A Little Bit of Everything

Chapter 1

Dr. Perez pointed at the number one thing that made me mad. "Still not over it, are you?" she asked me. She had long, filed red fingernails and she tapped her left hand on the wooden table in that tiny room and they made a strange sound, like klak klak klak, and I didn't like that sound because it sounded like the rain on the windows the day Mom died, and my shoes felt heavier suddenly.

"It's not something you can get over so easily, like a speed bump, or something."

"Death is more than just a speed bump, Bea."

"Obviously."

She nodded. "Yes, obviously."

She wrote scribbles and shapes on the paper she called a prescription paper thingymajig and handed it to me. "Give this to your dad," she said, with that Barbie smile I didn't like cause it looked too much like Mom's smile. I asked Tatay later what was written on the paper and he said my antidepressant dosage will go up. Yippee, I thought to myself sullenly, looking out the window. The rain made klak klak klak sounds on the tinted glass, and it made me think of Mom, and it made me sad.

Anyway.

I don't like waking up early, especially today. I stayed up late last night searching up on the Internet the pictures from that day, the Worst Day. I knew that I'm not allowed to look up those pictures (especially since I'm not yet eighteen, and the pictures were blurred with a 'Are you sure you're 18 or over?' sign on it before it became clear, kind of like saying the secret password before they let you in) but I liked to look at them anyway. Did you know that when humans are chopped up or they have dislocated parts sticking out from their bodies, they looked like crushed cockroaches? I remember them always because one time when we first moved here, Mom and I went on a special expedition while Tatay was out. We went through all the rooms, both hiding and seeking one another, and we both wound up in front of the bathroom underneath the stairs. We laughed and laughed and then Mom said, "Let's open the bathroom door. I've never seen this one yet."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because when your papa and I were overseeing the building of the house, we were too busy with other rooms so we left the architects and the plumbers to take care of this one." She said that all in one breath. She was so amazing, and always beautiful, like a sunny day in spring (or what I imagine spring would be like, since there's no spring here).

"So how did the toilet and the sink and the medicine cabinet and the tub get in here then if you have never seen it?"

"We let the interior designer take charge of that."

"How did the designer know whether you liked this style of a toilet or not?"

"All toilets are the same, Bea."

"No, they're not. What about the ones outside the beach houses? They're tiny and they don't have that thing in the back where the water comes in."

She sighs, but it's the sigh I liked the most. "Let's just look inside."

We open the door together and peek in, and as soon as the light from the kitchen filled the room like silence in a classroom, the walls came alive. Not literally, obviously. But the lines we saw on the walls moved and turned out to be long, black worms and fungi. Both the ceiling and the floor were filled with cockroaches and they scattered around like a mob. 

We both screamed and I fell backwards. One of the cockroaches went towards the light, lost and wandering, and then my mom crushed it underneath her bedroom slippers. With a half scream half laugh kind of sound, my mom, the superhero of the day, closed the door and locked it. She sat down next to me (I was sitting up by then, obviously) and we had a good laugh.