I wake up grumpy. My bedroom is dark and I don't know what time it is. I panic and am sure that I am missing something important. In the mirror above the low dresser I share with my sister, I see marks across my cheek from the pillowcase.

I hear the theme song from "The Guiding Light" coming from the family room, so I know two things. It is still the same day, and my mother is home, probably lying across the couch smoking Salems. I smell ironing starch. I tiptoe into the living room where the afternoon sun hits the gold velvet chairs and I can see dust swirling through a beam of light.

I hate the house when it is still. I hate my mother's summer afternoons, the darkened family room with the air conditioner blasting, and I hate my mother's slow ironing of my father's shirts. I hate the ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and the smell of old coffee in the percolator.

I look out the front bay window and outside I see the world alive. There's Mrs. Horne mowing her lawn and green trees growing everywhere. I know the neighborhood kids are deep into games by now, up in tree houses, racing bikes, living their lives in the woods. I am angry that I am missing everything.

I don't remember falling asleep. I remember my mother yelling and my face burning and me crying. I remember her telling me to go to my room. For the rest of the day, she'd said, until dinner. I remember her taking my own summer afternoon from me, squashing it as if I had them to spare.

"I told you never to call an adult by his first name- why can't you ever listen to me?" she'd said loudly. When she yelled, her mind was set on how she thought things were. She'd stand there and scream over me, over my desire to be good, and she always got it wrong. Her dyed black hair was in her eyes. The room was dark and she was dark and she just kept yelling.

I was only supposed to be inside for a minute. I was going to change into my bathing suit and go to the Johnsons' because they just got a slide in their pool. The phone rang in the kitchen and I answered it. A man was calling for my father. I wrote the message down and my mother lifted her sloppy head from the pillow on the couch and asked who it was.

"Mr. McCall," I said.

I guess she didn't hear the Mr. or the Mc because she yelled like a tiger, "Paul McCall is Mr. McCall to you, young lady." I had no idea what she meant until I realized she thought I'd said Paul. But I'd definitely said Mr. McCall.

I was eight and of course I knew never to call a grown up by his first name, only Mr. or Mrs. "Mom," I said softly, "I know. I said Mr. McCall. You didn't hear me. I said Mr. I know I did."

"Don't talk back!" she screamed. She was up and off the couch in seconds, suddenly all energy. I hated her size, her long arms, the bulky thick waist that gave her whacks heft. Even though she'd only done it a few times, I wished she'd hit me in the face. She could make my face bleed and then maybe someone would see how wrong she was. If my father came home and saw me bleeding or even with red marks, I could explain it right for once. He'd know for sure that she is crazy, that I'm the right one and always have been.

"Listen, listen I am not talking to myself," she yelled, the pitch of her voice drilling horribly in my ears. She was still in her robe, like always, and it was slipping open. I could see the top of one hanging breast. It was freckled and ugly. My mother saw me looking and pulled the robe shut, drawing the belt tighter. My looking made her even more mad. Her hair still held a little curl from my parents' party last night, but now it looked dirty, hanging on either side of her face like rags, greasy and filled with smoke.

This was when any other girl would leave. This was when she would think of everyone at the Johnsons' pool and what a waste of time it was standing in the dark, cold kitchen with my mother and she would leave. I could have walked out into the backyard and into the sun. I'd be free as if she were a crazy person in Sears, yelling things that had nothing to do with me. But I could only do that if I were a different person. She knew that. I started to cry. I stood in that kitchen and shook a little and, to my horror, I started to cry. I hated how that was all I knew to do.

"Don't even try it," my mother said with a smirk. She hated tears. "You don't even listen and act all grown and take a message like your father's goddamn secretary and try to tell me you said Mr. I've got your number, little girl."

My crying was that crumbling kind, where everything is ruined. You know inside who you are and that you are good. You've known since you could remember. The teachers know it and the other parents know it. But that's not enough, because if your own mother always gets it wrong, the rest of the world will too eventually. You'll be left the only one who really knows, and it's not enough to protect you.

"I hate you," I said, knowing she wouldn't hear this wrong. I said it again, louder, "I hate you." I'd said it to her before. I'd said it plenty. She'd said it to me and I'd said it to my sister, and sometimes even my father got in on it and said he hated all of us. The words really meant nothing. But they made her mad. They turned up the sound in her, and I knew I'd be sent to my room. I couldn't help it- I had to say them. I couldn't just stand there and cry.

