It was only a few months ago when I boarded the subway looking like some suburban snob. I was wearing stockings in July because they made me feel pretty and my face was painted with bronzer and blush, ballerina pink. I remember feeling, put-together, poised, purposeful. That morning in the mirror I slid my fingers down my figure, tucking in the ivory blouse, inching the stockings up my calf and then my thigh until they perfectly rested on my hip. I brushed my hair, a side-part to the right. I wore lipstick with a funny name, “Turning Heads Red.” According to Vogue I couldn’t pull off red with my chocolate hair and pasty skin, but I did it anyways like Audrey Hepburn, or Liz Taylor, or Spanish tango dancers with crimson mouths.

The station smelled of empty Corona bottles and sidewalk street food. A man sat with his head against the stucco wall, holding a Marlboro between two bony fingers. Another man carried a empty orange juice carton, “Just a dime, a nickel,” he pleaded. “Help my family.” He extended a jagged arm, rocking the cup, grinding his cigarette-blackened teeth to the turning of pocket change. I did not look at him because he was dirty, ratty, poor, and his nails were cracked and my father is European and I live in a big white house with a garden. He lives on concrete and eats out of wrappers. I did not look at him.

You see, I really did not want to take the subway that morning. Waking up from a weekend of city nights, with my nose in the air, superior, above the sultry atmosphere where everyone looked so strange: limping, sauntering, straggling, begging. I was dreaming of ivory arches, Providence, the man in a suit, the one who would ask me lots of questions. Because I am the type of girl who wears bows in her hair. I enunciate; I study; I sigh. I play the piano to please. I’ve got it all figured out.

I waited for the train as men coughed into their hands with fingers nails caked in dirt and hands strained workday soreness. I thought about college, about that interview I was going to, how I had to carefully package my life into a conversation that would only last one hour. And that man on the other side of the table had a family, a home, bills. He had seen thousands of girls like me and I was just another bright-eyed dreamer, another polished pick, another name: Lili. Looking around, I concluded the motley mix of characters passing by didn’t seem like the “college type.” There were the punk teenagers with cartilage and nose-piercings, those kids from abusive fathers perhaps, and alcohol, and greasy hair, and drugs.

“Hey, pretty girl,” said a boy with black hair sprinkled with dandruff. He did not wear a tie, or Sperrys, or Armani cologne. He smelled like a dollar burger and he spoke with a lisp and I was too pretty for him. I nodded, smirked, and walked on.

But there were more like him. There were the construction workers. There was a man in a Starbucks apron. Minimum wage. Why wouldn’t I judge a man who spends his life filling cups?

A girl waddled in wearing a cherry red dress with big white polka dots. She looked like a waitress at some crappy diner off route 95: hair in a bun that sagged at her neck, long white striped socks that ascended her calf, a fatigue that created wrinkles at the edge of her lips giving her that bulldog pout. Her eyes were calf-brown. Her cheeks were round, bulbous. She looked vulnerable. Of course that was because she was pregnant and I just kept on staring at her stomach, the way it swayed with each step, the way it bounced with each breath. This girl was indeed only a girl. Her legs were still slender. She had the frame of an adolescent and her bulging stomach looked awkward, unwanted. She was some  character on Lifetime or a statistic you learn about in Sex Ed. Did she know where she was going, where they were going? I imagined her walking into my college interview with that balloon belly, a knocked up teen with rich, plum hickies sprinkled across her neck. I sort of snickered and then started to feel bad. The mother was suffering so many eyes, stuck somewhere between motherhood and adolescence, insanity and normalcy, just trying to walk on that thin, ragged margin, as if it were a tightrope and she was hoisted hundreds of feet in the air. But she could barely walk; she waddled.

The mother looked around, holding a bare hand with fingers cupping the bump and the other hand holding a broken back, trying to support the weak knees, the nausea, the fear. I was watching from a bench, with my ankles crossed, and my arms crossed, and I thought about people disappearing, reappearing, walking toward me, walking past me. They were all lives that I would never know because I never wanted to know them. I was judging because it is easier to be knowing and powerful than to be ignorant. It is easier to judge. The mom walked toward the bench that was full with stragglers. I saw her eyes, not just the stomach this time, and I got up. She  looked up at me and I let her sit down and I know she appreciated it because the small glance became a smile.

