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bloodyrosemccoy) wrote2024-03-16 04:57 pm
bloodyrosemccoy) wrote2024-03-16 04:57 pm
Entry tags:
The Geography of Main Street: Arts and Culture
Prlogue and Index!
Previous Chapter!
I was in my mid-30s when I read a Twitter thread explaining to autistic people that when people are angry and ask you questions like "Why were you late?" they are not actually looking for an explanation and will regard your answers as excuses. Holy hell, y'all. That explained SO. MUCH.
It is extremely jarring to talk to someone who remembers a movie/book as being utterly different from what you remember. I once had a conversation with someone who insisted that the Shitty Kids die in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when I clearly remember a chapter called "The Other Children Go Home." It was very confusing and upsetting, and I had to go look at my copy of the book to prove that it was there. I have always wondered about that, especially after finding out about the Oompa Loompa revisions.
CW: Shitty family members, animal death, animal dissection, upsetting movie gaslighting, I guess, and Autism Warrior Moms. Also space tobacco.
---
Civic Hygiene recommended going to the theater for Sightseeing movies as a way to connect us to our planet of origin; to help us contemplate our connection to it and our duty to it. History class told us to consider where the Great Protector got zeir start. (I probably should do something to get on the history teacher's good side after accidentally making an enemy of her; it turns out you're not supposed to ask about plot holes in scripture.)
But Thoren and his friends had decided we were going to see the new action flick, The Golden Hammer. He and the rest of the Ball team were passing a pouch of dust between them, which was not only delinquent, but also unsanitary, , plus it led to a lot of obnoxious sniffling and a few sneezes. I should really report it, but I remembered how Mr. Sordell and Nielli had reacted last time I reported a problem, and it seemed like way too much trouble. I didn't take any when Thoren offered me the pouch, though.
Plus, I was really into the movie. There were a lot of twists and turns and nuances, and I wanted to catch them all. Not easy, it turned out, because a few rows behind us a child was absolutely wailing. When I turned, I saw she was maybe four years old, squirming against the iron grip of a woman who was probably her mother. Another child of about the same age, similar enough to be the screaming one's twin, sat by and grimly ignored the noise.
Poor kid, I thought of the screamer. Poor all of them, really. And poor us.
A scene from Be A Neighbor flashed through my head: a kid offering to carry a struggling mother's armful of groceries. "This station is what we make it," the narrator had said. "So let's make it pleasant for everyone."
Hunching my shoulders—I was growing so fast that I still wasn't sure how much I might be hulking in front of the other moviegoers—I slunk back to the row in front of the little family.
"Ma'am," I whispered, "I can watch your kid if you need to take the other one out."
The mother tightened her grip on her unhappy daughter, eliciting a squeak. "What?"
"If she wants to leave," I said, "I can watch your other kid while you take her out."
"Excuse me?" I'd had no idea a whisper could be shrill.
The other option was not ideal, but it was neighborly, and I could always get another movie ticket. "Or, I guess, if you'd rather, I could take that one out while you—"
"How dare you?" She wasn't whispering anymore. "Trizzie has just as much right to be here as anyone!"
It took me a second to work out that nonsequitur. Oh, she thought I was kicking her out.
"Sure she does." I looked pointedly at the upset child, who was now descending into hiccuping sobs. "But I don't think she wants to be here."
"No!" Trizzie squealed. "No! No!"
"This is harassment," the mother declared. Other people were starting to grumble. She glanced up, her expression changing. "Security!"
To my surprise, there was, in fact, a Station Security officer in the aisle. He looked a bit peeved, but when she motioned him over, he sighed and approached. "What's the matter, ma'am?"
"This boy is harassing my special needs daughter," she said.
He peered at me. "Dr. Grewell's kid, aren't you? The one on the Bolts?"
"That's my twin, sir," I said.
The officer looked toward the front, annoyed. "Go back to your seat, kid."
"I was—" I wanted to explain, but the Security officer took my arm and pulled me pointedly toward the aisle. "Okay. I was only trying to help."
"Grewell?" the woman echoed, sounding confused.
I found my seat, burning with humiliation. Thoren and his friends had outright left. Part of me I wanted to slink out, too, but another part wanted to stay and see what happened at the end of the movie. I was pretty invested by then. So I tried to block out Trizzie's sobs as the film wrapped up, and immediately fled the theater when the credits started rolling.
