Mirror, Mirror

Heaving a long crrreeeeaaakkk, the train pulsed away, leaving my Dad and replacement family saluting like statues on the icy platform. My stomach flinched. I had already lost Mom—when I was five, a truck plowed into our car, killing her instantly. Now I was leaving Dad. But I was also leaving my stepmother. It was as obvious as the skinny little nose on her copper-skinned face that she wouldn’t miss me any more than I would miss her.

A broad smile accompanied my final wave as the train curved into a tunnel, instantly erasing them and my bravado, for in that moment of immediate darkness, the window morphed into a mirror, reflecting a girl whose smile puckered into a scowl.

“Who are you?” I asked the twelve-year-old girl who looked back at me. We simultaneously removed our glasses. The girl in the mirror bit her lip, which told me that she was scared. She gnawed on her thumb, which told me she was anxious. She was alone, and nothing like the people who had just disappeared on the platform.

For starters, they had similar skin colors. Dad described my lighter and freckled version of his rich caramel skin as café au lait, with extra cream and brown sugar sprinkles. I wasn’t as dark as Dad, and not as light as Mom. She was pinkish, with freckles that marched across her button nose. I touched my own, which matched hers, freckles and all. Calling them fairy dust and me Bonnie Baby, she would tickle me with kisses.

Then there was the hair. Mine was a longer, tangled version of Dad’s close-cropped cinnamon nap. Mom’s was silky auburn. Dad’s face was chiseled with a square jaw, tight mouth, and dimpled chin. Mom’s was oval with a full mouth and soft chin. Mine was round and buckled with braces. But I had Mom’s eyes. Green eyes that blinked back tears. I resembled both parents, but looked like neither.

“You don’t belong,” I told my perplexed self, covering my eyes with long elegant fingers—Mom’s fingers—as if they could erase the last seven years as gently as they had wiped away tears before that. Shielding my eyes from myself, I reviewed the avalanche of events that got me here.

Mom. I didn’t remember much, except her hair. Thick auburn hair. It was the last thing I saw when the truck hit our car. Why did she have to die? I never told anyone this, but I wanted to kill the truck driver who killed her. Tears scraped my heart, burning it like a skinned knee.

“You’ll have to live with your father,” everyone said. That wasn’t a problem—I had seesawed between my parents since their divorce two years before the accident. But then Dad went and married Deborah—I called her Deb-Horror—saying I needed a mother. Then she needed a house. Then a baby. Nobody asked what I needed.

As if I could erase those disasters, I closed my eyes and circled my fingertips from them to my brow and across to my temples. Resting my palms together below my chin and fanning my fingers across my cheeks, I opened my eyes. In that instant, the train cleared the tunnel. Watching my reflection dissolve into a rolling countryside, my hands sprung outward.

“I’m free,” I announced aloud as the train slackened its pace across an intersection. A pack of teenagers in a pick-up truck waved, and I waved back. They didn’t know I was a loser.

I wasn’t always one, I sighed, remembering the world where I had had a real family and real friends. But Deb-Horror cancelled that life, shredding it like cheese. I hated my new school. The only kids who acknowledged me were the other misfits. For them, breaking rules was chill, like skipping school to hang out at the mall. Of course, the one day I went along, we got caught.

One morning, Deb-Horror pitched a fit when I tried to sneak out wearing a borrowed lace-up vest and short skirt. I responded by kicking a hole in my bedroom wall with my platform boots. I didn’t understand why that was such a big deal—I didn’t hurt anyone. Besides, she and Dad had knocked a hole in my life. A counselor suggested that I had something called an “antisocial disorder.” That was harsh. I didn’t have a disorder, it was my life that was disordered.

Then there was the Juul incident. I didn’t like vaping, but I liked hanging around with kids who did. Dad discovered and threw away my pod. But when Deb-Horror checked my Instagram, it was Game Over, big time. She discovered the picture I had posted of a slap game we played on a new girl. It was just a prank, but Dad called it bullying.

So besides taking away my screens, he grounded me, which was a good thing because I wasn’t with my homies when they got caught shoplifting a few days later. Some of those kids may have had that disorder thing. Even though they weren’t real friends, they were somebodies. I missed having somebodies, anybodies.

That’s how I ended up on this train, exiled to an aunt and uncle’s bed and breakfast. “Get her away from that crowd,” they suggested. “Keep her too busy to get in trouble.”

Patches of scenery appeared and disappeared dreamlike in the mist. We stopped. We moved. People got off. People got on. Scenery appeared. Towns disappeared. We stopped. We moved. Stations loomed and tracks retreated. Rocked into a half sleep, Dad and Deb-Horror blended into Dad and Mom. Mom combed her long auburn hair. “Young lady,” she called me. Not Bonnie Baby. I reached out to hold her.

“Young lady.” But it wasn’t her voice. It was a man’s. Jolted awake, I blinked. A porter was leaning into my seat. “Wake up, young lady. This is your stop.”