When Barbie Takes Over

47- Telling the Parents

Chapter Forty Seven:

Telling the Parents:

I didn’t do what Garrett asked, well not exactly at least. I waited until that evening after Alice had fallen asleep before I talked to my parents.

“Mom? Dad?” I asked, crutching into the living room. “Can I talk you guys for a second?”

“Yeah sure,” Mom said. “What about?”

I sat down on the couch adjacent to the one my parents were on, and nervously folded my hands into my lap.

“Well um, it’s about Alice,” I started.

“Is something wrong?” Mom asked. “She seemed fine earlier.” I guess Mom hadn’t noticed how Alice hadn’t talk to me at dinner, she hadn’t even looked at me. I guess she was mad at me for not believing her, or for not getting mad at her for attempting to kill me. Not that she actually had of course, that’s impossible.

“Um, well, you see, there’s this… Something strange has been happening lately. A couple of somethings actually.”

“What kind of things?” Dad asked.

“Well, um, a lot of things,” I said. Then I launched into the story of all the weirdness that has been happening.

I told them about how randomly Alice would call me Elder Sister and speak kind of robotically, but neither of them seemed to ever notice. I told them about all the things that had happened the last couple of days: the girls freaking out over the plane thing, Alice telling me it was all her fault that evening, Alice telling me about the ‘voices’ the next morning then going all creepy on me.

I told them how neither of the girls had played with their Barbies since before the plane emergency, but neither of my parents found that odd. After I reasoned with them a bit more, they began to see it my way.

I told them about the train thing earlier today. Mom got mad at me for even being on the tracks, but Dad calmed her down enough to let me keep talking. I explained to them how after I had gotten home Alice had tried to put the blame on it for herself, but there’s no way she could have caused it.

For the most part, as I spoke, my parents seemed pretty much quiet. They asked the occasional question, but they had let me just talk.

“Um, also, Maddy has been a bit strange as well,” I added at the end of my spiel.

“Maddy? How has she been weird as well?” Mom asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. But she also doesn’t want to play with her Barbies, and she was freaked out after the plane thing, and she called Garrett ‘Elder Brother’ at the same times Alice would be calling me ‘Elder Sister’.”

“Maybe she is just copying Alice?” Dad suggested.

I shrugged again. “She might be, I don’t know. I haven’t spent enough time with her alone to see if she is or not.”

Both my parents nodded as they absorbed all this information.  

“How long has this been going on? These strange things?” Mom asked.

I thought about it for a moment. “A week, maybe, before I started dating Garrett,” I answered. I remembered freaking out about the ‘Elder Sister’ thing the first morning it happened, hunting Garrett down and talking to him about it.

“This has been going on for three- four- weeks, and you didn’t think to tell us?” Dad demanded.

I lowered my eyes to my hands.