Thoren and the others were waiting for me in the park. "Nice distraction," my brother said, slinging an arm around my shoulders.
I lurched away from the touch; I was still trying to shake the feel of the officer's grip off of my forearm. "What?"
My eyes fell on the lump in his shirt pocket: the illicit pouch of settling dust he and the others had shared. "Oh. That Security officer was coming after you, wasn't he?"
Thoren stepped away from me, eyes narrowing. "You're not going to tell, are you?"
"Come on, Dreedo," Nielli said. "Don't be a goody-goody."
"I won't," I said, feeling tired. "But I'm not going to hang out with you while you have it."
"Fine, loser," Jod said.
"Which of us got to stay to the end of the movie?" I snapped.
He waved a hand. "It was boring, anyway."
"Then you don't need me to tell me the ending," I said.
Plus, the ending kind of ruined the movie, anyway. I was disappointed. I had been yelled at for trying to be a good neighbor. My brother was being delinquent. It was a rotten afternoon all around.
#
#
It was a few weeks before my library hold on The Golden Hammer came through: it was a new and popular movie. I sort of wished I could sneak a look at it alone, but our family had exactly one A/V rig, and it was in the living room. So I decided to be sociable.
"Anybody want to watch this with me?" I asked.
Vilda was just getting ready for trick-whist club. "Didn't you already see that one in the theater?"
"Well …" For one thing, I was attempting an experiment. But aside from that, I never had understood why one was only supposed to see a movie or read a book or do a puzzle just once. Sometimes things just grabbed hold of my brain and I wanted to consume them endlessly. Detective Britter, Drack, and Jazy were whirling in my head, their clever escapades bouncing around in there as I considered their feelings during each moment of the narrative.
But at least with this one I had a built-in excuse. "I want to look for all the clues."
To my surprise, Dad joined me and Thoren. He got himself a packet of settling dust and a drink and reclined in his chair as my brother and I settled on the couch with a bowl of Flavor Puffs between us.
When we'd watched the pirated stream online, Zarla had been proven correct in her summary. But this copy was the same I'd seen in the theater, and while it made me feel better about my memory, the glaring discrepancies between the two versions was creepy, as though I'd walked into my classroom and found that a third of the students were replaced with different people and nobody else seemed to notice.
I was glad I hadn't hallucinated the Inspector, but why wasn't he in the other version? Why was the scene with Jazy and the double agent so cool and dramatic in the pirated version, with Jazy casually shooting the agent with no forewarning, but so incoherent and downright goofy in the library copy, with a bunch of superfluous camera angles and a closeup of the double agent's hand going for a gun that didn't look anything like the one from earlier in the scene? Where was the steamy, illicit three-way kiss between Detective Britter and the two crooks in the middle of the big standoff? That was a pivotal scene, not just because it was sexy, but also because it set up the detective's dilemma and had you wondering if he deliberately made a bad call during the later chase so that they could get away.
Only they didn't get away in this version, because when the detective reached for the door to the microrail car, instead of him opening it to reveal it empty except for one jewel, and then time rolling back to show how they had pulled the switch, it just cut to the Inspector shaking his head about their capture and calling the whole heist pointless. Which it was, in this version. I was frustrated and annoyed and I had no way to ask about it.
"They should've gotten away with it," Thoren said.
They did, I wanted to say.
Dad raised his brows. "You want the criminals to win?" he asked.
"Well," Thoren said. "I mean … they got a raw deal, right? They tried going legit, but it didn't work. So I wish something went right."
"The judge," I began, then realized the corrupt judge hadn't even made an appearance in this version. "They were in trouble for a misunderstanding. Did the judge there fail to recognize the extenuating circumstances?"
"Or zey were corrupt," Dad said.
Well, at least he confirmed for me that was a thing that could happen. I'd never seen a corrupt judge before.
"Does that happen, planetside?" Thoren asked.
"It does, yes."
"Wow," Thoren said. "Must be a rough way to live if you can't trust a judge."
Dad barked out a laugh. "Indeed."
He considered. "I did rather expect Britter to let them go, however."
"He wouldn't have," Thoren said. "What was that parting line to Drack? 'I don't say goodbye to anyone I'm gonna lock in place.' So f—screw you, Drack, I guess."
"But what if he was implying '… and I'm not going to lock you up, so goodbye with my blessing'?" I countered.
