Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) by Sarah Tomlinson Page B

when the adults “have to tell you something” they are never offering you a trip to Disneyland.
    He looked at Eva. She smiled encouragingly. He smiled back at her. Looked at me. “We’re going to have a baby,” he said.
    â€œOh,”I said, not able to fake happiness, not even for my father.
    Here was another baby with two parents, another baby at the center of a family that did not include me. Each of these families contained a finite amount of space, of time, of money, of love, and there would never be enough left over for me. As far as I was concerned, I was the only person who could be relied upon for anything, and it was better if I accepted it up front. Soon after this, I began fantasizing about getting my own apartment, in Portland, or even better, Boston. In my dream life, I was at the center of a vibrant world of new experiences and people, dipping in and out of our interactions without ever needing anything concrete from them.
    M y sister, Asmara, was born in a birthing tub in the living room of my father’s Somerville apartment the following January, just before my twelfth birthday, when my brother was eighteen months old, and his constant need for care seemed to dominate everything at home. My father sent me a card with the news and the explanation that her name meant “love” in Indonesian. I didn’t hear much from him after that. Twelve years after my birth, he had not changed at all. It didn’t take even a year for Eva to reach the same conclusion Mom had reached in two—that raising a baby with a man who was as much in need of mothering as any child was actually harder than raising a baby without him.
    That fall, Eva took Asmara home to the Bavarian town of Garmisch-­Partenkirchen, eighty minutes outside of Munich by train, where her own mother lived, and raised her there. My father did not share his reaction to any of this with me at the time. After Eva left, he simply disappeared once again. I still waited for him, but this time, I was also waiting to get out.
    B y the time I was thirteen, music had become my tether to the big, sparkly world beyond my hometown, which had begun, more thanever, to feel like my bell jar. I had just entered my freshman year of high school. The novelty of a new school and classmates had worn off a few hours into my first day. Bored by my classes, oppressed by the small-minded meanness of my classmates, I was miserable.
    Home life also tested my patience. My favorite movie of that time was Labyrinth, starring a young Jennifer Connelly as a fifteen-year-old girl namedSarah, who felt her father and stepmother unjustly expected her to care for her baby brother. And so, she wished the goblin king, played by David Bowie, looking gorgeous in blond, bird-of-paradise hair, would take her brother away. One day, my brother drove me past the breaking point. Not by being bad, but by being cute, and being a toddler who needed patience from me. I had never been more of an impatient, impetuous perfectionist than I was at the age of thirteen. I drew on Labyrinth as the ideal alternative to our current life.
    â€œIf I had the choice between saving you and being David Bowie’s goblin queen, I would choose David Bowie, and you would be a goblin forever,” I snarled.
    Andrew began to cry, more upset by my tone of voice than my words, which were essentially meaningless to a three-year-old.
    â€œI don’t know why you’d want to go with David Bowie,” Mom said, picking my brother up and soothing him on her hip. “He’d just give you diseases.”
    That shut me up. Her tone wasn’t mean, even though I had certainly warranted at least a minor comeuppance for being a brat to my brother. Clearly, I was in over my head in the adult world, no matter how much I tried to pretend otherwise.
    On those nights when I was trapped at home, I felt ready to burst the seams of my skin. After dinner, I went up to my room, threw myself