I could hear Mum and Dad arguing through the gapes in the door.
The floor hummed with the magic keeping it together. If you looked hard enough at the seams, they would flicker. Maybe it was the colours bursting behind my eyes, or the hollow dryness in my throat… but the house screamed sometimes. It hummed so loudly that I was almost deaf.
I wondered which thread I would have to pull to start taking it apart. Would the shingles fall first? Would it tip to the side? Would I just fall through the floor, straight into the basement?
I used to try to hide the arguments. I would use spells to dampen the noise, to make the rooms their own little world. Now? I didn't care. I wanted to hear them.
Every holiday was the same. The same argument. The same excuses.
The same realization that my Dad would never love me enough to fight her.
That my Mum would never love me enough to stop fighting some weird expectations. I didn't know why she did what she did. I didn't want to know, really. All that matters, at the end of the day, is how people treat you.
I stopped telling Mum I was in pain. If I had to hear another lecture on the Spells of Women of a Certain Bloodline… I was gonna go mad. Maybe I was already mad.
Furious might be the word…
Dad would find me crying on the bathroom floor, any floor really, and try to talk to her.
I wanted to ask, sometimes, if Dad had seen the letters from the School. Maybe that would have given him the right push. Or Mum would be angrier, and he would back down. It hurt less, just a little bit less, when he tried. If he stopped all together, I don't think I could have dealt with the heartbreak.
Mum always outnumbered him. Even when she was the only one demanding the world move, she outnumbered everyone. She outnumbered me, certainly. I couldn't count on my own body, let alone anyone else.
But… the pain.
It kept me down. Kept me down like a wounded animal. I didn't have the energy to do more than pretend.
To listen to the memorized lines of my parents.
"I had the same pain, Arthur. This is not unusual."
"She has been crying all day…"
"Ginny always cries."
"She asked—"
"You really need to listen to me when I tell you things. She is fine. Fine. We don't have the money for this!"
"We can find it."
"I don't want to find it. I want you to trust me that—"
"What do you expect me to do, Molly? Ignore my own child?"
"I expect you to put this marriage first."
"She has been crying in the bathroom—"
"—I am her mother."
I sometimes felt the voice in my throat. I sometimes wanted to say the words.
But I am your daughter.
But what good would that do?
Mum only saw herself.