"A true logic problem of a sentence," Dad said thoughtfully.
"That would've been cool," Thoren conceded.
The next weekend, Dad rented a movie himself and brought it home with a bottle of soda for each of us. "If you liked The Golden Hammer, you'll love My Favorite Thief," he told us. "A classic."
I did enjoy it. But the damage had been done. With every movie night that came after, I had to wonder if what I was watching was the right version, or if reality was different in different places. I had no one to ask.
#
I got a bit of a surprise with Toast's latest station mouse. This was a female—and, it turned out, a pregnant female. Again, I felt bad about it on an individual level, but Thoren's ecoengineer had assured me their population needed to be kept down. Plus, I learned a lot about how the little mice developed in utero.
I was making a mental list of things to look up about mammalian reproduction as I lined up the fetuses when a scream split my thoughts.
The two recuperating sixcats yowled in response to Vilda's horror, which was good because it covered the sound of the vid on dad's tablet until I could yank off a sheath glove and pause it. I didn't think Vilda saw me kick the tablet behind the workbench; she was focused on the neatly disassembled body between us.
I probably should have realized that she wasn't going to react well, but Zarla's response to my photo had made me overconfident.
"It's Toast's," I explained, raising my voice just slightly to be heard over her shrieks. "I'm using them to study—"
She didn't let me finish; she fled back to the house, still screaming. Peeling off the other sheath, I chased after her.
Of course it was Grandma's night to join us for dinner. But that turned out to be good news for me, because Grandma was the one who convinced Vilda not to call Station Security.
"No grandson of mine is going to be seen in a security cell," she declared.
"Why would they put me in one?" I asked. "Did I break a law?" All I could think of was improper disposal of biological waste, but I was going to throw the mouse in the bio pod!
Vilda had, thankfully, stopped screaming, but she continued to weep. "Why would he do this?" she half-wailed.
"I told you—" I began.
"Be quiet," Grandma said. "Haven't you done enough?"
"But she asked—"
Grandma held up a hand. Her face had gotten a calculating look. Dad had gone quiet during the row; he watched her with that same stony expression he'd applied to Ms. Palbert.
"Clearly, you can't be trusted with animals," Grandma said. "Best to remove the temptation."
"You can trust me!" I cried. "Nobody said I shouldn't—"
"That's the problem," Grandma told me. "That you didn't know already." She thought for a minute. "We'll tell everyone the sixcat project was a bigger responsibility than you expected. You're stepping back to focus on your studies."
"Wait." The conversation had skipped ahead of me. "What?"
"We'll have to vote on how to repurpose the funds at the next meeting," she went on.
I was still trying to work it out. "You're … taking away my sixcat funding?"
"You must learn that there are consequences," Grandma said. "And they're not your funds. I organized the bake sale. It's my money."
"Oh." I tried to decide if that made sense. "But you said I could have it for the sixcats."
"As long as you could be trusted," Grandma said again.
I don't think she'd said that, but maybe it had been implied.
"So who's going to help them now?" I asked. "I promised!" Not just the sixcats themselves, either. I had also promised Mr. Sordell implicitly when I'd taken on this project, and the rest of the station, as well.
Grandma didn't care. "We'll work something out. Now. You will clean up the shed"—I would have done that already if Vilda hadn't started screaming—"and you will release those sixcats"—they could probably survive at this point, so that was no problem—"and you will apologize to Vilda."
Finally. Nobody had given me a chance to explain so far, and Vilda was clearly upset because she had drawn some erroneous conclusions. Now I could clear this up.
"I'm sorry you were frightened, Vilda," I said. "It was one of Toast's kills. I'm studying anatomy, and I figured as long as—"
"Apologize without excuses," Grandma snapped.
That pulled me up short. What? How was I supposed to allay Vilda's misapprehensions that way? Besides—"But she asked why."
"And no backtalk," Grandma said.
"I'm trying to explain—"
"Dreedo." Her voice was so sharp I thought I saw Dad flinch. "Apologize."
In The Tech Trap video in Civic Hygiene class, the kids made a robot's head explode by telling it paradoxes. I thought I understood how it felt now. Error, I thought, like the robot. Error.
I gave up. "I'm sorry, Vilda."
Vilda sniffled, still upset. "I just don't see why," she said plaintively, again.
