RE: Trailer Trash 4 Finale pt 3 (Patreon)

    Is it possible to boil broccoli for TOO long? Mrs. Moore pursed her lips thoughtfully. Everyone knows uncooked broccoli has dangerous things like arsenic in it, but I may have been a little... overzealous in boiling them a little EXTRA all the same. Just to be sure.

   When she endeavored to pick up the slack for them tonight and imitate Tabitha’s healthy cooking, the results were… underwhelming. Whatever she’d done wrong cooking this chicken and broccoli, it was bland. It wasn’t hard to imagine that her husband was measuring the pace of the unappetizing dinner with constant sips of water just for a little flavor.

   No one was touching the rather soggy-looking vegetables, which seemed to have started to liquefy into grotesque green paste. The family seemed share an unspoken agreement to simply pretend they didn’t exist, to tactfully not mention the too-mushy-looking broccoli florets and the way the stems drooped like runny noodles.

   “Well, don’t force yourself to eat it if you don’t want to,” Mrs. Moore chided, gesturing at her daughter with her fork in exasperation.

   She’d meant that to sound light-hearted and joking—the food really did look terrible—but she was honestly a little upset. Mrs. Moore considered herself no stranger to cooking, but she was also used to preparing meals like the good Lord intended, the way a normal person did. Using the microwave. 

   “No, I think… I think I need to,” Tabitha said, frowning in determination. The girl seemed to be punishing herself by cutting the unseasoned chicken into absurdly tiny portions and working her way through them one by one.

   Shannon Moore wanted to put on an affronted look, but even after the nap Tabitha had taken at Grandma Laurie’s place, the teenage girl seemed woozy, listless, and completely lacking in energy. The constant ordeals Tabitha had gone through in the past several days were putting Mrs. Moore on edge, and she couldn’t help but cast fretful glances at the way her daughter cradled that awful cast against her body.

   “Gonna drive up to the school tomorrow and see what they have to say for themselves,” Mr. Moore announced, taking another long draw of water. “You did the right thing leavin’ when you did, and I’m proud of you. Want you to just concentrate on resting and feeling better for a few days, Sweetie.”

   “I need to be doing all my exercises,” Tabitha said in a small voice.

   Alan looked like he was about to object, but Mrs. Moore silenced him with a fierce glare. 

   “Tabby, honey...” Mrs. Moore spoke up softly. “I understand, I really do. But, you really do need to rest, just have a few days off without workin’ yourself to death. You’re not going to lose your figure just from skipping your routines for this little while, Sweetie. Your body needs to recover.”

   “I— I apologize, I failed to explain myself,” Tabitha said, staring down at her plate with bleary eyes as she picked at her food. “The lack of proper exercise was affecting the quality of my sleep. Last night, I…”

   Tabitha trailed off with a frown and blinked, seeming to lose her train of thought, and Mrs. Moore shared a worried glance with her husband. This wasn’t normal for their daughter at all. Not only was she defaulting again to what Alan had once described as auto-pilot Tabitha, where she seemed to retreat way back into her own mind and go through life with mechanical motions—it seemed like even that was on the verge of shutting down.

   “You look plenty tuckered out to me,” Mr. Moore said, sliding his chair out and rising from the table. “Why don’t we get you to bed, Sweetie?”

   “I-I’m sorry,” Tabitha choked up. The girl’s eyes were wet, and she unsteadily stood and started gathering her plate with her single remaining hand. “I’ll put this in the tupperware.”

   “You’ve got nothin’ to be sorry for—you leave it be,” Mr. Moore took Tabitha by the shoulders and gently guided her away from the table. “We’ll clean up. You go and get them teeth brushed and we’ll get you settled, okay?”

   “Sorry,” Tabitha apologized again, retreating down the hall.

   Alan watched his daughter leave, then turned and gripped the back of his chair until the wood creaked, glaring vacantly across the table at nothing. When he finally sat down again, he did so heavily, looking ten years older than he had earlier in the week.

   “Sorry about dinner,” Mrs. Moore slid her plate away with the back of her hand, unable to keep up any pretense of interest in the meal.

   “Don’t you start, too,” Alan sighed, giving her a weak smile. “Nothin’ to be sorry for. It was fine.”

   “You’re full of shit,” Mrs. Moore shook her head in dismay. “Really goes to show how spoiled we’ve gotten with Tabby cooking, huh?”

   “It was fine,” he chuckled, before holding his hands up defensively as she gave him a withering stare. “Alright, alright. The chicken was… a little dry.”

   “Thank you,” Mrs. Moore said, appreciating the honesty, if not the truth of the sentiment. Probably should’ve just boiled the chicken breasts in with the broccoli instead of microwaving them. That’s probably how she’d’ve done it. “What are we going to do about Tabitha?”

   “Well...” Mr. Moore stewed on his words for a moment. “If she’s set on withdrawing from school for good, I’ve half a mind to let her. I was worried she might get picked on when she started senior high, because she’s so… different, but this whole nonsense going on is just completely beyond the pale. These other kids, they’re goddamn animals. Who knows what they might get up to next?”

   Mrs. Moore shifted uncomfortably in her seat, remembering that icy spike of raw terror she’d felt when she’d heard about Tabitha getting pushed at school and needing to go to the hospital. That terror struck deep and then began to percolate over the past several days, disturbing all of those long-buried remembrances of her own trauma from all those years ago—when the film producer had insisted on… touching her.

   The way Tabitha’s peers were mistreating her was already atrocious, but she was also growing into a lovely young girl—the horrible idea that bullying at school could possibly escalate to things like that made Mrs. Moore sick with rage. She’d been worrying herself into nervous fits over how to explain her fear and paranoia to her husband without sounding like a crazy person. What happened on those studio sets all those years ago wasn’t something she was ever prepared to discuss with him.