"Go," she said, the hugeness of her anger making her oddly calm. "I don't want to see you until dinner. If then."

I had to walk past her, past her painted toenails. I saw empty glasses and full ashtrays from the party last night, and I got a whiff of gin and saw an empty Fresca can under the coffee table. "Pig," I wanted to yell, but I didn't. Instead I though how she couldn't even get the house clean, couldn't make herself look like a real mother. She'd just watch her soap operas until the last minute, but around five she'd pull it all together with a shower and a quick straightening. When my father got home, he'd never know what a slob she'd been.

I went to my room and flung myself across my bed. My stomach burned like it always did when I got sent to my room. Sometimes it felt like a real fight with my mother, like we were equal and I had a chance of winning. But in the end I was the only one who lost, banished to my room until I heard her get quiet and I could sneak out.

I couldn't stop crying. I knew then that it was hopeless, that I'd never hold my own against my mother. The bedroom door opened and my little sister Jane came in to get her bathing suit. She just looked at me with disgust because I had the dry heaves and couldn't catch my breath. I heard her going back into the family room. She was talking to my mother extra-cheerfully because she loves it when I get in trouble. She can be the good one.

I slept for hours. I hate that I missed everything outside, passed out from rage. Standing in the stale living room air, I decide to sneak out. I am barefoot, but I don't want to run the risk of going back into my bedroom to put on my sneakers. I open the front door and feel air and warmth and an end to my mother's afternoon.

I close the door behind me with a slight click and I run. My stomach flutters because I am out and all the kids in the neighborhood will be together somewhere. Soon I will be there too. The grass under my bare feet is wet, and I see the sprinkler making its slow arc across the lawn. I run under it.

When I get to the street I look both ways for the gang of bikes, for the banana seats and bright shorts, but I see nothing. I feel awful for a minute. It's like everyone's gone and I'm alone, but I know that's not true. Probably they're all in the woods behind the Levins' white split level, where there's a patch of wild strawberries. I run for my life to get to the tiny sweet berries and the rest of the kids.

I run across the street. There are hardly ever cars driving around here. The street just got paved black in the spring and some of the loose gravel hurts my feet, so I make my way across the lawns. I feel the nap falling off my body and I pretend I'm a wild pony on the island of Asoteague. I gallop a little and feel giddy because my mother has told me a million times not to run through neighbors' lawns.

There's a path beside the Levins' that leads me along side a farm and to the woods. I am sweating. I love the world just where I am, wild and barefoot, nowhere near my mother's voice. I am just pure spirit, going to be with my own kind.

Kids are different in the woods. Climbing and walking the highest fallen tree are how we measure each other, and I am good at these things. The rules of school and the rules of home don't belong here. I even get along with my sister Jane, because I am a better climber and she respects that. My brain comes alive in the woods, and I get all kinds of ideas for plays we can put on. I make up a new country where we are like the Indians and the trees are great spirits. Everything that grows is sacred, and so are we.

In school I feel dead, sitting there in the third row of Mrs. Shelby's class. I wish it was like the woods. But in school I am just smart and good. I am nothing special. I don't get great huge ideas about the Indians, and I'm not good in gym the way I am when I climb a tree. All I can do in school is my math and my comprehension skills book and sit there in my hard seat and try not to fall asleep.

I stop running in the woods because there are too many rocks and I have no shoes. I climb a hill. I swoon when I look over and I see in the quiet green the gang of bikes, moving striped shirts and shaggy hair. There's Laura, my best friend, and Jane, my sister, and Timmy and Tommy Crane, Susan Levin and her brother whose name I forgot. They're all there and their voices ring and sound like bells.

I rush down toward them and stub my toe on a root. The pain is sharp. I stop and look down and see some skin puffed up with a line of blood, but it's not going to stop me. "Hey!" I yell. "Hey, it's me!"

Everyone is gathered in a circle and they're looking down at something with their bikes all pointed in. They look up at me for a second when I yell, and then they look at each other.

"What's that?" I ask. No one speaks. The woods are so quiet except when there's wind, and then the leaves on the tops of the trees tinkle like the chimes on my grandmother's porch.

"I said what's that? What are you doing?"

My best friend Laura says, "Dead rabbit," then looks away. There's a blankness coming from her, and I don't like it. I feel like I was slapped.