My head didn't explode, but I did the best I could to approximate it. "You don't know why because you yell at me when I try to explain it!" I screamed.
She jumped, and wept harder. Grandma said something else angry to me, but I had stopped listening. My head was going to explode if I stayed.
So I left.
# Next Chapter!
Poor kid, I thought of the screamer. Poor all of them, really. And poor us.
A scene from Be A Neighbor flashed through my head: a kid offering to carry a struggling mother's armful of groceries. "This station is what we make it," the narrator had said. "So let's make it pleasant for everyone."
Hunching my shoulders—I was growing so fast that I still wasn't sure how much I might be hulking in front of the other moviegoers—I slunk back to the row in front of the little family.
"Ma'am," I whispered, "I can watch your kid if you need to take the other one out."
The mother tightened her grip on her unhappy daughter, eliciting a squeak. "What?"
"If she wants to leave," I said, "I can watch your other kid while you take her out."
"Excuse me?" I'd had no idea a whisper could be shrill.
The other option was not ideal, but it was neighborly, and I could always get another movie ticket. "Or, I guess, if you'd rather, I could take that one out while you—"
"How dare you?" She wasn't whispering anymore. "Trizzie has just as much right to be here as anyone!"
It took me a second to work out that nonsequitur. Oh, she thought I was kicking her out.
"Sure she does." I looked pointedly at the upset child, who was now descending into hiccuping sobs. "But I don't think she wants to be here."
"No!" Trizzie squealed. "No! No!"
"This is harassment," the mother declared. Other people were starting to grumble. She glanced up, her expression changing. "Security!"
To my surprise, there was, in fact, a Station Security officer in the aisle. He looked a bit peeved, but when she motioned him over, he sighed and approached. "What's the matter, ma'am?"
"This boy is harassing my special needs daughter," she said.
He peered at me. "Dr. Grewell's kid, aren't you? The one on the Bolts?"
"That's my twin, sir," I said.
The officer looked toward the front, annoyed. "Go back to your seat, kid."
"I was—" I wanted to explain, but the Security officer took my arm and pulled me pointedly toward the aisle. "Okay. I was only trying to help."
"Grewell?" the woman echoed, sounding confused.
I found my seat, burning with humiliation. Thoren and his friends had outright left. Part of me I wanted to slink out, too, but another part wanted to stay and see what happened at the end of the movie. I was pretty invested by then. So I tried to block out Trizzie's sobs as the film wrapped up, and immediately fled the theater when the credits started rolling.
Thoren and the others were waiting for me in the park. "Nice distraction," my brother said, slinging an arm around my shoulders.
I lurched away from the touch; I was still trying to shake the feel of the officer's grip off of my forearm. "What?"
My eyes fell on the lump in his shirt pocket: the illicit pouch of settling dust he and the others had shared. "Oh. That Security officer was coming after you, wasn't he?"
Thoren stepped away from me, eyes narrowing. "You're not going to tell, are you?"
"Come on, Dreedo," Nielli said. "Don't be a goody-goody."
"I won't," I said, feeling tired. "But I'm not going to hang out with you while you have it."
"Fine, loser," Jod said.
"Which of us got to stay to the end of the movie?" I snapped.
He waved a hand. "It was boring, anyway."
"Then you don't need me to tell me the ending," I said.
Plus, the ending kind of ruined the movie, anyway. I was disappointed. I had been yelled at for trying to be a good neighbor. My brother was being delinquent. It was a rotten afternoon all around.
#
Sir, we got a report today from one of the IP265 parents that I think you should be aware of.
Go on.
She reports that your son harassed C06 while they were in a movie theater, demanding that C06 leave.
Thoren?
No, Dreedo.
Sir?
That is interesting.
She believed he was targeting her for discrimination, but once she learned who he was, she wondered if it was possible that we had orchestrated some sort of social test.
I need to know, sir, if this is a part of the experiment.
I see.
I assure you, my sons are not aware of the identities of our subjects.
But it is a small station. There's bound to be some crossing of paths.
Yes, sir. Thank you.
Why did she take a pair of four-year-olds to a movie for adults, anyway?
#
so i wathced Teh Golden Hammer like u recomiended
Cool! What did you think?
AWESOME
Isn't it? What a cool heist.
I thought the ending was a little disappointing, though. I was almost on Drack and Jazy's side!
then y didnt u like the end?
