He sat frozen and listened to the words, which seemed to vibrate in the air between them. For years he had said things like that in his head while interacting with his parents. This was the first time one had come out of his mouth.
“I’m just expressing my opinion,” she said.
“And I didn’t want to hear your opinion, but you never, ever keep your opinion to yourself. So that’s why I didn’t tell you.”
He stood and walked off toward his bedroom.
“You’re being too sensitive,” she called after him.
No, you’re not being sensitive enough.
“No, you’re not being sensitive enough,” he called back over his shoulder.
He wondered if this was just the way of things now. If he would never be able to hold his comments inside again.
He closed himself into his room and decided he would not find that magic moment to ask her. She would always be just like this: defensive, quick to anger, slow to understand. So maybe he wouldn’t ask her. Maybe he would just skip school and go to the trial.
She could punish him any way she chose to afterward. It would be worth it.
He sat at the dinner table, pushing something around on his plate with a fork. He wasn’t even entirely clear on what it was. Could have been chicken, or it could have been some cut of pork.
He looked up at his two middle sisters, who looked back. Then they looked at each other and burst into giggles. He looked away from them. At Clarissa, who was shoveling rice into her mouth and paying no attention to anyone. He looked back at the two middle girls, and the scene repeated itself.
“What?” he yelled suddenly.
It came out much louder and angrier than he had intended. It startled Clarissa, who jumped. Her eyes immediately filled with tears.
Rhonda was the one who said it out loud.
“Raymond has a girlfriend. And she’s . . . like . . . a hundred!”
Raymond jumped up from the table, purposely catching the edge of his plate and flipping it up into the air. It came down hard, a foot nearer the center of the table, pitching the slab of mystery meat off onto the plastic tablecloth.
He turned his eyes on his mother, who threw both hands in the air as if being held at gunpoint.
“I didn’t say anything to them,” she said. “One of them must have overheard.”
“See, this is why I can’t stand being part of this family. You treat me like I’m totally weird, like I’m from outer space or something. We have nothing in common. Look at me. I don’t look like I belong with you people, and I don’t act like it, and I don’t feel like it. We don’t even have the same last name. And you all drive me crazy, acting like there’s something wrong with me—well, I’ve got news for you. Maybe it’s not me. Maybe I’m perfectly okay, and there’s something wrong with all of you.”
He froze there, towering over them, and looked at the horrified faces. He had never spoken to them like this before. He had never spoken to anyone like this before. The middle girls sat with their mouths hanging open. Clarissa was crying openly.
“Not you, Clarissa,” he added. “You’re okay.” He looked down at the tablecloth. Shook his head. Hard. “I’m not hungry. I’m going to my room.”
As he walked away down the apartment hall, he heard Ed say, “You gonna let him talk to you like that?”
He couldn’t hear what his mother said in reply.
She came to his room a minute or two later. She knocked, but didn’t wait for a reply. Raymond was lying facedown on his bed. He didn’t move as she crossed the room and sat on the edge of the mattress beside him.
She placed a hand between his shoulder blades.
“Please don’t,” he said, because he wanted to stay angry.
She took the hand back.
“We don’t mean to make you feel like you don’t belong here.”
“The point is not whether you mean to make me feel that way. The point is not even whether you make me feel that way. The point is that it’s true. I don’t belong here. I don’t fit with this family. It’s just a fact.”
A pause fell.
Then Raymond dropped a bomb that had been in the bay of his aircraft for a very long time. He had never paid it any conscious attention. He hadn’t thought it through. But it was always there.
“Maybe I should just go live with Dad.”
Silence. Deadly, nearly radioactive silence.
Then, with an eerie tightness in her voice, she said, “You honestly think his new wife would put up with that? That she’d treat you better than we do?”