Look! It's a miracle, Charlie Brown: I actually finished this chapter!

I apologize for any spelling or grammar errors, but I was so desperate to get this up and get my brain back into the story that I didn't look through this as thoroughly as a probably should.

Next chapter, there will be more Spencer, but I'm trying to build this beyond just romance.

By the way, does anyone else think this SoN movie with MTV is a little fishy? I just don't like how the meeting keeps get pushed back.

Also, what should I do with David Plum? At the moment he's only comic relief, but I'm considering a bigger part for him.

Actor's Mask

Spencer and I don't talk much anymore. It's not a big deal. I've survived without her, and I can continue to do so. I'm not even a people person. I've got Talise and my father, and that's good enough. So, I'm not popular, but I'm so out of the loop that nobody can actually hate me. It's sad but not overwhelmingly tragic.

"Put the vacuum away, Ashley," my mother shouts even though I'm barely six feet away. Sighing, I start winding up the cord while she bustles off to the kitchen. Just as I'm finishing up, I hear, "Ashley! I need you to wipe the bathroom floor." Tiredly, I start up the stairs. My entire day has been spent in sanitizing and random furniture re-arranging. This is what Thanksgiving does to you. The extended family of Christine Woods is a fearsome thing. Even Joe is harassed into mopping the kitchen floor.

On my way to the bathroom, I pass Ben lugging a box full of decorations up from the basement. He's too short to see over the top of it and keeps bumping into things. Swearing, he totters towards the door and promptly slams into Waldo, who was talking over his shoulder to Kyla. The resulting chaos is hilarious, but I am forced to scurry away when I hear my mother making her way over.

"There you are, Wallace!" One of my aunts (my mother's older sister) sweeps Waldo up in a hug. The living room is full of aunts, uncle, cousins, step-'s of all the aforementioned, family friends, and one grandmother.

I hate them all.

Okay, I only hate one or two of them particularly, but I detest having all these people over.

Becky, Joe's younger sister, is busy trying to get her spoiled daughter to sit still. Like mother like daughter. The little brat, Bianca, starts wailing and interrupts the greeting process. Her father tries to bribe her with candy. As she shakes her head wildly, her brown curls go flying. Everyone is quick to assure her parents that no harm was done and coos over her messy hair.

Talise is having a conversation with Joe's college buddy's son. Irritation continually flicks across her face as she watches the awkward creature that is our family blunder around the room. She throws me a forced smile and rubs her face tiredly.

"Oh, let me get that!" my mother exclaims when the doorbell rings.

Step-aunt Becky, having left the monumental task of calming their daughter with her pushover of a husband, winds her way over to me.

"So, Ashley, how are you doing in school?"

"Fine." I lean against a wall, stare straight ahead, and inhale deeply. Then, I nearly choke on the smell of disinfectant that has soaked into my skin.

"Fine? Really? My brother just told me that you have a D-average in History and English. I certainly hope that's not your idea of fine." Why the hell would you ask me how I'm doing if you already now? "You must learn how to apply yourself better. Joe and Christine have provided you with wonderful opportunities that most people couldn't dream of. You are extremely lucky to have such a stable home environment and freedom."

Overhearing the conversation, Christine's mother detaches herself from lecturing a friend about how to discipline children (her favorite topic) to join Aunt Becky. "Christy has always done everything for this girl," my grandmother informs us in the air of one who knows more about this subject than anyone else. "The best treatment, the best care, while that bastard of a rock star runs around the country getting drunk."

There are three types of grandmothers in the world. Those that do nothing but sit in a rocking chair, those that bustle around doing grandmotherly things, and the vicious ones. Guess which one mine is.

When you look at me and my grandmother you can see the family connection. We have the same face and basic build. Sure, my mother and I both have brown hair and brown eyes, but if a stranger saw a picture of my mother, my father and me they'd never assume that we're related. Maybe that's symbolic or something of the state of our family. With my grandmother though, strangers can clearly tell that I'm related to her, and she to my mother.