Well, I actually kind of wanted them to escape. <-vo^
but they did
No, they didn't. Jazy and Drack were caught. The Inspector congratulated Detective Britter at the end
inspector?
Britter's boss? The one who made the speech at the end about how crime doesn't pay and it was a shame they wasted their talents?
drombash thats not waht happened
u never see briters boss
they have a big chase
then he thinks hes got them on a microrail car but theyve swicthed cars
They did? How do you know?
like when he opened the door it was empty!
they had swihcted the bag back tho
jazy n drack drive off with the loot
No
Wait
That's
That would have been way cooler.
But the detective was walking to the microrail car door and then when he opened it he found them, because it cuts to the Inspector saying they got the loot back.
Didn't it?
no, look
lets watch it again
ill show u
#
#
It was a few weeks before my library hold on The Golden Hammer came through: it was a new and popular movie. I sort of wished I could sneak a look at it alone, but our family had exactly one A/V rig, and it was in the living room. So I decided to be sociable.
"Anybody want to watch this with me?" I asked.
Vilda was just getting ready for trick-whist club. "Didn't you already see that one in the theater?"
"Well …" For one thing, I was attempting an experiment. But aside from that, I never had understood why one was only supposed to see a movie or read a book or do a puzzle just once. Sometimes things just grabbed hold of my brain and I wanted to consume them endlessly. Detective Britter, Drack, and Jazy were whirling in my head, their clever escapades bouncing around in there as I considered their feelings during each moment of the narrative.
But at least with this one I had a built-in excuse. "I want to look for all the clues."
To my surprise, Dad joined me and Thoren. He got himself a packet of settling dust and a drink and reclined in his chair as my brother and I settled on the couch with a bowl of Flavor Puffs between us.
When we'd watched the pirated stream online, Zarla had been proven correct in her summary. But this copy was the same I'd seen in the theater, and while it made me feel better about my memory, the glaring discrepancies between the two versions was creepy, as though I'd walked into my classroom and found that a third of the students were replaced with different people and nobody else seemed to notice.
I was glad I hadn't hallucinated the Inspector, but why wasn't he in the other version? Why was the scene with Jazy and the double agent so cool and dramatic in the pirated version, with Jazy casually shooting the agent with no forewarning, but so incoherent and downright goofy in the library copy, with a bunch of superfluous camera angles and a closeup of the double agent's hand going for a gun that didn't look anything like the one from earlier in the scene? Where was the steamy, illicit three-way kiss between Detective Britter and the two crooks in the middle of the big standoff? That was a pivotal scene, not just because it was sexy, but also because it set up the detective's dilemma and had you wondering if he deliberately made a bad call during the later chase so that they could get away.
Only they didn't get away in this version, because when the detective reached for the door to the microrail car, instead of him opening it to reveal it empty except for one jewel, and then time rolling back to show how they had pulled the switch, it just cut to the Inspector shaking his head about their capture and calling the whole heist pointless. Which it was, in this version. I was frustrated and annoyed and I had no way to ask about it.
"They should've gotten away with it," Thoren said.
They did, I wanted to say.
Dad raised his brows. "You want the criminals to win?" he asked.
"Well," Thoren said. "I mean … they got a raw deal, right? They tried going legit, but it didn't work. So I wish something went right."
"The judge," I began, then realized the corrupt judge hadn't even made an appearance in this version. "They were in trouble for a misunderstanding. Did the judge there fail to recognize the extenuating circumstances?"
"Or zey were corrupt," Dad said.
Well, at least he confirmed for me that was a thing that could happen. I'd never seen a corrupt judge before.
"Does that happen, planetside?" Thoren asked.
"It does, yes."
"Wow," Thoren said. "Must be a rough way to live if you can't trust a judge."
Dad barked out a laugh. "Indeed."
He considered. "I did rather expect Britter to let them go, however."
"He wouldn't have," Thoren said. "What was that parting line to Drack? 'I don't say goodbye to anyone I'm gonna lock in place.' So f—screw you, Drack, I guess."
"But what if he was implying '… and I'm not going to lock you up, so goodbye with my blessing'?" I countered.
"A true logic problem of a sentence," Dad said thoughtfully.
"That would've been cool," Thoren conceded.
The next weekend, Dad rented a movie himself and brought it home with a bottle of soda for each of us. "If you liked The Golden Hammer, you'll love My Favorite Thief," he told us. "A classic."
