When I was little we actually celebrated Christmas. It was a pretty big deal because my mom was a major Christian and her brother was a pastor and every year we would all get together and open presents and eat a lot of food. My parents drove my little sister and me three whole hours every Christmas Eve just so we could see our oddly religious cousins, which apparently was something we liked to do.
Fast forward to my eighth grade year. It was Christmas Eve and I, being the little punk I claimed to be, refused to get into my parent’s minivan because I didn’t want to drive three hours to see people that I hated. I locked myself in my room and listened as Lucinda cried about not being able to see cousins Billy or Nick or whatever their names were. My mom stormed to my room, banged on the door, and yelled, “We are going with or without you Alice Marie Kavanagh!”
They ended up going without me, and my mom’s frustration at me led to the fatal accident that morning. Just a few minutes away from home, the van slid on ice and tumbled down a hill, leaving my little sister paralyzed from the waist down and my parents unharmed. My mom called me, and I ran three miles to the scene. After spending hours in the hospital, my parents finally decided that we could go home and leave Lucinda in medical care. My dad’s mom drove us home late that night, only to find that our house had been completely vandalized from the outside in due to me not locking the door that morning. Christmas had officially been ruined.
Fast forward even further to my junior year of high school. Christmas had been a whole lot different since the accidents. For starters, my mom and dad split up the summer between my eighth grade and freshman year. Mom took Lucinda and they moved three states over- twelve hours away. I stayed with my dad, who mostly just stayed in our basement writing music. We never celebrated Christmas again, period.
I was eligible to apply to Cornell my sophomore year of high school because of my “outstanding grades” and “spectacular behavior”, so I did. I waited for an acceptance letter for months and months and months, but every day I came a little more to the realization that I would never get accepted.
Like I said, Christmas had been a little different previously, and that year, my junior year, was no exception. I spent a majority of that school break in a place my grandma called “wonderland” and my dad called “hell”. It was a place where I was supposed to feel safe and sound and be able to express what I was feeling. To my mom, I was at church camp. In reality, I was at Janet’s Rehab Center for Drug and Alcohol Abuse.
“Have you talked to God yet?”
“What?” The question caught me off guard. I was bookmarking a place in my book just as my mom called. Not even a “Hello! How are you?”
“Church camp is fun, isn’t it?” Mom asked in the way she did my first day of first grade.
“Big kid school is fun, isn’t it?”
That day I got two crayons stuck up my nose and was placed beside the gassiest kid in school for nap time, but I lied and told her it was the best day of my life.
“Absolutely.” I try to sound as reassuring as possible after sounding completely ignorant to the “God question”. I wasn’t really at church camp, but my dad decided it would be best to tell my mother than rather than letting her know about my “drug problem”- our “drug problem”. “How’s Lucinda?”
YOU ARE READING
Alice
Teen Fiction"Drugs and books. Basically my life." Alice Kavanagh thought she had it all together until her parents split up the summer before her freshman year. Her mom moved across the country and her dad rejoined his post-grudge band, Armor and All, in hopes...