She eventually boarded the train, the one going north. (I was going south.) She pressed a hand to the cool metal as the cart began to trundle down the tracks. I knew what she was thinking: Where are we going? Do we have a place to stay? Away, away, away echoed in the rhythm of the train.

But I saw her there differently. I saw her for what she was., Not a slut. At that moment I saw myself in her: scared, unsure, just trying to pull it together. And the truth is I don’t have it all planned out, although I try so hard to. Sometimes the red lipstick fades and my chapped lips appear. Sometimes the shirt wrinkles, the stockings rip, I don’t feel so beautiful anymore. Providence is only a distant hope; I have become just another girl that life puts on a tightrope, watching to see if I fall. And I do; I fall so hard outside the margins that I’m not even straddling the line. Perfection perishes. I stop judging the outliers in the station: the man smoking, the beggar, the girl nursing a baby. I’m just one of them, hoping to get on the right tracks, hoping to go in the right direction.

My name is Lili Rosenkranz and I am 17 years old. I am going into my senior year at GreenwichAcademy in CT. I have always loved writing. I attended the UVA summer writing workshop last summer and am currently teaching poetry to young children through an art therapy program called CARING at Columbia medical school. I have beenpublished in “Connecticut Student Writers,” “Blue Pencil,” “Apprentice Writer,” and have been recognized at a regional level with a gold key from the Scholastic Awards and placed third in the Lynn Decareo Connectice State writing contest.

I like writing about bad girls. A murderous countess. An adulterous queen. I don’t know what they’ve taught you in school, but here’s the truth: history is full of bad girls.

Meeting the Countess

When I was in high school, I got a book about vampires out of the public library. It was an anthology of short stories and excerpts from novels, and among them was a story about Countess Erzebet Bathory. It told the legend (in gory detail) of a countess so obsessed with preserving her youth and beauty that she murdered her young female servants and bathed in their blood, believing that it would make her immortally young. The story was riveting to me. It was also deeply repulsive and terrifying. When I finished reading it, I didn’t want to be anywhere near that book.

Maybe because it scared me, it stuck with me. Often the things that make an impact on us during our childhood or teen years—whether favorable or otherwise—leave a mark that still exists years later. When I started studying writing in college, I found myself returning to the story of the countess. I was fascinated by her obsession, her madness, her desperate grasp at some untenable perfection: eternal youth and beauty. We would all grow up and grow old, eventually. I was keenly aware of this fact. Assuming that she wasn’t born evil, what happened to her when she was a child that caused this transformation?

The teen years are a dramatically charged time of life. This is one reason why I write about teenagers, for teenagers. There are so many things that can influence a developing sense of self. There is so much at stake. Who are you going to be? How are you going to change? What does the future hold? It’s that urgency that makes reading and writing young adult fiction so invigorating; not only is there action surrounding the character, but the inner self is mutating in ways the character hadn’t imagined or intended.

So what’s the internal struggle of a young murderess? I kept wishing I could ask the countess “Why did you do it? What were you thinking?” This question nagged at me. Clearly, she must have been crazy—but in fiction, that’s not a satisfying answer. Perhaps she feared growing up, growing older, losing her beauty. Why couldn’t things remain just as they were, safe and contained in her castle in the mountains? I had wished for that kind of comforting consistency myself, especially when I was a young teenager and filled with dread of the unknowable that awaited me in the years ahead.

Sharing my fear with the countess offered me a way to connect with her, to empathize. As I started writing her story—which would eventually become my first novel, “The Blood Confession”—I began to see her madness drive her to do terrible, cruel, repulsive things. If I wanted to tell the story in her point of view I had to expose the weaknesses that lead her down that path. For all of her vanity and pride, the countess was ruled by fear and insecurity. It would be a dark book, certainly not for every reader, but even in those early drafts I had envisioned it as a young adult novel, as it grappled with many of the same issues that I had felt as a teenager. Those questions about why she did what she did fascinated me, not because I knew the answer, but because I wanted to know. I wanted to create a logic (if entirely mad and illogical) for the countess to follow, that led to bleeding her servants, to bathing in blood, and finally to murder.

