“Honey, your father and I are getting a divorce.”
Those nine little words repeated in my eight-year-old brain as I slammed my bedroom door shut, confining myself in a painful state of solitude as tears stained the freckles on my cheeks. I burrowed my face into one of my polka-dot pillows and screamed until the last bit of air escaped my lungs.
I heard a knock from outside. Why can’t you leave me alone? It felt impossible for me to force my thoughts into words as my head pounded with an intensifying heat. If only someone had been there to say, “You will get through this. You will be okay.”
No one told me this, so I sat in my room, unable to cope with the recent news. My parents don’t love each other so they don’t love me. Why would they put my brother and I through this?
I thought we would never be okay.

My younger brother Gage has always been a fragile boy. He used to wake up in the middle of the night thrashing between his sheets and screaming for my mom, even if she stood a few inches away, comforting him with her loving arms. I think it was the abuse.
“Gage, your hair is too long,” scoffed my step-monster Kyla.
Step-monster: the nickname she rightfully deserved.
“You look like a little girl. I could put bows in your hair.”
One by one, her harsh words attacked Gage’s psyche, forcing an array of gentle tears down the side of his face that he desperately tried to hide.
“Why are you crying?  Now I need to mop these tears off of the floor with your head, Rapunzel,” the step-monster said, her words as sharp as a barber’s blade.
I sat there lurking in the shadows as a witness of one of my brother’s most traumatic memories, unable to help as he stared me down with desperate eyes.

“Jessi, where did you put my black boots?” I scream down the basement stairs.
My new step-sister moved into my basement a week ago, already making herself comfortable. Despite my growing appreciation for our late night ice cream runs and end-of-the-summer mani-pedis, having to share puts me in the grumpiest of moods.
She rummages through my closet like a natural disaster, leaving a dirty mess of tangled clothes and mismatched shoes for me to pick up later.
“I have no idea, Gabi. Did you check under your bed?” Jessi screams back.
I remember exactly where I last saw them. They aren’t under my bed.
“Don’t mess with my stuff anymore, Jess! I know you wore my boots.”
“Then you can’t ever wear my grey cashmere sweater.”
I love that sweater. We need to compromise.