Read Sister Golden Hair: A Novel for Free Online

It’s just not nice.”

    At home, my father was already in bed and my mother sat sideways on the couch, with her legs under her, eating from a plastic container of grocery store macaroni and listening to Camelot on the record player. In Philadelphia she’d met with a reducing group that made her wear a pig’s mask if, during the weekly weigh-ins, she’d gained more than a pound. My motherhad worked in a department store. On Saturdays, her day off, she sometimes sang along with the records of Camelot or Fiddler on the Roof . I knew to stay in my room. If I came out, she’d tell us how sad it was that Jackie Kennedy had lost two babies; Arabella was stillborn and Patrick Bouvier died just a few days after his birth. Or she’d yell at me for leaving dirty clothes around or opening up the refrigerator door so long all the cold got out.
    As she opened her mouth, I prayed she wouldn’t tell me again that James Vanhoff had won the State Junior Tennis Championship two years in a row and that he was now on the board of the Roanoke Historical Society or, worse, about the woman who claimed she was possessed by a devil or the toxic mold particles that were suspended in the air all around us. And I was in luck; she just asked me if it went OK, and all I had to do was nod.

    I’d set up my stuff in Miranda’s old room. On the little wooden table beside my bed I’d placed my busts of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare. I liked the way I’d painted Emily’s necklace with tiny dots of gold, and I’d highlighted Shakespeare’s gray hair with silver streaks so he looked like a superhero. My Venus flytrap had survived the journey. I had to remember to place a grain of raw hamburger into its clawedblossom once a week. My record player was in the corner beside my box of 45s, and I spread out my posters, one of a kitten and another I’d gotten from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an Egyptian with eyes outlined in sparkly black. I loved how you could never tell the girl Egyptians from the boy Egyptians and how they were all so ridiculously glamorous.
    From where I lay on my bed I could see my dad through his open bedroom door across the hall. He was under the covers reading his Ram Dass book. The relief he’d felt after we left the church was fading; at first when I asked how God would find us outside the rectory, he’d laughed and told me God was everywhere, you didn’t need any particular prayers to find him. But now he seemed worried; he stayed up late every night reading and writing in his notebook. Though he wouldn’t admit it, I think my dad was disappointed in Roanoke and the world outside the church; neither were the paradise he’d imagined.
    Even though I had my things around me and my dad was nearby, being in Miranda’s old room was still spooky. My room felt penetrable. I had taken precautions, moving my mirror directly across from the window, dumping salt in all the corners to ward off bad spirits, and keeping cloves of garlic on the windowsill to scare off vampires. I felt for the bottle of sage I’d taken from the kitchen spice rack—a safeguard against ghosts—and now kept under my pillow, and I knew my squirt gun, full of holy water, was in thetop drawer of my dresser. True, I’d blessed the water myself, but I figured as a minister’s daughter I had some powers, though they were probably diminished now that my dad had left the church. None of these things made me feel safe. I imagined the ex-husband crouched in my closet, his eyes rolled back to white, and I could almost feel the black hairs growing out of the pink skin of my underarms and down between my legs. I figured the sooner I became a woman, the sooner the ex-husband would be threatening me with a knife. It didn’t seem fair that I had to change shape. I wished someone would have asked me; I might have said yes but I would have liked a choice.
    At least I didn’t have the curse yet. One of my friends had gotten the curse at nine; during gym a line of