Read Online Like Son by Felicia Luna Lemus - Free Book Online
Authors: Felicia Luna Lemus
Tags: General Fiction
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outside my father’s apartment. So, yes, technically, there were probably cockroaches at his place, but still, she might as well have hosed me down naked in the carport every other weekend and Wednesday night. I was thus filled with deep shame. Not to mention self-loathing.
When I was eight, Chip’s parents helped my mother file papers to terminate legally my father’s visitation rights. They had no true legal right to do what they did. But they had the pull. They were that powerful. My dad still had to pay child support, but he couldn’t see me anymore.
And, presumably because I had become, for all intents and purposes, as Chip said, “his girl,” Chip hired a design team to glitz-up my bedroom. Looking back at it, the miniature pied-à-terre that resulted should have been a red flag that he thought of me in ways other than purely parental—which it turned out he definitely did—but no one seemed to think anything strange of it then. All I knew was that I was totally stoked when an interior decorator came over to consult with me, still only eight years old, on possible themes for the renovation. With my approval, we settled on new rattan furniture à la Three’s Company , what I thought were awesome Hawaiian-print linens, a custom paint job that included an OP-surfer-style sunset on one wall, and adhesive glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling in a perfect recreation of the Milky Way. Construction workers installed a bar sink and dorm-sized refrigerator (blended into my bedroom with tiki bar rattan accents and forever stocked with those cool squat eight-ounce cans of Coke and vacuum-sealed glass jars of macadamia nuts). One corner of my room held an entertainment system that consisted of not only a turntable and speakers but also a remote control color television with stereo sound. I even got my own phone line and answering machine. I felt so damned grown-up. A third-grader missing two front teeth, I was crowned an American princess.
On most weekends, Chip, my mother, and I drove up to a super snooty section of hilly suburban Los Angeles to visit Chip’s parents. They held dinners and introduced us to congressmen, senators, and a hodgepodge of renowned musicians, artists, and other famed people. Two quirky examples I loved to brag about when I was a kid: my stepgrandma knew astronauts, and she’d met Andy Warhol once (she’d been bombed on wine—as she often was—the night they met, according to an entry in Warhol’s later published diaries). Sir Edmund Hillary, drunk and sans the Sherpa who really reached the summit first, posed for a Polaroid with me by my stepgrandparents’ fireplace for my Famous World Figure social sciences report in fourth grade. Official NASA satellite photographs illustrated my planet report in sixth grade.
I glowed in limelight. I traveled. I sat front row at rock concerts. I wore cashmere sweaters and drank from a crystal glass filled with Martinelli’s Sparkling Apple Cider at the fancy yuppie wine-tasting parties we hosted in our home. Chip liked to play Frisbee golf on the weekends. He also had a thing for secretly snorting pharmaceutical coke lifted from hospital holdings. Hippocratic Oath and all human ethics out the window, by the time I was nine, Chip had taken to drugging and fucking his prepubescent stepdaughter in the middle of the night.
And my mother dared ask who I was?
Well, I’d been the little girl who woke inexplicably groggy and aching and sad in the mornings, who still managed to always keep her braids combed tidy, to tuck her shirt in, to say thank you and generally sit politely when told to. I’d been the one who worked like a dog in school to get high marks so my mother would be proud of me. I’d been the strange kid who cried at her desk before elementary school exams from the anxiety of trying to be perfect.
I’d also been the child Chip came home to once after a shift in the ER and told about a little boy he’d worked on the night before.
“It
When I was eight, Chip’s parents helped my mother file papers to terminate legally my father’s visitation rights. They had no true legal right to do what they did. But they had the pull. They were that powerful. My dad still had to pay child support, but he couldn’t see me anymore.
And, presumably because I had become, for all intents and purposes, as Chip said, “his girl,” Chip hired a design team to glitz-up my bedroom. Looking back at it, the miniature pied-à-terre that resulted should have been a red flag that he thought of me in ways other than purely parental—which it turned out he definitely did—but no one seemed to think anything strange of it then. All I knew was that I was totally stoked when an interior decorator came over to consult with me, still only eight years old, on possible themes for the renovation. With my approval, we settled on new rattan furniture à la Three’s Company , what I thought were awesome Hawaiian-print linens, a custom paint job that included an OP-surfer-style sunset on one wall, and adhesive glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling in a perfect recreation of the Milky Way. Construction workers installed a bar sink and dorm-sized refrigerator (blended into my bedroom with tiki bar rattan accents and forever stocked with those cool squat eight-ounce cans of Coke and vacuum-sealed glass jars of macadamia nuts). One corner of my room held an entertainment system that consisted of not only a turntable and speakers but also a remote control color television with stereo sound. I even got my own phone line and answering machine. I felt so damned grown-up. A third-grader missing two front teeth, I was crowned an American princess.
On most weekends, Chip, my mother, and I drove up to a super snooty section of hilly suburban Los Angeles to visit Chip’s parents. They held dinners and introduced us to congressmen, senators, and a hodgepodge of renowned musicians, artists, and other famed people. Two quirky examples I loved to brag about when I was a kid: my stepgrandma knew astronauts, and she’d met Andy Warhol once (she’d been bombed on wine—as she often was—the night they met, according to an entry in Warhol’s later published diaries). Sir Edmund Hillary, drunk and sans the Sherpa who really reached the summit first, posed for a Polaroid with me by my stepgrandparents’ fireplace for my Famous World Figure social sciences report in fourth grade. Official NASA satellite photographs illustrated my planet report in sixth grade.
I glowed in limelight. I traveled. I sat front row at rock concerts. I wore cashmere sweaters and drank from a crystal glass filled with Martinelli’s Sparkling Apple Cider at the fancy yuppie wine-tasting parties we hosted in our home. Chip liked to play Frisbee golf on the weekends. He also had a thing for secretly snorting pharmaceutical coke lifted from hospital holdings. Hippocratic Oath and all human ethics out the window, by the time I was nine, Chip had taken to drugging and fucking his prepubescent stepdaughter in the middle of the night.
And my mother dared ask who I was?
Well, I’d been the little girl who woke inexplicably groggy and aching and sad in the mornings, who still managed to always keep her braids combed tidy, to tuck her shirt in, to say thank you and generally sit politely when told to. I’d been the one who worked like a dog in school to get high marks so my mother would be proud of me. I’d been the strange kid who cried at her desk before elementary school exams from the anxiety of trying to be perfect.
I’d also been the child Chip came home to once after a shift in the ER and told about a little boy he’d worked on the night before.
“It
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