“Mom. Dad.”
My mom turned her head. She looked at me sitting on the ground with blood on my leg, but she didn’t run to me. She didn’t look scared for me. She looked annoyed.
“Audrey, please,” she snapped. “Can’t you see we are dealing with a crisis here? Your sister is hysterical. Stop making noise.”
“But I’m bleeding,” I sobbed.
“Go inside and put a Band-Aid on it,” my dad said, his voice impatient. “Don’t be a baby. Chloe is really upset right now.”
I stopped crying. Not because it stopped hurting, but because I was shocked. My sister was crying because she didn’t like the color of a brand-new gift. I was crying because I was bleeding, and they chose to comfort her.
I picked myself up off the ground. I limped into the house. I found the bathroom. I washed the blood off my leg with cold water. It stung. I found a Band-Aid and put it on. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and looked at my reflection in the mirror. I was 6 years old, but I looked older. I looked tired.
That was the day I learned the rule: Pain doesn’t matter. Only volume matters, and Khloe is always louder.
This pattern repeated itself every single year. When Christmas came, the tree would be full of presents, but the distribution was always uneven. Chloe would get the big-ticket items, the gaming consoles, the designer clothes, the jewelry. I would get socks. I would get school supplies.
One year, I got a calculator.
“You’re the smart one,” my dad said with a shrug when I opened it. “We thought you’d use it.”
Chloe opened a box with a new leather jacket. She frowned.
“I wanted the black one. This is dark brown.”
“We can exchange it, honey,” Mom said quickly. “We’ll go tomorrow.”
I looked at my calculator. I didn’t say anything. I just put it in my pile of socks and notebooks.
The hierarchy was physical, too. At the dinner table, Chloe sat next to Mom. I sat on the end near the kitchen door. It was my job to get up and get the salt if someone needed it. It was my job to refill the water pitcher.
“Audrey, grab the butter,” Dad would say, not even looking up from his plate.
“Audrey, we need napkins,” Mom would say while listening to Chloe tell a long, boring story about her day.
I was the waitress. Chloe was the customer. My parents were the managers who made sure the customer was happy.
I tried to get their attention in other ways. I tried to be funny. I tried to tell jokes. One night, when I was 10, I came to the dinner table with a joke I had heard at school. I was excited to tell it.
“Hey, Dad,” I said. “Knock knock.”
“Not now, Audrey,” Mom cut in. “Chloe is telling us about the girl who was mean to her in gym class.”
“But it’s really funny,” I said.
“Audrey, don’t be rude,” Dad said sharply. “Let your sister speak. She had a hard day.”
I looked at Chloe. She was smirking. She wasn’t sad. She was enjoying the audience. She knew she had the power. She knew she could suck all the air out of the room and leave none for me.
So, I stopped telling jokes. I stopped trying to be funny. I became quiet. I became the girl who sat at the end of the table and ate her peas in silence.
I spent a lot of time in my room. My room was my sanctuary. It was the only place where I didn’t feel like a second-class citizen. I read books. I wrote stories. I created worlds in my head where I was the main character. In my stories, I was a princess or a warrior or a spy. I was important. People listened to me.
But then I would have to open my door and walk back out into the real world.
The worst part wasn’t the big events. It was the daily small erosions of my self-worth. It was the way Mom would brush Khloe’s hair for 20 minutes, talking softly to her, braiding it carefully. But when I asked for help with my hair, she would hand me the brush and say, “You’re big enough to do it yourself.”
It was the way Dad would go to every single one of Khloe’s soccer games, even though she mostly stood on the field and picked grass. But when I joined the debate team, he never came to a single match.
“Debate is boring, Audrey,” he told me. “It’s just people arguing. I get enough of that at work.”
“But I’m the captain,” I said.
“That’s nice,” he said, turning back to the TV.
I learned to carry everything alone. I learned that if I wanted something done, I had to do it myself. I learned that if I was sad, I had to comfort myself.
By the time I was 12, I was basically an adult. I did my own laundry. I made my own lunches. I kept track of my own dentist appointments. My parents bragged about this to their friends.
“Audrey is so easy,” they would say at parties. “She’s on autopilot. We never have to worry about her.”