The Empress Chronicles by Suzy Vitello Read Free Book Online

him. It’s been a long time since I allowed it. My back muscles soften, all of me does, and then, a shrill “Is everything all right?” pierces the moment.
    I cringe at the touch of an index finger poking me between neck and shoulder. No! I want to shriek. Nothing is all right. Not since you swooped in on our life and ruined everything .
    Instead, I draw my arm across the front of my face, sop up salty tears and snot. Now I have to soak my shirt in vinegar for an hour.
    Dad says, “Honey, can you give us a moment?”
    Both The Girlfriend and I say, in unison, “Thanks,” in anticipation that the other of us is being asked to leave the room.
    I win this round though. Dad is choosing me, this one time, and I sniff. Turn around. Smile at the woman who thinks she can just take over that special place in my father’s heart, and watch her bow, doing Namaste hands as she backs out the door. Right before she disappears, one of her bobby pins slips from her hair, making the tiniest plink when it hits the dirty floor.
    Dad sits down on the sagging futon and pats the space next to him, and I take a seat. My bed, if you can call it that, is a moist, rumpled mattress, which smells of damp wool and mud puddles. I sniff a couple more times and make myself into a peapod next to him, resting my nose against my kneecaps.
    “This will take getting used to,” he says.
    I nod, mushing nostrils into knee.
    “Even though she doesn’t have kids of her own, Willow is the oldest child of a large family.”
    The Girlfriend again? An elevator-dropping sensation swirls around the inside of my ribcage just at the sound of her name. I refuse to speak that name aloud.
    “She cares deeply about her brother, though. ‘The baby of the family,’ she calls him. If and when he comes up, I imagine things will get even more complicated.”
    I accidently snort. More complicated? If only Dad knew how out of control I felt. Like free-falling from one of those giant oaks in the yard.
    “We need to become a team,” he continues. “You, Willow, me. And that boy, I suppose.”
    Back when Mom and Dad were in counseling, when they briefly thought they’d reconcile, we needed to be a team then, too.
    “What about this brother?” I say. “How long will he be part of this team ?”
    Dad sighs. “For the summer, maybe. Kid’s some kind of soccer star. Been overseas these past two years, but now he’s back. Things didn’t work out for him there.”
    Great. A delinquent soccer star. I sniff again. I need a Kleenex.
    “Once you’re settled, I’ll walk you around the farm. You’ll love the goats. They have such great personalities.”
    Three Billy Goats Gruff. Trip-trap, trip-trap, trip-trap . Goats belong in fairy tales and petting zoos and the mountains of Switzerland.
    “You’ll thrive out here. I promise,” Dad says.
    Fairy tales. More fairy tales. But I keep nodding. I will be good. I won’t disappoint. I won’t end up back on the fourth floor of Providence. I won’t give The Girlfriend any reason to suggest I should be back in Adolescent Psych, where they take away your shoelaces and count the leftover peas on your plate and make you sit in a circle with the other psycho rejects demanding that you share how pissed off at the world you are.
    With that, Dad stands up. The wet blotches from my tears make him look like a nursing mother. He pats my tufts of hair and blows me a kiss as he hops over my belongings. Then, he trip-traps back down the hall, down the stairs, back to his girlfriend, his goats, and his weed pipe that he keeps in the left front pocket of his jeans.
    I unwind myself from my peapod and reach for my Kleenex-type box of 100 latex rubber gloves, which is nestled on top of my books. I pull a couple out, fit them on, then rip off my soggy shirt and use it to clean the dust from an empty space on a bookshelf. Then, up on the shelf go my American Heritage Dictionary , my art history books, and my thesaurus. I put my best art and