I am fifteen and I am at Sarah’s for dinner. I can tell they eat dinner at the same time every night because each member of the family has a different job that no one need tell them what or how to do. It’s 6:30pm. The microwave tells me it’s 6:30pm. But the middle lights aren’t blinking. So maybe it’s wrong. I don’t like this time to eat, I am still wound up from school, and I am not hungry at this point. I ate dinner with Sarah and her family anyway. The walls were yellow, and the plates were white. Her father was wearing a light blue button up shirt. The dining room was puking spring, even though it was not springtime. Sarah and I are going to a friend’s house, maybe to smoke pot. Sarah needs money for pot, so she tells her parents she needs money for gas. Sarah walks into the kitchen where her mother is doing the dishes to ask for money, I am sitting at the dining room table while they clean up around me, pushing at my leftover plate. I don’t know how to help yet. Her mother says no, “Ask your father.” I hear her say. I think briefly if those words have ever been spoken to me, and they haven’t. I have the urge to leave, but I don’t. Sarah gallops into the living room where her father is reading the newspaper, she walks by me with a pouty smile, and winks. She asks her “daddy” for gas money, she sounds like an infant, still unable to pronounce words. She strokes his arm, she sits in his lap, she is flirting with him. I adjust myself in my chair, afraid that what I am seeing is wrong. Sarah’s dad puts down his newspaper and reaches in his pocket; he pulls out $20 and hands it to his flirtatious daughter. I’m happy we have money for pot. He’s happy his innocent daughter has money for gas. I’m disgusted. I wipe my hands on napkin still sitting in my lap and I move myself from the table. I rustle the hair of Sarah’s little brother as I walk by him to leave. I hope that he is not as friendly with his father. I do not understand what I have just witnessed.