   “I don’t want her at that school,” Mrs. Moore finally admitted. 

   “We need to have a talk with her about it tomorrow,” Mr. Moore rubbed a hand across the stubble along his jaw. “She does have friends there. I think it needs to be her decision, and we’ll havta support her no matter what she decides. She’s… she’s just so damned smart that it scares me, and I hate thinkin’ of her bein’ here at home instead of out getting a proper school education.”

   Mrs. Moore bit her tongue. She wanted to argue that her Tabitha would thrive with or without school simply because of her single-minded focus and drive for improvement, but she knew that the feeling was mostly likely just her bias as a mother.

   “There’s… there’s somethin’ else I haven’t told you,” Mr. Moore sighed. “Promised Tabby I wouldn’t, but… I think it’s a part of all this goin’ on, think it’s important.”

   Shannon Moore felt herself go stiff with fear, and her grip on the edge of the table tightened until her knuckles went completely white.

   “This past summer, Tabby didn’t fall off of that trampoline jumper,” her husband revealed. “Those Taylor girls, they pushed her. Threatened to make her pay if she told anyone, really put a scare into her. But, she told me. Made me swear not to say anything. She was blubbering and wailing and completely beside herself—I had to promise her.”

    “What,” Mrs. Moore bit out.

   “I was still gonna look into it anyways,” Mr. Moore tried to explain. “Maybe go talk to the parents of those girls. But, then…”

   He shook his head in disbelief.

   “Then it was like Tabby hit this critical mass, this point way out past her hysteria an’ breakin’ down and something changed inside of her. I keep wanting to think it was such a… I don’t have the words for it. Such a transformation, that it put the fritz on that MRI machine, like the thing just didn’t know what to make of the goings-on in her head that night at all. Maybe nobody but Tabitha knows.

   “She fainted dead away in there. When we got her out of there and she came to, she wasn’t sobbin’ and caterwaulin’ like when she got in. She came out, and she was so calm, cold, distant, there was this… this patient sense of… I don’t know, purpose to her. You know how she was, that night I brought her home from that. How she’s been. It’s like whatever happened, whatever decision she came to that night, she looks around now and sees everything with these new eyes, this completely different perspective.”

   Mrs. Moore remembered the strange new Tabitha glancing across the dinner table in surprise all those months ago. ‘Oh? You didn’t know? Everyone calls me tubby Tabby. They always have. I’ve been made fun of for being fat and smelling bad my whole life.’

   “She was being bullied all along,” Mrs. Moore realized, filling with emotion at how stupid she’d been. “All this time. She tried to tell us—she tried to tell us, and I couldn’t even listen. Said they were calling her tubby Tabby, back then. Didn’t she!”

   All this time, I thought it must’ve been Grandma Laurie. But, it wasn’t—Tabby was DRIVEN to this, she was pushed to this point, Mrs. Moore covered her face as she began to cry, sagging forward over the dinner table. How totally fucking stuck on myself could I have even been to ever think she was trying to spite me somehow?! This all, this was never about her seeing the album, or thinking I was keeping her from her potential. She NEEDED to change, living as who she used to be was BREAKING HER.

   Just like being who I was broke me, Shannon Moore sobbed. This whole stupid tragic story played out for my life, and now it’s playing right back over itself in reverse for Tabitha. Why can’t it all just—what do I have to do to put a STOP to this?

*     *     *

   Tabitha always steamed the broccoli. Why did I try to boil it? When Shannon Moore sat up abruptly at two AM in the morning to a mobile home of still silence, it felt like her mind was more clear than it’d ever been in her whole life—it was just like she imagined Tabitha had felt coming home from that concussion this past summer. Like she’d been reborn.

   The bewildering realizations, epiphanies, and misunderstandings had crashed through her for hours last night like a hurricane, displacing, uprooting, and even destroying the stagnant, ingrained mindset that had become her own prison. Everything after sitting at the dinner table was a blur—she remembered weeping and weeping beyond her husband’s ability to console her, and her muffled tears and choked cries didn’t stop until long after he’d managed to bring her to bed.

   When’s the last time we all WENT somewhere, just to get away from it all? Mrs. Moore glanced around the dark, increasingly claustrophobic enclosure of the trailer’s master bedroom. Taken family pictures together, made new memories? What have I been DOING here, besides being miserable and waiting to die? What’s been the point?

   I could go out and start looking for a job—we could use the extra income. Why did we even stay in this trailer park for so goddamn long? Want us all to go somewhere tomorrow, DO something together. Tabby’s writing that story of hers—I want to read it. That blue album I had hidden away… I’d forgotten, but there were GOOD memories in there, too. So many of them—I want to actually go through and share them all with her. How have I been living?

   She turned the covers carefully so as not to wake her husband, and slipped out of bed. In the fourteen years she’d spent holed up in this mobile home, she’d never before felt so restless, and as she crept down the narrow hallway and through their tiny kitchen she found herself staring at all the once-familiar odds-and-ends and random detritus of their time here and seeing nothing but a life never lived.

   Tabitha was doing stretches at first. Going on walks. Sit-ups and things like that, she had a whole chart drawn up. I wonder if she still has it?

   It didn’t seem like enough.

   Shannon Moore whirled in place, looking around at the now-stifling walls with a sense of dread. The only reason the tiny chamber of space barely resembled a home at all was because Tabitha had taken down the blankets blocking out the sunlight, then scrubbed the mildew off the ceiling, repositioned the aging furniture, and cleaned the carpet so thoroughly.

   How have I been such a fool, all this time? I want to wake Tabitha up, just to tell her how much I love her. 

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