Aside from her fears of growing older, Erzebet’s close friendship with Marianna is at the core of her story. Marianna’s acceptance of Erzebet relieves some of the loneliness of the young countess’s existence. But Marianna does not harbor the same fears of the future; she is eager to become a young woman, a wife, and a mother. When Marianna falls in love and marries, Erzebet feels abandoned by her closest friend.

We often grow apart from our childhood friends—I have, and I think most people I’ve met have had similar experiences. It’s a natural, painful part of growing up. This gave me another way to empathize with Erzebet. I remembered feeling neglected and powerless as a certain old friend pulled away. And if there was one thing I knew Erzebet would react poorly to, it was that feeling of powerlessness. I knew she would react strongly, and—when it became clear that she couldn’t control Marianna’s actions—she would take drastic measures to convince herself that she was all-powerful. Time may have changed Marianna, but it would not change her: her search for eternal youth was energized, and remorseless. Bleeding her servants was only the beginning. She would murder young girls. She would act as God in her tower room, choosing life or death for the minions held captive before her. What could be more powerful than deciding a person’s fate according to your own whim, choosing whether they live or die?

Admittedly, Erzebet’s behavior is irrational, insane. But she enjoyed playing out her own power games, and I enjoyed writing them. Fiction is liberating. You can be bad in fiction, without fear of consequences. You can slip into someone else’s skin and play their role, even if you know they are horrible, vindictive, mad as a hatter. What might draw you to read a terrifying story is the same thing that draws me to write one—we want to visit that dark part of ourselves in a safe way, a way that won’t hurt anyone. It won’t even hurt ourselves. It’s frightening and it may make an impact on us, but then we put the book down and we can walk out into the sunlight again.

A Different Breed of Bad Girl

After finishing “The Blood Confession” I tried to settle my attentions on other ideas, but they just didn’t hold up. I had spent years writing about a girl who murdered for blood, for youth, for fun. She was dramatic, malevolent. How would I follow that up? How would I find someone else bad enough to inspire me?

And then one day I was surfing the internet, and I came across the story of Catherine Howard.

Catherine Howard was a teenager when she became the fifth wife of the notoriously unpredictable King Henry VIII. He had divorced his first wife, beheaded his second, lost his third in childbirth, and then hastily divorced his fourth (she wasn’t as pretty as he had hoped, after all) in order to marry Catherine. Not a great track record, but he was king so he could get away with these things.

Image courtesy of Ann Marie Brasacchio.

So what did she do, this Tudor-era Cinderella, propped upon the throne beside her all-powerful husband? First, she lied about being a virgin upon marrying the king. The king didn’t like liars, to say the very least. And according to most historians, Catherine engaged in a secret affair with one of the king’s most trusted servants during their marriage.

Knowing what she did about her royal husband, why would Catherine have acted so rashly? Henry’s second queen, Anne Boleyn, had been executed on similar charges of adultery—and Anne was Catherine’s cousin. Further, historians tend to agree that it is doubtful that Anne had actually committed the crimes she was accused of, while Catherine’s affair may well have been real. Either way, they both met the same grim end: execution by beheading at the Tower of London.

Here I was meeting another bad girl, whose actions inspired a similar confusion and interest. I found myself wanting to ask her the same questions: “What were you thinking? Why did you do it?” How would she explain?

Catherine was much different than the countess, of course. The countess murdered people in brutal ways, without remorse. But Catherine’s actions were absurdly reckless: she was risking her own life, and the life of the young man whom she claimed to love. Did she really imagine that she was safe, seated beside this great king? Did she really believe that Henry’s love (which had already proven itself fickle, and was quite dependent on her ability to produce an heir to his throne) would protect her? I read some amazing historical accounts about Catherine’s rise to the throne, all of which offered a broad array of potential reasons for her actions, but I wanted to get inside Catherine’s head. I wanted to hear her story, from her point of view. These thoughts would lead to my second novel, “The King’s Rose.”