Turning towards me, she fixes me with steely eyes. They're just like my eyes.

"You better realize how lucky you are, young lady, and appreciate what your parents do for you. You have no excuse for not being at least as good as your siblings. If anything, after all the money and time Christine has devoted to you, you should be exceeding your siblings."

I tap my fingers on the wall as the two women rail on about my inadequacies. Most people don't think I'm a popular person. I disagree. I'm very popular. Everyone loves to talk about what's wrong with me and what a screw-up I am.

"Look, everybody!" Everybody turns to see my mother coming in. My mother, however, only has eyes for Talise. That's not— oh god, it is. This is hilarious.

"It's the Plums!"

My eyes dart over to where Talise's are just returning from their trip to the ceiling. Even as David is pulled over to her, the mask of indifference settles onto her face.

"Hello, Tali!"

It's great not being the most miserable person in the room.

Dinner takes place in the great dining room which is twice as large as our normal dining room. And, our normal dining room could hold all of us and the Carlins—twelve people—with plenty of room to spare. Having spent the last few frantic moments before the guests arrived setting the table, I know that there are exactly 37 people here today. And 6 turkeys.

As luck would have it, I'm jostled in between Bianca and Betty on one side and Billy (an old family friend) on the other. Across from me, my grandmother sits stiffly on the wooden seat. Talise is on the other table, trapped next to David.

We don't use the great dining room often. When I was younger, I was terrified of its high ceiling and huge emptiness. It still unnerves me. Between the unrelenting disapproval that streams from my grandmother and aunt, the intermittent shrieks from Bianca, and the indifference of a man I barely know, I'm too wound up to eat much. The turkey tastes like sand anyways.

"Is something wrong with your food?" comes the sudden sharp question from my grandmother.

"No," I reply, startled. My hand releases its hold on the table cloth.

"Then, why aren't you eating anything?" she shoves a plate of squash, which I hate even more than the turkey, towards me. "Stop being rude and eat. Don't look at me so ungratefully. As though you owe nothing to your mother who worked so hard to raise you and cook this meal." For an instant, my hackles rise, but I master myself while trying not to suffocate on squash.

The rest of the room is filled with the tinkle of china and polite laughter. Uncles chuckle majestically (or at least they think they do) and try to tell their nieces about how their uncle took them fishing once. Nieces barely listen. Parents brag and admonish their kids. Kids ask, "can I be excused now?"

These people aren't my family. I've got half their genes at the most. Talise and I don't share anything but a room and asocial tendencies. What right do they have to judge me? What do I owe them? Love? Respect? Devotion? Why? What have they done for me?

My father is the only family I'll ever have, and he's never here. He'll call tonight, and I'll tell him that everything is great, don't worry, and that I love him. I won't tell him that everyone wants me to fail so they can say I told you so or that sometimes I feel so lonely that I wonder if I'm human. Sometimes I'm so lonely I'm not sure if I'm real.

You know what? I hate the Carlins, the stupid family where everyone has the same last name and the same blue eyes. I hate Glen for being so weak that he can't pick himself up and get over whatever happened to him but instead attacks the world and feels justified. I hate Paula for hating people she doesn't know and for being one more person who thinks the world would be a better place without me. I even hate Mr. Carlin for being so... so... uninteresting and useless.

Most of all, I hate Spencer for assuming that I'll fall into her life like another perfectly-shaped piece on a perfectly-made puzzle. Just because she can hold a pleasant conversation with Madison doesn't mean I can. I don't know what I'm doing wrong half the time, but everyone seems to despise me for it. They expect me to get straight A's because other people can and love my family because other people do. They want me to socialize more, as though I can re-shape my entire world overnight and escape the mold that's been built for me.

I hate them all, and that's okay because they hate me too.

My grandmother narrows her eyes, "You're a spoiled child who barely deserves any of what Christine gives you." In the background, Bianca refuses to eat her squash unless Daddy buys her a pony. "You're a disgrace to this family. I told Christine she was making a mistake taking you in," she hisses.

