before the school bus comes. Liam will not wake until fifteen minutes before he has to leave for school because he’s a senior and he’s already in at the college he wants. Logan will be driven by our mom to middle school because she loves him too much to let him take the bus. I would go with Liam if it weren’t for the fact I don’t like that in his car, it’s his rules, and he picks up all his friends, and we’re always late for class. 

My breakfast is simple: hot chocolate with water (milk is too fattening, but I need something sweet), wheat bread toast and peanut butter, and whatever fresh fruit is available. I have almost the same thing every day, unless I run out of bread, then I have eggs. If I have more time I make something like pancakes, oatmeal with greek yoghurt, or protein smoothies. Then my brothers will appear and shovel into their mouths what I make as if it was theirs.

Today, I can feel the sadness in my body, weighing me down. But I keep moving, otherwise, my mom and grandma will call me lazy. I don’t have it half as hard as they did in the past. They had to wake up to cook for their entire families. Grandma lived through a war. Mom lived through food shortages. The least I can do is take care of myself. Even if the skies are gray and I’m cold.

I walk to the bus stop a few blocks away, snacking on a banana. The surrounding houses are just as sleepy and deserted as ours because everybody either already left for their 5:00 a.m. shifts or they are unemployed. Only one other kid is at the bus stop, and he smirks as I bite into the banana. I stop eating.

On the bus, I put my earbuds in and listen to a podcast about a freak accident on the mountain. The eeriness keeps me awake. I finish a case on the death of a group of hikers/skiers in a mountain— all experienced mountaineers who died of hypothermia. I lean my head against the icy window. The bus hits a pothole and my head thumps against the window. The cold feels nice.

Outside the window, the evergreen trees blur into visions of green and white. Evergreens thrive despite the winter, and I think maybe the body is like the earth.

Shawn, Liam’s best friend, is dumb. I didn’t use to think that, I thought the world of Shawn before summer. But as I listen to him talk to his friend, Dean, the guy who sits next to me, and Charity, the girl who sits beside Shawn, I realize he doesn’t know a thing.

Before summer, Shawn’s attention sent pinpricks through my body leaving blood to rush to whatever surface of my skin he touched or looked at. He was so handsome, so clever, so funny. I laughed at all his jokes. I let him touch my hair and hands and face. Maybe he flirted with everyone, but he was flirting with me. 

Shawn looks through me now. When people ask what we were, he laughs and tells them I was easy. 

Our teacher put us into groups of four to solve impossible calculus problems to test our skills of working together, but also so she can scroll on her computer pretending she’s doing serious grading even though she hasn’t gotten any grades back to us even from the beginning of trimester.

I’m trying, I am, to just fit in and be normal. But being around Shawn makes being normal difficult. I’m not attracted to him anymore. My stomach turns like it’s been infected every time I see him. I listen to a podcast episode about normal people resorting to cannibalism in the Donner Pass, but all I hear is a jumble of Shawn’s laughter mixed with the monologue of the cold winter trapping the Donner Party in, the blur of other groups’ conversation, and the clacking of our teacher’s keyboard.

A hand hits my notebook. I take out one earbud to speak to Charity.

“Why don’t you come with us in the car anymore, Lola?” she asks.

“I don’t like being late,” I said. “I can’t keep getting detention because I’m late to first period.”

“Aww, but we miss having you in the car.” 

I smiled, “I’m sure it’s much roomier.”

Dean puts his arm around me. I jump, but don’t dare to push him off as he pulls me flush against him until I’m almost falling out of my seat onto him. Every inch of my body locks itself in place. I’m sweating, I’m uncomfortable, I don’t say it because I can’t, “Come on, we’re all friends. What’s wrong with getting cozy?”

Shawn glances over me and says, “Lola knows a thing or two about getting cozy.”

Charity scoffs and hits Shawn’s shoulder. Dean laughs and his hand falls onto my chest, groping me in broad daylight, letting his lips linger near my ear. I swallow my tongue, cannibalize myself in order to shut up and let the world be as it is. Our teacher looks up and says, “This is not a slumber party, you two, stop touching each other.”

