My Life as a Doormat (in Three Acts) by Rene Gutteridge

said, “Kate, why don’t you help me in the kitchen? Let’s see what Lola made for dessert, and maybe you can tell me a little bit more about Dillan.”
    The two rose and carried their plates into the kitchen together. Dad sighed and stretched his arms outward, signifying that a perfectly satisfying meal and conversation had just been consumed.
    â€œDillan sounds just about perfect, doesn’t he?” I asked Dad.
    â€œLet’s just hope he’s a Democrat,” my dad said, then excused himself to the study.
    I sat there at the table alone, listening to the vague chatter of my mom and sister in the kitchen, wondering if the day would ever come when I would have the courage to tell my dad I was a Republican.

Chapter 6
    [She cowers in her seat.]
    I ’d never been to therapy of any sort. Therapy signified everything I was against, which was the fact that sometimes things go wrong in life. On one hand, I couldn’t think of anything more mortifying. Yet, on the other hand, I had to acknowledge that because I had a lot of hang-ups about this, maybe I wasn’t seeing that this was Edward’s way of showing his love for me. Maybe he cared too much about our relationship to let a pink dress stand in the way.
    I tried to leave it at that as I worked on my play throughout the day. Tuesdays were notoriously bad writing days for me. Mondays were always met with a lot of creativity and enthusiasm for the project. Tuesday was known as the Question Mark Day. On that day I questioned everything: what I wrote, why I’m writing, where my career’s going, who’s going to read it anyway, when will I ever get it done. I figured out that I consume three times as much caffeine on Tuesdays than any other day of the week. If I were a smoker, it’d be a three-pack day. If I were a drinker, I’d be dead.
    But on this particular Tuesday, I was trying to sort out a new set of problems that had crept into my day. First, there was the therapy ordeal. I’d worked through it a little bit by giving Jodie Bellarusa a few good lines. She was also against therapy, and that subject worked in nicely since I could give her family background at the same time.
    Second, I couldn’t figure out how my sister had suddenly risen to the top of the stock like fat boiling from a chicken. Except fat is really easy to skim off. Kate, with her unseasonal fur boots and ensemble of clothing that shouldn’t be worn together, had “come home,” in a sense. Except in the prodigal story in the Bible, the prodigal does a little groveling, a little insinuating that he’s no better than pigs. My sister somehow managed to skip that part. Our parents gave her the fattened calf because of her association with a Harvard graduate who likes children and the elderly.
    The Big Bad Wolf liked pigs, children, and the elderly, and look how that turned out.
    Third, Elisabeth’s words continued to ring in my ears. The more I gave it thought, the more I realized that what she was saying about my ability to predict the future did seem slightly plausible. After all, in her own words, something had come true in all three of the plays I’d written.
    So as I stared at the taunting cursor, I had to wonder what exactly I was predicting in this next masterpiece. (Yes, I call all of my plays masterpieces. It helps my self-esteem.) Every word I wrote could be someone else’s demise.
    Or your own.
    Jodie pointed that out, citing the remarkable similarities between the two of us. Outwardly, we were very opposite. But Jodie knew a secret nobody else knew. Inwardly, I was one heck of an Italian. But most of it stayed in my head.
    In a way, the possibility that I might be predicting events made the play a bit more tantalizing, like I had some special power to control the universe with a few select keystrokes. But Jodie kept reminding me that the universe I was writing about was my own. Sure, it was cleverly disguised