I knew it when I was sixteen and started bagging groceries after school because I wanted my own money. My father never once asked if I was tired. He asked what I was making hourly. My mother asked whether I was smart enough to hand over enough of it to help with bills. My older sister Madison asked if I could pick her up a lipstick she liked because I was “already out.” Lily, my younger sister, only asked if my shift ended before her homework time because she liked when I sat next to her while she worked. Even then, before I had words for any of it, I knew Lily was the only person in that house who ever wanted something from me that didn’t feel like extraction.
By the time I graduated community college, the shape of my family was already fixed. My father was a man who believed authority entitled him to comfort, admiration, and obedience in equal amounts. My mother was a woman who had made an art form of surviving him and called it wisdom. Madison, three years older than me, was the family’s axis. Everything bent toward her preferences. Her moods influenced dinner plans, weekend schedules, even the tone in the house. When she wanted a fresh manicure, my mother called it self-care. When she wanted a designer bag she absolutely could not afford, my father called it “investing in appearance.” When she announced, every few months, that she was about to change her life in some dramatic and expensive way, they all rearranged themselves to support the fantasy. Madison wasn’t cruel all the time. That would have made her easier to understand. Instead she was charming when charm cost her nothing, affectionate when affection brought her attention, and casually vicious in moments when she sensed someone else might become inconvenient. She lived as if the world owed her a better version of itself and my parents treated that delusion like ambition.