At my mom’s beckoning, I almost always help with dinner. Liam and Logan have to study. My studies don’t matter because I’m just going to get married and become a wife and a mother. But these days, my mom never fails to remind me that finding a husband will be harder now that I’m dirty. But we’re living in a different time now. My friends even call me slutty as a joke, though it still hurts. Being slutty doesn’t mean I won’t find love. Even if I did, I don’t think I’m made for love anymore. I wouldn’t survive it.

I slice vegetables while my mom leans over the stove, stirring the bone broth. My mom spent over twenty-four hours on that broth, but I know my grandma will still criticize its taste. 

Becoming like my mom is the worst thing for me to do, according to my grandma. I’ve observed my grandma’s lingering looks of disdain, uncountable criticism for my mom’s cooking, the way she dresses, the way she raises me and my brothers, and of course, the ever-present reminder that if only my mom was a good wife, her son would have married her. There was something wrong with my mom, my grandma always whispered to me at night in our shared room, and I should do my best not to follow her down the same path.

My mom criticizes me as we cook together, moving in tandem to get dinner done. I pour the cut vegetables into the broth and the liquid jumps up and kisses my hand, she stirs, I salt and take the ladle from her, she goes to handle the pork belly, I taste the broth, she pours the cut pork into the pot, I submerge the meat, she washes her hands before returning to the stove. Blue and orange flames wrap around the gray pot’s side, and my mom smacks me.

“If you’re not going to be useful, go somewhere else,” she said. “You’re taking up space and wasting my time. I’m trying to get dinner ready for everyone and you’re just—”

“Okay, okay—”

“You’re talking back to me now?”

“I’m agreeing with you, like why are you mad at me?”

“You—” she said, rounding on me with a pointed finger. “Stop talking back. I’m your mom. I am trying to teach you, but you’re hopeless— mày mất dạy.”

I have learned that besides being a bitch and a slut, the worst insult a child can be is mất dạy — the literal loss of teaching, untrainable, uneducated, anything that I’m taught is lost on me. It’s a reflection not of my inability to learn, but mom’s inability to teach me properly.

She keeps calling me stupid even as I leave the kitchen and enter the living room where Logan and Liam are studying at the dining table and my grandma watches a Vietnamese-dubbed Chinese drama.

“You should listen to your mom,” my grandma says as I pass her to sit down in the armchair to her right.

I don’t reply.

“You need to try harder to listen, to be good, do you want to end up like your mom?”

Listen to my mom, but don’t be like my mom.

When my grandma touches my leg, I flinch away from her. She shakes her head. “Stubborn girl.”

One day I come home and see my dad’s truck parked on the road outside of our driveway, I don’t know whether to think things are bad on his end or if he comes bearing gifts. Either way, he’s looking for a place to crash.

Inside, it becomes apparent that he’s been here for a while. My mom is wearing a dress, her hair is curled, her face is warmed with pink cheeks and lipstick. She is cleaning up every misplaced fork and spoon—tidying up the books, mail, and half-empty cups of water from the dinner table as if we don’t leave everything there after a stressful day. She doesn’t make me help cook when he’s home. I even hear her humming. 

When Shawn joins us for dinner, I’m glad to get booted to the coffee table in the living room in order to make space for him.

My grandma brings up how I’m a bad girl to embarrass my mom who’s trying so hard to be perfect out there. My mom laughs, I can hear the tremor in her laugh as my dad asks what my grandma possibly means. So my mom begins to explain, taking blame for not having raised me to be a good girl.

My grandma rounds on my mom, “She learned everything from you. Three kids and you don’t even have a husband! She’s going to grow up to be just like you—”

Liam and Shawn laugh about the night Shawn took my virginity, blaming me for my promiscuity.

It’s their laughter. I try to drown them out by listening to my podcast as if the story of ritualistic murder at the beckoning of a higher power could distract me from my own family talking about me like I’m not right there. The young girl is told that if she stabs her victim the right amount of times, if she properly drains her victim’s blood, then her god would be satisfied. Her actions are out of her control because she was told to do it. My body, out of my control. 

My family talks about my body as if I’m not there. How they contort me in their words, painting a gross, overly sexual, extremely debauched version of my body. My mom says I can’t be taught. My own brother calls me a whore. Shawn laughs at how I came onto him. That man who calls himself my dad calls me disgusting, hissing at how bad I’ve become.

