Gesture Prompt

It was a regular battle between me and my mother. I was dubbed the "car dj" when my dad wasn't around when I was in 6th grade and since my Mom worked at my high school, my duty followed me. On days when we had to go in an hour early (Alice had jazz band practice) and days when we barely made it on time (8:25! No time for a locker run), I would be scrolling up and down on my ipod's screen. In seventh grade, I quit playing Beatles' songs when my mom exclaimed "All their songs sound the same!"

For a long time, I tried to play things that would make her happy. She used to ask me to play Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1 everyday. That was before she went into therapy. By the time I was in my Junior year of high school, I started trying to play songs that I liked, that she didn't like. My playlists consisted of The Mountain Goats most off-key songs, the Teeth and Joe Jackson. I was waiting for, wanting, her to turn the music down so that I could turn it back up, louder. The gesture, the reason to snap at her and scowl; I was praying for it every time I put on Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod. Joni Mitchell wasn't played anymore, I used to play Cake's Nugget every week:

"heads of state who ride and wrangle,
who look at your face from more than one angle,
can cut you from their bloated budgets
like sharpened knives through chicken mcNuggets.

shut the fuck up.
shut the fuck up..."

Sometimes she would turn the music down. Sometimes she wouldn't. This was the closest to rebellion I ever got.

Prompt One Margaret

Hallie's room couldn't have existed this way for more than I few months, but I only saw it in this one state. Her room was off the long hallway next to the staircase on the second floor. All along the wall were the Woodhead-Nutting's three daughters school photos. They grow before your eyes in a cheesing smile kind of way. Hallie's emotions ranged from angry to ecstatic, not in that order. Her door had a “Caution” sign that she took from a construction site.

Madeleine and Hayley had led me into her room with quiet voices. She was out, they didn't know where, they told me that it was not uncommon for her to disappear on weekends. Her door opened to, what seemed to my nine-year-old eyes, a pit of clothes. Piled up on her futon, flung on her desk and it's chair and all over the carpet. There were piles of books, some text books, some novels circling her bed and all along her walls. The air in her room was still, like her one window had never been opened and the central air had been blocked. The walls were light blue, but were covered in the ravings of a fourteen year old girl. Madeleine informed me this was so her parents would finally let her paint her walls a different color. Black sharpie sketched out curse words I'd never heard or seen before, mainly dealing with her parents, or her sisters. The sentences varied in size, in an arbitrary sense. Her fucks ranged from one inch to a foot tall. Hayley told me they'd read all her walls several times. The writing grew scarcer as I looked up the wall, eventually stopping at 6 feet up.

I only saw Hallie's room like that once. The few other times I went to Madeleine's house we didn't venture into that chamber, and by the time I was in high school they'd moved to a different neighborhood. I couldn't have stood in there more than ten minutes but the strong, unadulterated adolescence that was contained in those walls were a new idea for me. Anger being open was something I had never seen before. The fear of Hallie's return coupled with the dark urge to keep reading, was something that stuck with me. Like I find myself wanting to go into stranger's homes, not to steal anything, but to rifle through lives like a deck of cards.