Though the action took place hundreds of years ago, in a culture much removed from our own, Catherine was recognizable: a teenage girl, full of flaws and desperate for love and attention. Her faults and weaknesses made her palpably human to me. I empathized with her plight. I imagined that being chosen by the king was a heady experience. In spite of her triumph, she didn’t know enough about court life to know how a queen should behave. She didn’t understand how to deal with King Henry and his dangerous mood swings. And then she risked all to indulge in a night of love (or lust?) with a young man from her past.

I’m a lifelong fan of fairy tales, and I was enthralled by how Catherine Howard’s story resembled both a princess fantasy come true, and the terrifying Bluebeard murdering bride after bride. Haven’t we all wanted to be the princess? The chosen one? I did, and I think it’s a pretty universal fantasy. I spoke to my editor about this before starting my revisions of “The King’s Rose,” how the whole story could be seen as a loose parallel to modern life: every girl wants to be chosen by the Prom King, even though he’s kind of a jerk. The point is that he’s powerful, everyone respects him, and he’s the most popular kid in school. And when you are chosen, that attention and respect and elevated status is fun for a while. But then you start to think of the nice guy that you really like, who maybe isn’t so popular but was a whole lot nicer to you and maybe really cared about you. But then it’s too late, you’re stuck dating a monster, who is enabled by the social structure of high school to be as jerky as he wants and get away with it—for reasons as infinitely complicated and illogical as any royal family tree.

When I was a teenager, writing rhyming vampire poetry and dreaming (quietly, from a distance) about boys in my class, I kept my dreams to myself. While I vigilantly protected my heart, Catherine let passion rule her. She followed it and fell blindly from grace, indulging in sin and ignoring the consequences. Though her actions are foolish, there is something powerful in her story. We all teeter on the brink of disaster at one point or another during our teen years—do we give ourselves to passion, to a potentially bad decision, or do we back away? Catherine never backed away, which is what makes her story so dangerous, and so delicious.

Wicked Fiction

I find that people—especially people who know me—often look for who I am in my novels, or what may be based on truth. This is the beauty of fiction. My life is, thankfully, very different from the lives of glamour and danger lead by my characters. Though we are very different, I can still connect with them through our inner fears, our awkwardness—something that all of humanity shares, regardless of the century in which we’re born. It’s through these very human stories that I connect most deeply with history, with those who came before me, and imagine the stories their ghosts might tell us if they could.

Reading and writing are the safest and most effective modes of metamorphosis that I have found. It can be liberating to shed your own preoccupations and obsessions and try on someone else’s for a while. To take your own pain and anger and fears and dreams and transform them into a story—someone else’s story—this is part of the magic of writing, for me. The act of creation can be liberating. It’s empowering to let your old demons dance across the page, and tell a story that is dark, and human, and true.

Alisa M. Libby has been writing stories since she first learned how to properly grip a crayon. Growing up in Natick, Massachusetts, she dabbled in other potential careers in her formative years (trumpet player, actress, astronomer, unicorn) but ended up going to Emerson College for a degree in creative writing, with a focus on fiction. While at Emerson she began writing numerous short stories about the “blood countess” of Hungarian legend, which years later evolved into “The Blood Confession,” her first novel. She lives in Brockton, Massachusetts, with her husband Thomas, and their basset hound, Roxanne.

She also writes a blog we here at YARN highly recommend!

Why couldn’t my relatives have a place at the beach? I’d be able to stroll off, thoughts whooshing around in my head like the crashing waves, and, most importantly, I’d have a high probability of scoping golden lifeguards with six-pack abs. Instead, our Chevy Astro heaved up a gravel driveway leading to an old house in Waynesville, North Carolina, a small mountain town. My attempt to read Seventeen along miles of winding roads had made me too nauseous to enjoy even the magazine’s folded perfume samples, usually my favorite freebie.  The postcard view of the lush highlands was totally lost on me—their peaks verified that there was no escape from this family gathering.

