The Stepdaughter

Exercise:

Someone else chose the setting and characters. He established that it was a father and stepdaughter in a dining room, and the stepdaughter gets angry and lashes out. Here's my 10-minute fast writing response:

In the last two minutes, I’d gone from standing on the other side of the room to baring my teeth ten inches from her ear, growling her name like a damn German Shepherd.

But I couldn’t force her to turn her head.

She hadn’t looked at me since I got home. What had started as a simple request — “Could you take off those earphones?” — had turned into a vicious match.

Except I was the only one fighting, at least that you could tell. Jessica hadn’t opened her mouth. She hadn’t acknowledged my presence. Which had, ironically, made me much, much bigger. I was towering over her, which was easy considering that I had almost a foot on her. She was petite and obstinate, just like her mother.

“Harry,” the mother called from the next room, clearly trying to distract me from my one-sided tirade. “Should we have chicken or lasagna for dinner?”

I ignored her, as easily as her daughter was ignoring me.

I realized as I did it that I was trying to intimidate her, but I couldn’t stop myself. I leaned even closer to her dewy neck and yanked the earphones out myself.

At least that got a reaction.

She didn’t scream at me. She didn’t get histrionic. She didn’t yell for her mother’s intervention.

“Harry,” she hissed, without looking at me. “You are not my father. But it’s worse than that.”

That’s when I realized Jessica was all of her 14 years and even more than that. The day she talked to me as though I were the child and she the adult, and she made me believe it.

“You’re not my stepfather. You aren’t even a friend.” Finally, she put her eyes on mine, and I trembled.

“You’ve failed me, which means you have failed yourself.” She took the earphones from my forgotten hand, which trailed out in front of her nose and filled the small space between us.

“I don’t know how you’re going to live with that,” she said. She tucked the buds back into her ears and leaned quietly back into the dining room chair, tapping her fingers to music that I couldn’t hear.