[pre]You never were there for me
No never at all
You never took care of me
You just watched me fall
I placed all my faith in you
I needed you here
God knows what I've got to do
To rid me of fear
“Life in Black” - Fight
Chapter 1: Changes
Sara sat at the kitchen table, banging her feet restlessly against the chair. Her mother was pacing the length of the kitchen, her ear glued to the phone. She was shouting at someone for something, but Sara didn’t know what she was saying. She had tuned her mother out a while ago and her attention was now on the book resting lightly on her lap. Sara’s hands flipped the pages with a subtle ferocity and her legs pounded lightly against the chair legs, currently the only two indicators of her agitation.
And yet, try as she might to prevent it, her mother’s voice still echoed in her ears. It was more difficult than she had imagined to block out the voice of a woman who, for better or worse, had been speaking to her since she was a baby. It wasn’t her fault that her ears were trained to automatically perk up whenever she heard that voice.
But she didn’t want to think about her mother right now, she needed to concentrate on her book and the exciting chase scene between Jim Hawkins and barbarian pirates. Unconsciously, Sara’s turned the next few pages more furiously, and found it harder to concentrate on her book. Stray thoughts kept running through her head…
Better them than me
Better her mother was yelling at whoever was on the phone than her. It wasn’t even as if Sara got yelled at often. No, her mother did not yell at her that often. At least, she never used to. But she did know that she didn’t like it when her mother yelled at her. It was a scary, lonely, feeling that automatically made Sara want to leap into her mother’s arms and feel them envelope her and hold her and never let her go.
But the occasional fights with her mother also awakened another feeling within her, one that was becoming familiar to Sara, one that her spirit and her mind automatically roared their approval of whenever they sensed it, even though her heart told her something else entirely.
The feeling was one of rebellion. It was frustration. It was resentment, and anger, and pride. Once completely alien to her, these feelings were now becoming familiar and comforting, and they were what stopped her from running to her mother’s arms these days, whenever they fought. Instead they pushed her away, up the stairs and to the safety of her room, where her mother was forced to resort to screaming at her from the other side of the door.
In the beginning, this new dynamic to their relationship had been strange for both of them. At first, Sara had been scared of retribution for her little hissy fits, but she soon realized that her mother was just as bemused and bewildered by this change in attitude as she was. She had no idea how to handle Sara, so she just screamed some more and then left. The next morning both of them acted like it had never happened. For her part, Sara went about normally, but her mother could never quite get over the power shift that had suddenly occurred and she had been distant and quiet around Sara ever since.
After that, Sara had been more careful around her mother and tried hard not to pick fights with her. Though she liked the feeling of power and freedom she felt whenever they fought, Sara was afraid that one of these times her mother would emotionally detach herself from Sara completely and for good, and that thought scared her more than anything else in the world.
All Sara knew consciously was that it was better for her mother to be screaming at someone on the phone, far away and unaccountable, than at her. So for the moment she was content. Or at least she thought she was, but she had been staring at the same paragraph for a long time without reading it and her pounding had taken on a more tribal-like intensity.
Her mother suddenly hung up the phone and rubbed her eyes. Sara looked up at her expectantly and for the first time, focused her thoughts on her mother. Her mother glanced up at her, noticed her for the first time, and a ghost of a smile flitted across her face, but it was soon replaced with the permanent frown that Sara was now accustomed to seeing on her mother’s worn features.
“What are you doing in here?” She asked Sara in an accusing voice.
What, I can’t be sitting in my own kitchen? Sara thought back angrily, but she didn’t say it. She just shrugged.
“Well go outside and play or something. Mommy needs some alone time,” she said, switching back into what Sara thought of as her mother’s baby voice.
Her mother used that voice whenever she was doing something selfish at Sara’s expense. In essence, it effectively justified her actions to Sara without ever letting her feel guilty about it. All she had to do was act like Sara was still a toddler, one who didn’t have enough emotional range to be hurt by her actions for any significant length of time, and then resolve to make up for it later, which she almost never did.
Her mother did this more and more often now, and her mood-swings were hard to keep up with. Some days she treated Sara as though she were three years old, and other days she yelled at Sara for not being more responsible, more adult-like. Their relationship was unpredictable and swaying constantly. One thing might be enough to set her mother off on her one day, and then on a completely different day the action could have no consequence.
Sara decided not to risk any fights at the moment. Instead, she suppressed the mutinous feeling bubbling up inside of her and got up from the table, opened the French doors and walked out onto the patio without another word. [/pre]
. Otherwise your story is captivating. 
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