We’d driven three hours to devote our Memorial Day weekend to the Phillips Family Reunion, never mind the fact that I’d never known we had any affiliation with this last name.  When my dad set the parking brake, I had no choice but to drag my butt out of the car.  Clutching their Beanie Babies, my two younger sisters bounded out the minivan, high on Skittles and Dr. Pepper. I slid out of the car and scanned the scene.  About twenty of my relatives were scattered among several picnic tables on the craggy incline.

Photo Courtesy of protoflux (flickr.com).

“I’m so glad you wore those ratty shorts for the occasion,” my Mom said.

I’d had these strategically deconstructed J.Crew cut-offs for a couple of years; Mom was just waiting for her chance to sneak them into the trash.

“What, like I was supposed get all fancy for this?”  I said under my breath, loud enough for her to hear.

She sighed.  I made a face and pulled at one of the threads along my thigh.  Neither of us wanted to get into it in front of everyone.

“Are we having fun yet?”  my Dad asked.

He adjusted his visor and squinted his eyes, which ping-ponged between Mom and me.  Earlier, I’d mumbled “Yeah” and “I know” in response to his pep talk about how it was just one afternoon, and I should try to relax and get to know some of my relatives.  Little did my parents know there were actually supposed to be parties back home that weekend.  I hadn’t told them this because I sensed that they’d get a secret thrill out of ruining my social life.

My Great Aunt Kate, sort of the matriarch of The Phillips Family Reunion, lived in an old white house at the top of the hill. Everyone called her “Aunt Kate.”  I’d only met her once before this particular family event.  My Great Aunt Rooney and Uncle Robert, whom I’d also met once before, lived at the bottom of the hill in a ranch-style brick house that was right across the street from a Lowes.

I said hello to my relatives of the close-extended variety: the ones who sent me birthday cards with a crisp twenty sandwiched inside.   I vaguely recognized some of the other faces from fuzzy old photographs. I prayed no one had gotten tee-shirts made for the occasion.

Although Aunt Kate was well into her eighties, she wore semi-cool tennis shoes and carried herself like a lanky gym teacher. In a hopeful voice, Dad told me that Aunt Kate had won several medals in the Senior Olympics for running. I’d been on my high school cross-country team for a year, but I’d won nothing besides a Varsity letter that was now tacked to my cork bulletin board—I had zero desire to sport the jacket.   My passion for the activity was mainly due to its calorie-burning benefits and the fact that I hated it less than other sports. On a trail, you could just be in your head, sans blaring scoreboards and teammates screaming at you for dropping the ball.  When Aunt Kate led a few of us through her old house and pointed to her display case of ribbons and medals, I mentioned that I ran too.  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught my mom looking pleased.  Ugh.

“Do you like it?”  Aunt Kate asked.

“Um, well,” I took a deep breath.  Her house had a woody, apple cider scent.  “Probably not as much as you, y’know?  I’m not very fast, but I do like to exercise.”

“Good for you,” she said.

I wished I had more to say.

“Cool.  Where’s the bathroom?”

Photo courtesy of Jason Marshall.

In the bathroom, my Aunt Kate’s “Evening in Paris” perfume and powder set caught my eye.   The midnight blue bottles with elegant calligraphy looked like it had existed in the days of bootlegging and flappers, and the fancy set almost seemed out of place in the rustic house.  Though I wasn’t sure what kind of prospects could be found in these hills, I tried to picture a young Aunt Kate primping for a hot date: her hair in a French twist, a spritz on every pulse point so that her “Evening in Waynesville” could be as magical as the designs on those starry bottles.

Back out in the yard, my family lounged in lawn chairs around the picnic tables.  I was amazed at how many of the grown-ups wore the same gross, pleated khaki shorts.  From the words “Whitewater” and “son of a…” I knew that they were discussing their favorite boring adult topic—politics.  So much for jumping in on that conversation–not that any of them would listen to me anyhow.

