Darkness Inside (Formally: A Day in the Life)

Lisa dropped her book bag by the front door as she walked in. She didn’t bother calling out that she was home. No one would have heard her anyway. If they even cared. She strode into the dining room. A plate of cookies lay on the counter. She hopped onto a stool and snatched a couple.

While she ate the cookies, she heard the sound of chopping coming from the kitchen. Her mother chopping vegetables for dinner. Likely, her mother imagined her daughters on the kitchen counter, the knife chopping their young bodies into small pieces to be buried in the backyard. Lisa laughed. She did not think her mother so twisted as to believe she would actually serve her and her sister for dinner, but she did not love them.

Over her entire life, Lisa could not remember her mother ever display any affection–for anyone. Her mother never hugged nor kissed Lisa or her sister. She was cold even to Lisa’s father. Lisa never saw them kiss or hold each other at all. They even slept in separate rooms. That was as much his fault as it was hers. He spent all his time in that stupid workshop.

Lisa and her mother exchanged very few words. Her mother spoke to Lisa in volumes with her eyes. If her mother’s eyes were daggers, they would stab Lisa in the chest repeatedly. Her sister, however, would have legendary arguments with their mother. Melissa was bad. She did it for the attention. It got attention–from Mom, at least. Melissa didn’t see it, though. She never looked into their mother’s soulless eyes. Better to be invisible than to attract her attention.

Wanting to avoid attention from her mother, Lisa slipped out of the dining room, avoiding the kitchen. She grabbed her book bag from the front door and headed down the hall towards her room. She walked by the basement door, which was slightly ajar. She opened the door and looked down the stairs. Though she couldn’t see him, she knew he was down there. Her father was always down there. His experiments were more important than anything: his wife, his daughters, even his career. It was quiet. He must have been thinking. Or designing. Or calculating.

She went down there once. There were charts and boards full of math equations. Her father had been so angry with her. Not even Melissa was bold enough to cross their father. Lisa did not want to chance his wrath, so she closed the door and moved on.

She strode into her room and hopped on her bed. Melissa was not there. Lisa was not surprised. Though they went to the same school and even the same class, they never arrived home at the same time. She had all her boyfriends to entertain. Melissa’s bed was still made. Lisa wondered if she even slept in it last night. She had not been there when Lisa had woken up that morning.

Lisa pulled out her diary and wrote in it until dinner.

It was just her and her mother at the dinner table. Melissa had not come home yet. Dad was still downstairs. They ate in solitude. When she finished, she asked to be excused to work on her homework. Her mother let her go. After rushing up to her room, Lisa pulled out a pencil and paper. Her teacher wanted her to write a paper about herself and her family. As Lisa began to write, she heard the sound of the front door opening and closing. She blotted out the screaming match as she wrote. She heard her sister run up the stairs to their room and open the door.

Lisa looked up at her sister. It was like looking in one of those fun house mirrors that made you look different. Lisa was looking at the slutty version of herself. Melissa wore a low-cut blouse that showed off an amazing amount of cleavage for a girl her age and a mini-skirt so high it left little to the imagination. Her natural strawberry blonde hair was dyed jet black, and she wore more make up than Tammy Faye Baker. How two identical twin sisters could be so different was beyond Lisa.

“Hey, sis,” Melissa grinned. “Mom’s pretty pissed.”

“What else is new?”

“Well, I’ve got a date tonight. Cover for me?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

With that, Melissa slipped out the window and climbed out of sight. Lisa considered her paper. She wondered what would happen if she wrote the paper like she wrote her diary. She started over.

All About Me

So you wanna know about me? My name is Lisa Brown. My father doesn’t even know that I’m alive. He spends all day with his research. I’m surprised he took the time from his research to get my mother pregnant. I’m not even sure why she let him. She treats me and my sister like we’re an inconvenience. I don’t think she ever wanted kinds.

My dad is super smart. He works for the University of Southern California. I know he does important research there, but he always brings it home. The only way I can get his attention is to be smart like him. If I’m smart like him, maybe I can join him in his research and he’ll pay attention to me.

My mother hates me. I can see it in her eyes when she looks at me. I wish she were dead. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to lure her to a part of town with heavy traffic. I could “accidentally” give her a shove. No more mommy. I would cry and screech. No one would be the wiser. I’m a good girl. Who would suspect me?

My intellectual prowess has alienated me from my peers. Boys never look my way. They are intimidated by intelligent women. Point of fact: my sister is just as intelligent as I am, but she pays dumb and the boys flock to her. Maybe that’s because she puts out. She’s always been a slut. It doesn’t matter. They are all my inferiors. Someday, they’ll all get what’s coming to them. Someday they’ll pay.

Lisa crumbled the paper up and threw it in her wastebasket. Never. Stay beneath the radar. Be invisible. No one will ever see that side of her. Only to her diary would she confess this secret life. It had to be contained. She started over and wrote her paper like a good little girl would write it.