I get up from my seat without realizing what I’m doing. I go to the kitchen. Then I return to the dinner table. My dad stares at me like he’s just noticed I’m here. The hush that falls over the table allows the squelching of the splaying blood leaving his body to take over the room when I pull the knife out of his neck. My dad grabs at his throat as he falls sideways out of the chair.

Nobody moves.

Blood drips down the knife. I shift the knife into my other hand and turn to Liam. I touch Liam’s back, and then drive the knife into his back. He falls forward into his bowl of bun bo hue. His blood leaks out of him, mixing into the spicy chilli broth, further staining the rice noodles.

My grandma finally screams. Stop. Bad girl. Stop. What are you doing? Stop. My boys— my boys. She slides clumsily out of her seat to reach Liam and my dad, and when she does, I grab her and slit her throat. She wretches on her own blood.

Logan is crying. With him, I’m more careless. I go for whatever’s closest to me and end him because I’m drunk on blood, and he is always just there, laughing when they laugh, looking away so he doesn’t feel guilty.

Then I cross the table, to my mom, and wrap my arms around her like I’m giving her a hug. She whimpers. I guide her hands so we are both holding the knife, and I push it into her heart. She lets out a small gasp. I kiss the temple of her forehead like she used to kiss mine. 

Finally, I turn to Shawn, frozen in his seat. The blood of everyone I’d already killed decorates the wooden table along with broken ceramic bowls. The broth and blood seep into the tablecloth filling the room with the smell of spice and rot. I climb onto the table, knocking over the bowls, squish my hands and knees into the soup and blood, crawling to Shawn like the animal he made me become.

I’m in the white skirt he pushed up to my waist like on the night he fucked me back in July. It’s stained red the way it was after that night too, the same stains that are immortalized in the pictures he took and sent to a group-chat with his friends and my brother. I don’t remember changing into this skirt, I don’t even remember having this skirt anymore. All I can see is the yellow light and shadow on the ceiling of Shawn’s hatchback, the sight I held onto as he crushed me into the seat of the car, hushing me. I told him to stop, I swear, but maybe the words never escaped me, maybe my mouth betrayed me.

He reaches out to touch me— to stop me. I take his outstretched hand in mine, intertwining our fingers. His mouth moves as if to say “please” but no sound comes out.

I lower his hand to the table, grab my knife, and begin to use it like it’s a cleaver, chopping his wrist off with grisly effort.

Liam smacks my towel-covered head as I leave the bathroom.

“You’re such a shower hog,” he said, running in.

Logan is watching sports with grandma on the couch, but mom and dad are nowhere in sight or sound. I pause in the hallway between the living room and bathroom, my eyes wandering out to the window behind Logan and grandma. My mom stands, hugging herself, talking fast. Her voice is hushed through the window and muddled by the TV. My grandma pretends to be watching TV, but I know she’s straining to listen to the conversation outside.

I wonder how much cash he’s asking for. I wonder if she’ll ever say no to him, if she even knows how to. I guess, when it mattered, I couldn’t say no either. I feel tired again.

In my room, I shut and push a chair against the door. I put in my earbuds, and listen to a podcast episode around a cult group-suicide and the lead up to the tragedy. How one person could convince everyone to kill themselves, and how the people in the group only confirmed one another into believing it was right. Where did free will go?

I rub my old blue towel furiously over my skin, rubbing off the last remnants of water. The woman in the podcast talks about the bodies found in the old church, how the stench of old blood and rotting flesh from their gruesome knife-suicide leaked all over the floor. I pull on my underwear and sit on the floor, rubbing coconut lotion into my legs and arms and stomach and shoulders. The podcast jumps to the beginning of the story, focusing on a new family buying into the cult in order to save the father from his alcoholism, nobody forced them to be there, they chose and reaffirmed their choice to be at the cult everyday, at least that’s what the records say. I am soft, pliable, slipping on old shorts and a T-shirt— then I change my mind and put on longer pants because I know my mom will say I look like a whore with my legs out. The cult only wants the best for their members. I sift through my shower bucket and find my moisturizer, applying it liberally to my face and neck. The cult affirms that their way is the only way— listen to them and they will lead you to salvation. When I feel thumping footsteps by my door, I take my earbuds out and listen closely to my brothers laughing with each other in the living room, a door slam, and my grandma’s drama overtures. I look into my hand mirror to make sure there is no white-cast on my skin, and I see my glassy eyes staring back, a lifeless doll.