I did have plenty of cousins, some of whom I was seeing for the first time that day.  The family-tree-forces had conspired against me though, so most of them were still dependent on someone else to fasten the metal clasp of their Osh Kosh straps.  While my little sisters were no ankle biters, they hadn’t yet hit the MTV phase of life.  Besides, three hours in the car with them had sucked out every ounce of my “helpful, understanding big sister” persona.  I grabbed my Discman out of the Astro, and plopped down on a metal folding chair.  I hit play on the device and covered my ears.

My tunes, the green mountains, and the crisp air, almost swept me into a Zen-like mindset.  Almost.  Then I found myself as the unintentional Monkey-in-the-Middle in a game of catch between my sister Sarah and our cousin David.  A dog-slobber-matted tennis ball whizzed my face. The last thing I needed was to get slammed in the face by this nasty ball—my zits were already enough trouble to spackle. I was forced to relocate. Radiohead’s lyrics fit my mood: “What the hell am I doin’ here?  I don’t belong here.”

In an authentic fifties convertible, a “local” relative, Tim, arrived with metallic tubs full of fried chicken with a myriad of country “fixin’s,” from some restaurant.  Everyone formed a line for the food then dug in.  I fought the urge to ask how many fat grams were in a drumstick.

Later that afternoon, I took a walk down to my Aunt Rooney and Uncle Robert’s house.   I’d said hello to them when we’d first arrived at the picnic, and I wasn’t sure if they were in Aunt Kate’s house now or what. Taking a walk would  get me away from everyone for a minute and counteract the greasy fried chicken and blackberry pie I’d inhaled that afternoon.  I didn’t tell anyone where I was going because the house was just down the stupid hill.  Like there was any trouble to get into. I dropped my Discman off in the car, and carefully walked down the slope.  Too bad we hadn’t come in the winter–sledding might actually have made things more fun.  On my way down, Aunt Kate was walking up, a smile on her face.  She waved at me without missing a beat, almost charging up the incline.  I felt lazy.

Once I reached the house, I saw that the screen door was open, so I poked my head in.

“Hello?”

Aunt Rooney came to the door.

“Um, hi,” I said.  “Can I use the bathroom?”

I was such a dazzling conversationalist.

“Of course,” she said.

I kind of hoped there’d be another “Evening in Paris” discovery in their bathroom, but it was just a standard old people bathroom: a hand-knit cover shielded the extra toilet paper roll from looking like toilet paper.

When I came out Rooney was in the kitchen, filling a tall glass with ice.

“You want a soda, honey?”  she asked.

She eagerly held open the refrigerator.  If I was a decent human being, I had no choice but to sit down and have a soda.

“Sure.”

She handed me the Coke she’d poured, and I followed her through a hallway into the living room. We walked by a framed 1950s school photograph of a smiling, brunette teenage girl.  I wondered which of the middle-aged people at the picnic that cute girl had turned into.

We reached the living room, where my uncle sat in a leather recliner.  The dark wood panels and musty couches made me feel like I’d stepped into some early 1970s sitcom.  The scene on the television really clinched the time warp— an announcer in a polyester leisure suit introduced a group of women who looked like Dairy Maids, who burst into a corny tune.

I’d never seen such cheese that didn’t seem to realize it was cheese.

“What show is this?” I asked.

“The Lawrence Welk Show,” my uncle replied.

“Mmm.”

While he hummed along with the swinging, singing women, Rooney asked me questions about school and my family.  I must’ve even mustered up some questions for her because she told me, “I don’t know why people call me Rooney.  My name is Mary Katherine.”

I was getting a kick out of Lawrence Welk in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way.  I also liked being around fewer people.   It was easy to be polite to these sweet old relatives whom I didn’t really know.  They’d never seen me slam doors and sulk.

I’d almost finished my Coke when someone tapped at the screen door.  Rooney got up, while I watched the beginning of another equally wretched song-and-dance.

I heard my Dad asking about me, so I got up.

“Just seeing if you were down here,” he said.  “You didn’t tell anyone where you were going.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said.

I would’ve said, “Whatever, like anything was going to happen to me in this Podunk town,” but I didn’t want to subject my elderly relatives to my snottiness. After Dad and Rooney chatted for a minute, he and I said our goodbyes and hoofed it back up the hill.  The sun had almost set and the temperature had dropped.  I wished I’d brought pants.

