Dysfunctional

Here's my story for the Three Word Wednesday prompt. I managed to not kill anybody in this one.

My whole childhood was a struggle. A struggle to find something interesting going on, some mischief to get into or some way to torture my parents who were too lenient and thought I could do no wrong. Little did they know, I hardly ever did any right. 

I acted up in school, but the teachers did nothing about it because my father was the principal. Of course, that gave me license to try to find the one thing they couldn’t ignore. Ours was an old school establishment in which all twelve grades were in the same building. I tried for twelve long years and never managed to be sent to the Principal’s Office once. I think the teachers were more scared of what my father would do to them than to me.

As for my father, he was too busy sleeping with the school secretary to care what I did during school hours. He only cared whether I told Mother about Mrs. Johnson, which I never did. I thought if my mother was too stupid to figure it out on her own, she didn’t deserve to know. 

My mother, now she was a piece of work and a half. She spent her days reading fashion magazines and going to the beauty parlor and her nights with cucumbers over her eyes and some stinky green goop smeared all over her face, trying to be beautiful for a man who was screwing a woman twice her size, but who baked killer chocolate chip cookies and called him sir. 

And my brother, well, he was a spoiled rotten brat from the time he could walk. I plotted his death numerous times while growing up, but my plans always were foiled at the last minute. I swear that boy lived under a lucky cloud, while I lived in a fog of misery.

I couldn’t wait to leave the town of Rockchester when I grew up. You see, we never went on vacation. We never went anywhere. My father wouldn’t leave Mrs. Johnson for any length of time, and my mother wouldn’t leave her sewing circle, aka gossip group. I begged them to go to the beach, which was only twenty miles away, every summer to no avail. 

I didn’t even make it to the beach as a teenager like most kids in town did because my parents refused to buy me a car and I had no friends to hitch a ride with. I had no friends period.

The suck ups who tried to be my friend because of my father I ridiculed until they cried, and the outcasts were scared to be my friend because of my father, so I was left alone, which suited me just fine. Most of the time.

Sometimes, I wished I had a friend, you know, because misery loves company. 

Despite it all, I managed to grow to adulthood. I never did leave town though. I went to Rockchester Community College after high school where I met my husband, James. We have been married for ten years. 

My mother and father are still together. Mrs. Johnson has lived with them for the last five years since my mother had a stroke and can’t kick her out. My brother spends more time in the county jail than at home with his wife and six kids. 

As for me, well, I’m the principal of the new Rockchester High School, and the assistant principal makes the best cookies in town.