"Boo-hoo face," my sister Jane says, standing there in an aqua blue T-shirt with only her bathing suit bottom and sneakers. Her belly is round. "You have boo-hoo cry face snot nose nappy nap lines on your face." Jane is only six, but she is so sure of her place in the world.

"So?" I say.

"So, go back to bed. Baby go back to crib. Boo-hoo." Everyone laughs, even my best friend Laura. I try to see the dead rabbit between everyone's legs and get a flash of a sacred ritual we could have over it, but I can't see it.

I hate Jane. I hate it when she has power. She's always laughing and looking around for something to make fun of. She doesn't ever worry about herself. She's got a funny boy's haircut that sticks up all over with cowlicks and I could say a million things about that. But I never do, and she just walks around like it's normal.

I stand in the woods with the dead rabbit that I can't see, and everyone's looking at my eyes swollen from crying. There's dirt in the cut on my toe and it stings.

"Go home," Jane says again. I wait for Laura to say something, to act like my best friend, but she doesn't.

Suddenly I see what happened. While I was sleeping and didn't know I was sleeping, Jane came out and told everyone about me. She told every secret I have ever told her late at night in our room when thing soften enough and I think we are friends. She told them how weird I really am. In a few quick words, she peeled off my skin of ordinary childhood and revealed a freak. Everyone knows it all and everyone is repulsed.

I might as well have slept for a year, because Jane has turned the whole world against me. I am stunned at that kind of power. The nap feeling is creeping back over me and my teeth hurt in my mouth. In the woods I thought I was always safe, but I turned my back for a minute and Jane changed everything. I know she only gets power because she is friends with our mother. When we drive to the store, Jane sits up front and they sing together. I sit in the back and feel carsick. I can only see the tips of Jane's black hair sticking up. I sit and think about pulling it by clumps until her brains come out through the top of her head.

I stand there and my foot bleeds into the ground. I stare at my sister. Her cheeks are flushed from playing. I'm not going home- I cannot go back to my mother and the smell of her cigarettes. The sweat drying on my back feels itchy and the purple stripes on Tommy's shirt look blurry. I feel ancient with the thought of a lifetime of losing to my sister and my mother. I can't do it anymore. I stand and stare at Jane and I know I'm not moving.

"Fuck you," I say.

I hear someone gasp. I have never said these words before. No kid has. They are my father's words when I hear him and my mother in his den, and I know my mother doesn't even say them. "Fuck you Jane," I say again, and I turn around and run.

I am down the hill and out of the woods. I look at the swing set in the yard. It's a symbol of the innocent life I just gave up. I'll never roam the neighborhood again. I feel dizzy. Opposite the Levins' there's a row of tall green cornstalks and I run in that direction. I hit the corn and run into the stalks, the long leaves scraping my arms. When it seems like I'm near the middle of the field, I stop and sit down. There's an anthill between two stalks. For a minute I am blank and all I do is watch the ants moving fast on their tiny legs, going back and forth to the anthill in a perfect line.

It's green shade where I'm sitting. The inside of the cornfield is a separate world. I've been playing here with my best friend Laura since we were little. Wee made up a whole town with separate houses and everything. We ran a store that sold diamonds made from kernels and a library with husks we turned into books and even tried to write on with sticks.

What's making me sick now is this is where Laura and I became blood sisters. It was at the beginning of the summer when the corn only came as high as our shoulders. Laura had a safety pin holding up the strap of the shirt she was wearing, and I suddenly remembered about blood brothers in a book. We both poked our thumbs with the pin and got a little dot of blood, which we smeared together. "I take this pledge," we both said, "to be your sister in blood forever. May the gods of the cornfield bless this vow, and woe to she that breaks it."

Laura turned away from me. She let Jane say anything and she did nothing. I am not stupid enough to think that any corn god will hurt Laura for going against me. I can see my bleeding toe and the bumped up white part.

I can't think too hard about Laura because I'm in trouble. I'm the skinny man with the beard on Dragnet who shot someone and ruined his life. All the kids and all the parents will know I said fuck you to Jane. It will get all around when school starts in a few weeks and the teachers will know it too. I lay flat on the ground between the rows and look up at the sky. The corn leaves look giant. The sky is still blue, but I know it's getting late. I'm in so much trouble. I think about staying out, living in the corn for real. I could eat it. I could bend some stalks over and make a bed. I'd weave the leaves into a blanket. I'd miss reading books and I'd miss my father, but I wouldn't miss my mother or Jane.