“How long did you talk to them for?”  Dad asked.

“I dunno, a little while I guess.”

“Did they tell you anything about their daughter?”

“Um, Rooney might’ve mentioned something.  Hey, did you know her name’s not really Rooney?”

He nodded.

“Their daughter died of Scarlett Fever when she was seventeen.”

The wholesome face from the hallway picture flashed in my mind.

“Oh.”

Chilly bumps covered my legs, and I pulled at my shorts.

“They’ve always been fond of teenage girls,” Dad said.

I was so, so grateful that I’d acted nice in front of them.

We said our good-byes to the rest of the family.  My dad steered the Astro back down the mountain while I thought about how I’d survived the Memorial Day family reunion—it wasn’t so bad after all.  I realized that maybe my relatives hadn’t always been the kind of people who donned Christmas sweaters without a smidge of irony: they’d been young once.  Not that I believed they’d all been born over-the-hill, but I’d just never considered how much life they’d lived—all the loves and deaths they’d already experienced before I made the scene. I felt lucky to be related to an eighty-year-old who could trek up mountains with a smile on her face. She probably still carried her memories of magical “Evening in Paris” scented nights with her.

About Susan: Though I have lived in Atlanta, GA since 2006, I spent my college years and early twenties in Asheville, NC, which is about thirty minutes from the town where this memoir takes place.  I have just completed my MFA in Children’s and YA Lit. through Hollins University, and I currently work at a private high school, teaching Writing and Yearbook, as well as tutoring students.  When taking breaks from writing, I can be found adding new music to my Itunes, searching for online sales, and going to concerts.

Congratulations to Susan!

For her $25 prize, Susan chose the children and YA bookstore Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, GA

Family reunions are misleadingly depicted as happy occasions.  In reality, the teenage victim of this relative-filled hell steps onto the patio, as Aunt Beatrice rushes forward, fingers poised for pinching cheeks.  My family reunion experience was no exception to this kind of familial torment.  The atmosphere was filled with that awkward how-do-you-do, I-don’t-know-where-to-sit feeling.  We had never gathered together in a “reunion” setting before.  It was hard not to laugh watching the adults try to act like they knew what was going on and what they were doing.  My uncle and aunt on my mother’s side were hosting.  They were hectically cooking; the guests were standing around, talking.  My sister and I stood by the wall just watching.  Nervous laughter flooded every conversation.  Why was everyone acting so happy?  This reunion was not a happy occasion.  It was painfully obvious how masked everyone was.  It was painfully obvious how strained everyone’s emotions were.  My sister and I stayed by the wall.

Family reunions always have a reason for occurring.  Typically, those reasons include holidays, celebrations, and occurrences of that sort.  Ours fell under the “celebrations” category.  It was a bittersweet thing, really.  We had come together that day to celebrate Death.  My granddad’s death.  I, for one, was not in the mood to celebrate the one-year anniversary of his death—at least not the way my family was doing it.  Who celebrates Death and laughs the whole time?  I felt uncomfortable, I felt confused, and most of all, I felt like my feelings of anguish were absolutely uncalled for in this sea of commemoration.  I didn’t know what to think.  I’d never been to a family reunion before.

So, there we were, my sister and I: standing against the wall.  All I wanted was to be left alone.  But at a family reunion, that’s just wishful thinking. The whole room reeked of boredom.  Rapidly, people began to search for escapes from these awkward this-is-great, how’s-the-family, oh-wait-we’re-all-here conversations.   I will never understand why it is that youth are always the portal to entertainment at reunions.  Our mother pleaded with us to sing for the family; she wanted to show us off, glorify her parental successes.  As a result, our uncle begged us to perform for them, my sister on guitar, myself as vocals.  Our aunt beseeched us to belt out karaoke.  Our older sister, age twenty-two at the time, asked us to play Frisbee out in the yard.  Our grandmother implored us to discuss various subjects of our lives with herself and the small crowd that had formed.  Thus, we were bombarded by the adults; the cowering antelope had been spotted by the famished lions; the mouse was closed up in the snake’s jaws.

