Wednesday March 13
25 days left

When I get home from school, I see Mom seated at the kitchen table. Our kitchen is narrow and tiny, and if I were to spread my arms out, I could touch each mint-colored side wall with the palms of my hands. Mom's thumbing through bills, her neck craned in concentration, but when she hears the door, she turns to look at me. And there it is. The same facial expression she's greeted me with for the past three years. It's a cross between a wince and a frown.

Until three years ago, I used to spend the weeks with my dad and the weekends with my mom. But then after my dad got locked away, Mom had no choice but to let me live with her and Steve. Before my father's crime, my mother used to look at me with a combination of love and longing, like I was a mirror into her past life, a bittersweet memory. Her dark brown eyes would glaze over, she'd tilt her head forward and her straight light brown hair would fall over her thin shoulders, and she'd squeeze my hands tightly, like if she gripped me hard enough, I'd transport her back in time. It was almost like I was her permanent bruise. Not a painful bruise, but a tender one made of melancholy memories.
I didn't mind that. I secretly relished being the vehicle to her past life, her connection my father and her youth.
That all changed three years ago. Everything did. Now I live with her, Steve, Kendall, and Rob. She'd never say it, but I am an intruder in their happy home. An infestation. I've gone from being a bruise to an open festering wound. Evolution isn't always a positive thing.
"You're home early," she finally says.
"I don't have to work today." I don't mention that I was told not to come in because I would make the customers "uncomfortable." Mr. Lendon is nothing if not the king of euphemisms. He and my mother would probably get along splendidly, considering my mother refers to what happened with my father as "that unfortunate incident." Or used to refer to it that way. Recently, she's been pretending like it never happened. As if simply not talking about something makes it disappear. Newsflash: It doesn't.

Kendall marches into the kitchen. She drops her pom-poms on the scratched wooden table. Her hair is slicked back in a high ponytail. "You're going to be at the game tonight, right?"
She's asking Mom, not me. I'm invisible.
Kendall is my half sister. We have the same mom, but you'd never know it from looking at us.
"I'm going to try my best to make it," Mom says. Translation: Hell will freeze over before Mom isn't at the game. Kendall is only a freshman, but she's on the varsity cheer squad. Apparently, that's a big deal. Though it seems to me that unlike other sports where JV and varsity are determined by skill level, in cheerleading, JV and varsity are determined by cup size.
"It's the play-offs," Kendall reminds her. Her tone is calm, the tone of someone who is used to being in control, used to getting what she wants. Kendall is good at that. She's always been a schemer. When everything went down with my dad, some of the heat fell on her too, but she somehow managed to use it to her advantage.

I remember one day, a few months after my dad was officially convicted and locked away, I saw Kencall talking with a boy in the hallway. I hid around the corner so I could spy on them. I was ready to intervene if she needed my help, but the thing about Kendall is she's never needed my help.
"Yeah," Kendall answered the boy's question, which I'd been too late to overhear. She nervously fingered the shell necklace I'd given her for her birthday two years ago. "Taylor is my sister, but he's not my dad."
"But did you ever meet him?" the boy asked Kendall, his voice eager. I stared at the back of his head, tufts of brown-colored hair, and guessed it was probably Louis Tomlinson, a boy from my grade who everyone thought resembled the leading actor in that summer's popular vampire romance movie.
I watched Kendall wrinkle her nose as she considered his question. "Yeah, a couple of times."
"You did?" Louis pressed, clearly hopeful that Kendall had some kind of inside scoop.
"Oh yeah," she said. "He was basically cally family." Louis leaned closer to her.
"I can tell you some crazy stories if you want," she added, in a flirtatious promise.
I remember being furious that she was willing to trade our family "secrets" for popularity, but I've finally learned to let it go. Kendall is Kendall, I know what to expect. Anyway, you can't really blame someone for surviving.
The same can be said for my former friends, not that I ever had that many. Most of the ones I did have scattered as fast as they could once the news of my dad's crime traveled through the halls of school, but some of them actually tried to stick by me. Especially Selena Gomez, my former best friend. When everything happened, Selena tried her best to comfort me, but I pushed her away. I knew it would be the best thing for her to disassociate herself from me, even if she didn't. I like to think I did her a favor in the end.