For a moment, I'm to furious to speak. The moment quickly passes. "I'm not the bastard child," I snarl just loud enough for her to hear. "I'm not the illegitimate baby that your lovely daughter and my loving mother had because she was such a whore."

"How dare you?" Her face as red as Santa Claus' shirt, my grandmother leaps to her feet and screams. Combined with her shock of cropped white hair she reminds me of Christmas. You know, if Christmas ever manifested into a rabid Tasmanian devil. "You are the most selfish, ungrateful, disrespectful, disgraceful excuse for a daughter that I have ever come across."

Most of the room is watching us now in various stages of alarm. Christine pushes her chair back and starts walking over from the other side of the room.

"Do you think your father was a saint?" My grandmother continues, her voice getting louder by the second. "That lousy son-of-a-bitch got—"

"Mom, can we finish this in the kitchen?" Christine cuts in tightly. With her skin pale and straining over the bones of her face, she clamps down on my wrist, tugging me into the kitchen. Her mother follows behind us. The room behind us breaks out into a flurry of polite coughing (don't know when coughing became polite) as we leave.

"What in the world is going on?" My mother demands the second the kitchen door swings closed behind us. Her eyes travel from me to her mother beseechingly. I stay silent. My grandmother, however, wastes no time in informing her that I'm a terrible child, bad seed, all that fun stuff.

Two guys in my gym class last week saw two birds in the sky. One of them said, "hey, look. It's two herrings." I thought it was pretty amusing, but Talise nearly exploded at their stupidity when I told her about it. People say stupid things all the time. Which brings me t—.

"Ashley!" My head jerks up to see my mother looking at me very seriously. Whenever Christine needs to be a mother, she reverts to that role she had as a struggling single parent millimeters away from financial ruin but bravely holds her little family (it's always a "little" family) together until she falls in love with and marries a rich guy somewhere. I think she won an award for that at some point.

Right now she's looking intently at me with serious, dark eyes that are not to be lied to. "Did you really say all those horrible things?"

The music has stopped. I feel like I'm in a movie. "I said two sentences, and they were true."

My grandmother cannot contain her rage. "You called your own mother a whore!" she shrieks. If they didn't hear that in the dining room, they must be deaf.

I stand there, probably bone white, with my hands shaking uncontrollably. Christine turns to her mother. "Please keep your voice down, Mom." Then, she tries to entrance me with her openly warm eyes again. "How could you say that, Ashley?"

I don't get it. Does she have amnesia or something? She knows what she did. She knows that she's never been there for me. How can she not know why I hate her? How can she expect me to pretend like I don't know?

"I don't when we drifted so far apart," my mother claims in a heart-broken voice. Tears collect at the corner of her eyes. Guiltily, I stare at the floor. I hate her for making me feel so uncomfortable. As though, I've been unfairly harsh on her. As though she's done nothing wrong. "Sometimes, it's like you don't hear me at all. Like we're speaking different languages. You just go your own way, and nothing I say gets through." By now the tears are coursing down her face.

"I'm sorry," I say. Anything to get her to stop crying. My mother makes a strange strangled sound. Lunging, she envelopes me. "I love you," she tells me, making more choked crying noises.

I walk back to the dining as dazed as if I had just left a movie theater. My mother gives me watery smile as she returns to her seat, seeming to think that we had just shared a significant mother-daughter moment. But we didn't. Her tears haven't changed anything she's done, and her smile is an actress's, coming on and off at any moment.

I believe everything I've said.

I remember the door swinging closed when I was five. "I'm going shopping," she told me cheerfully, her heels clicking across the floor. I wanted to go too. Being in the big house with strangers all the time was boring. "You don't want to go shopping, Ashley." She laughed at me. "I'll be back soon, okay?" Just like that, she left in a cloud of perfume, off to play housewife with her new family. For three days she was gone; long enough for the door to slam shut and stay shut.