Fending off these mobs of faces with hasty excuses like, “I left my coat in the car,” and, “What’s that, Mom, way over there, on the other side of the house?” we managed to make it to dinner.  I sustained a few wounds to my cheeks and various areas of my face where I had been smothered in kisses, but food awaited, and so all was well.  Sitting down, I didn’t expect anything really emotional to happen.  Nonetheless, as soon as the food disappeared from our plates, my uncle spoke.  We were each supposed to share one memory, our favorite or most profound, of Granddad, with the everyone gathered.  My uncle was going to start, and then we would go around the table.

At first, panic seized my very heart.  I could feel the muscle being compressed within the massive palm of an invisible attacker.  I had to pick a memory.  I had to pull one random thought out of a hat.  I knew they would accept anything.  I could tell them about him savoring his one tiny bite of chocolate ice cream once a day after he was moved from the hospital back home until the day that he died.  I could tell them anything.  But I chose my one memory; the only memory I knew would really hurt me to share.  It was my most vivid memory of him, even though I was not actually present at the creation of this memory.

And so, I waited with baited breath.   No one had started crying yet, but people were wiping their eyes.  I had never cried over him since he died.  I wasn’t allowed to see him before he died, because I was ill, and I would make him die faster.  So, I didn’t get to say goodbye to him.  When my dad told me he died, when I joined my family downstairs over his deathbed, when my mother embraced me in her shaking arms sobbing, even when they told me his last words, I never cried.

Photo courtesy of Stephen Coles (flickr.com).

I cried that day.  It was my turn.  With a slow breath, I explained how I wrote him a letter in painstakingly perfect calligraphic writing, which I had been encouraged by him to learn.  I had used his pen set, his ink, his paper.  He had given them to me.  I wrote that letter, and I sealed it with hot wax, burning myself over and over to get it right, because I was pouring it straight onto the envelope instead of stamping it. What it said wasn’t anything complicated or long or particularly sentimental.  It was what any granddaughter might write to her dying grandfather: I know you will get better!  Your doggies miss you, they follow Mom everywhere.  I miss you more.  I can’t wait to see you.  You’re going to get better.  I know it.  I love you.

I wasn’t there when that letter was delivered.  My mother was the one who originally told me what he did when he received it.  But I could picture it so perfectly in my mind’s eye that I was there.  I shared this piece of my memory so utterly deep within my soul that a fragment of my heart shattered as I let the words slip from my lips.  He slowly opened the letter.  He unfolded the paper with the utmost care.  He read the letter.  He folded it up.  He unfolded it with the same care.  He read it again.  He folded it up.  He unfolded it and read it again.  Then, he placed it on his windowsill, where he could always see it and read it over and over. This, my mother told me.  This, I recalled for them.  It was this that ultimately released my unyielding wall against tears.  I left the table after I told them that.  I left it not because I cried, but because they started laughing at me for it.

I will never understand adults.  They cry when something distressful happens, but they cannot bring themselves to cry in a gathering for the purpose of crying.  I know that the laughter was meant to prevent them from breaking out in sobs themselves.  There was no other explanation for this bizarre reaction.  There was dead silence when I finished my story.  My attempt to control my emotions was what actually initiated the first of the laughs.  But honestly, I would have preferred to have them all crying with me so that I didn’t feel so inconceivably alone and stupid.  They laughed at me when I went back, too, after regaining my composure.  Even my sister laughed.  I loathed them.  No one else cried; they all were weeping inside, but they didn’t let it out.

About Helen Hasbun: Raised in California, I have been a writer all my life.  My family has always been extremely supportive, through my move from California to Washington and through all the hardships I have faced.  I am a senior in high school, and while my passion for writing is evident, I am pursuing orthodontics.  My grandfather passed away in 2007, the day of his sister’s birthday.  While we miss him every day, we know that he left happily.  His last words were, “Hugs all around, love to all; I have to fly away now.”

CONGRATS to Helen, and thank you to all the teens who bravely threw their own family gatherings into the ring.

For her $25 prize,  Helen chose the Lion Heart Book Store in Seattle, WA.