But I don't know how big the field is because I only play in the part right inside where the Levins' yard ends. I shiver a little when I think of how the corn could go on for miles and miles, and if I decided to live there, I might never find my way out.

I'm getting cold. My bleeding toe could get infected and fall off. I know it needs Mercurochrome, even though that stings. My father will fix it up. He'll make me sit back on the couch while he sits on the coffee table with my foot on his knee. He'll dab my toe with a soaked cotton ball. He'll pretend to cry while he's doing it, loud and silly, so I'll laugh even though my toe will be burning. Then he'll put on a Band-Aid or even some gauze and smooth his fingers over it before he bends down and kisses it.

Then I think about the fuck you. No one, not even my father, will care about my stupid toe when they hear what I've done.

I walk out of the cornfield slowly, limping a little so the swollen part of my toe doesn't hit a rock or a fallen ear of corn. At the Levins', the father's car is in the driveway, so I know it's late. I stay at the edge of their yard and walk to the street, expecting Mr. or Mrs. Levin to come running out to tell me how shocked and disappointed they are that I said fuck you. The best thing I had was that people thought I was good, and now that's gone.

I walk home in the middle of the street. The neighborhood is quiet and there's no one out on bikes anymore. Dinner is probably already started. My shirt is smeared with light brown dirt. I'm in trouble for everything.

What hits me when I walk in the front door is my least favorite smell in the world- creamed tuna on toast. It's one of the things my mother makes that she likes to talk about on the phone. "In a jiff," she'll say, snapping her fingers. It looks and smells like hot cat puke.

But it means there will be a babysitter. My mother only makes creamed tuna on toast when she and my father are going out. Sure enough, I go into the kitchen and there's my mother, serving it up. She's all clean now, wearing a long maxi skirt with her eyes squinted in this funny way because she just put on mascara and she doesn't want it to smear.

She turns to me when I come in. "Sit," she says. "We're late and Darcy will be here any second." There is no sign that she's about to kill me, that the fuck you has gotten anywhere yet.

I sit at the kitchen table, numb that my life is not yet ruined and that Darcy is coming. She is the best babysitter, and my parents can hardly get her anymore, because she plays at guitar recitals constantly. We went one time, Jane, my mother and me, and I couldn't believe how much I loved Darcy up there, with her long fringed hair and a skirt made out of jeans cut and sewed with flowered fabric. She played her guitar slow and sweet, and she sang in this warbly way that I thought sounded like an angel. I sat down in the audience and thought how I wanted everyone to know she was my babysitter.

Darcy coming means she'll let me stay up late and show me how to crochet. She'll fix my toe. She pays me the most attention, not Jane. Right now I'm so happy I don't notice I'm eating whole bites of creamed tuna on toast.

"Ja-ane," my mother calls out. Jane comes scurrying past the couch and takes her seat, which is set with a Planet of the Apes placemat.

I look at Jane and she laughs. My father comes into the kitchen and plants a kiss on my cheek. "Janisina," he says, and I smell his aftershave. His hair is greased like Dean Martin and he is smoking a cigarette.

I am waiting for Jane to spill the beans. She has both our mother and father in the same room. My mother is blotting her lipstick with a paper towel. My creamed tuna on toast is getting cold, and the smell is mixing with my father's aftershave and making me dizzy.

For a minute I look around and see that in fact my mother has pulled it all together. The curtains are open and the ironing board is put away. Her hair is back to its bouncy flip-up curls, and she put pencil on her eyebrows to make these little arches. If I got close to her I'd probably smell Chanel Number Five. She calls it her signature.

Jane is stuffing her face. There's a beige blob on her chin and she holds her fork in her fist like a little caveman. I catch her eye and shrug as if to say, "Go ahead, let's get it over with. You know I'm dead."

Jane twirls her fork around so her fist is curled back and slowly raises her middle finger. "Fuck you," she whispers with a mouthful of mashed toast.

"Fuck you," I whisper back. We both laugh. It's been such a long time since we were in on anything together. We look at our parents, who are pouring drinks from the liquor cabinet, and we whisper it again, in unison, fuck you.

I said it first, in front of all the kids, which is my right because I am the oldest. I get a flash that it will be the big thing to say once school starts back. It was better than the dead rabbit, and I think it will be even better than being good. I said it first, right there in the woods, standing tough.