I did enjoy it. But the damage had been done. With every movie night that came after, I had to wonder if what I was watching was the right version, or if reality was different in different places. I had no one to ask.
#
I got a bit of a surprise with Toast's latest station mouse. This was a female—and, it turned out, a pregnant female. Again, I felt bad about it on an individual level, but Thoren's ecoengineer had assured me their population needed to be kept down. Plus, I learned a lot about how the little mice developed in utero.
I was making a mental list of things to look up about mammalian reproduction as I lined up the fetuses when a scream split my thoughts.
The two recuperating sixcats yowled in response to Vilda's horror, which was good because it covered the sound of the vid on dad's tablet until I could yank off a sheath glove and pause it. I didn't think Vilda saw me kick the tablet behind the workbench; she was focused on the neatly disassembled body between us.
I probably should have realized that she wasn't going to react well, but Zarla's response to my photo had made me overconfident.
"It's Toast's," I explained, raising my voice just slightly to be heard over her shrieks. "I'm using them to study—"
She didn't let me finish; she fled back to the house, still screaming. Peeling off the other sheath, I chased after her.
Of course it was Grandma's night to join us for dinner. But that turned out to be good news for me, because Grandma was the one who convinced Vilda not to call Station Security.
"No grandson of mine is going to be seen in a security cell," she declared.
"Why would they put me in one?" I asked. "Did I break a law?" All I could think of was improper disposal of biological waste, but I was going to throw the mouse in the bio pod!
Vilda had, thankfully, stopped screaming, but she continued to weep. "Why would he do this?" she half-wailed.
"I told you—" I began.
"Be quiet," Grandma said. "Haven't you done enough?"
"But she asked—"
Grandma held up a hand. Her face had gotten a calculating look. Dad had gone quiet during the row; he watched her with that same stony expression he'd applied to Ms. Palbert.
"Clearly, you can't be trusted with animals," Grandma said. "Best to remove the temptation."
"You can trust me!" I cried. "Nobody said I shouldn't—"
"That's the problem," Grandma told me. "That you didn't know already." She thought for a minute. "We'll tell everyone the sixcat project was a bigger responsibility than you expected. You're stepping back to focus on your studies."
"Wait." The conversation had skipped ahead of me. "What?"
"We'll have to vote on how to repurpose the funds at the next meeting," she went on.
I was still trying to work it out. "You're … taking away my sixcat funding?"
"You must learn that there are consequences," Grandma said. "And they're not your funds. I organized the bake sale. It's my money."
"Oh." I tried to decide if that made sense. "But you said I could have it for the sixcats."
"As long as you could be trusted," Grandma said again.
I don't think she'd said that, but maybe it had been implied.
"So who's going to help them now?" I asked. "I promised!" Not just the sixcats themselves, either. I had also promised Mr. Sordell implicitly when I'd taken on this project, and the rest of the station, as well.
Grandma didn't care. "We'll work something out. Now. You will clean up the shed"—I would have done that already if Vilda hadn't started screaming—"and you will release those sixcats"—they could probably survive at this point, so that was no problem—"and you will apologize to Vilda."
Finally. Nobody had given me a chance to explain so far, and Vilda was clearly upset because she had drawn some erroneous conclusions. Now I could clear this up.
"I'm sorry you were frightened, Vilda," I said. "It was one of Toast's kills. I'm studying anatomy, and I figured as long as—"
"Apologize without excuses," Grandma snapped.
That pulled me up short. What? How was I supposed to allay Vilda's misapprehensions that way? Besides—"But she asked why."
"And no backtalk," Grandma said.
"I'm trying to explain—"
"Dreedo." Her voice was so sharp I thought I saw Dad flinch. "Apologize."
In The Tech Trap video in Civic Hygiene class, the kids made a robot's head explode by telling it paradoxes. I thought I understood how it felt now. Error, I thought, like the robot. Error.
I gave up. "I'm sorry, Vilda."
Vilda sniffled, still upset. "I just don't see why," she said plaintively, again.
My head didn't explode, but I did the best I could to approximate it. "You don't know why because you yell at me when I try to explain it!" I screamed.
She jumped, and wept harder. Grandma said something else angry to me, but I had stopped listening. My head was going to explode if I stayed.
So I left.
# Next Chapter!