Kendall sashays around the kitchen table and takes a seat. "I think we have a really good chance of winning tonight. Could be historic. You have to come, Mom!"
There's a long pause in the conversation. Mom takes a deep breath and then says, "Why don't you come with me?"
I look behind me, certain that Rob, my younger half brother, must have walked in, but it's unlike Rob not to make his presence known. He's always bouncing his basketball inside, even though Mom has repeatedly told him to stop. I don't mind it, though.
"Are you talking to me?" I ask with perfect seriousness.
Kendall doesn't say anything, but I can see her face twist up like she just chugged rotten milk. She'd never insult me in front of Mom, but she's doing everything she can to signal that she doesn't want me to come. What can I say? I have a gold-star rating in the embarrassment department.
"Yes, I'm talking to you," Mom says, and I detect a slight quiver. Sometimes I'm convinced even my own mother is afraid of me.
"Thanks for the invite, but I have a lot of homework." I walk over to the cupboard and grab a chocolate-chip granola bar. It's weird, I know. But sometimes, I'm ravenous. It's almost as if I want to eat as much as I can to fill up the empty void inside of me. Other days, I can barely bring myself to nibble on a piece of toast.
But even if today I can muster an appetite, I'm mostly taking the granola bar for show. I don't want to give my mom more reasons to worry about me. I know she's not-so-sneakily studying me for signs, searching for any clues to my questionable mental state. I'm doing my best to hide it all from her. Once I'm gone, I don't want her to feel guilty thinking there was something she could have done.
"Good luck tonight." I give Kendall a fake wave and then head up the stairs to my room. Well, our room. But since she'll be at the game, it's my room for tonight. Once I get to our room, I crawl into my bed. I pull the charcoal-gray comforter over my head and pretend like I'm in the middle of the ocean, waves crashing over me, my lungs filling up with water, the whole world turning black. I try to imagine my potential energy turning into kinetic energy turning into nothing. As I hum Mozart's requiem, I wonder what it will feel like when all the lights go off and everything is quiet forever. I don't know if it will be painful, if in those last moments I'll be scared, but all I can hope is that it will be over fast. That it will be peaceful. That it will be permanent.
April 7, I think to myself. Soon enough.

Sometimes I'm convinced it's a sign of my own insanity that I still feel comforted by classical music when it was my father who first introduced me to it. He loved it. Bach, Mozart, you name it. The clunky cassette tapes were among the few things he brought with him when he came to America. When I was younger, he used to pop a tape into his old boom box that he kept on the counter at his convenience store and would tell me a story of his childhood, playing chess with his father on a smooth board made of alabaster stone or measuring people's feet at the shoe store his uncle ran. While he talked, I would dance around the store, moving clumsily as the notes rose and fell with the tempo.
Then one day he forced me to sit. "Really listen, Taylor," he urged, his dark eyes wide and focused. "All the answers are in this music. Do you hear them?" So I'd listened and listened. Straining my ears in an attempt to memorize every note. I never really heard the answers, but I nodded like I did. I didn't want my dad to get mad and turn the music off, or lock himself in his bedroom for hours like he sometimes did. With my dad, you always had to tread lightly, like you were walking on icy pavement—it was so fun when you were gliding, but it was very easy to slip.
I squeeze my eyes shut and force that memory out of my mind. I roll around in bed, humming Mozart's requiem over and over again, and I'm able to find only one answer in the notes: April 7.
The walls of our old frame house are thin, and I can hear Mom and Kendall rattling around in the kitchen. I imagine them hugging. Kendall wrapping her arms around Mom's thin waist and Mom running her fingers through Kendall's shiny ponytail. The two of them fitting, interlocking, like mothers and daughters are supposed to. Fitting in a way that I never have. My edges have always been too sharp, my grooves too deep.
That's what they should write on my tombstone: Taylor Alison Swift, the Girl Who Never Fit.
And since I've never fit, not really before my dad lost it, and certainly not after, Mom's life will be so much better without me. When I'm gone, she won't have to be reminded of my dad every time she sees my angular nose or curly blond hair. Or my round cheeks.
Without me, my mom won't have to stay up at night, worrying that the criminal gene, the murderer gene, was passed to me and that any day now I'm going to blow up the school or something awful like that. I know she can't live through it all again—the police, the media, the gossip. I know she doesn't want to think about it, but deep down, I can see her struggling with her fear and her doubt. Her sideways glances and cautious probing questions are all her way of determining just how much of a mental case I am.
I want to say that I know for sure that I'm different from my dad. That my heart beats in a different rhythm, my blood pulses at a different speed. But I'm not sure. Maybe the sadness comes just before the insanity. Maybe he and I share the same potential energy.
All I know is that I'm not going to stick around and find out if I become a monster like my dad. I can't do that to my mom.
I can't do that to the world.