Memory Flash

The summer my family rented a house in Rhode Island, a pretty house on a river, I was more miserable than I had ever been in my life.  I think I was 12.  I'd wanted to go to camp, or at the very least I'd wanted to hang around with my friends, making earrings and friendship bracelets and gossiping and listening to Cranberries and Green Day tapes, and instead I was stuck in a place where the only people I had to talk to were the members of my nuclear family.  It was an isolated house, no kids nearby.  My parents were giving the appearance of hating me, and I knew for a fact that I hated them.  I polished my nails obsessively, scraping the polish down when it wasn't perfect and starting again, two or three or four times a day.  I got nail polish on stuff, and my parents yelled at me.  I read teen magazines, looked at the pictures of beautiful girls, their long, thin, golden limbs.  I did hundreds of leg lifts late into the night.