Dollhouse
By K. Weikel
Inspired by Melanie Martinez’ song Dollhouse
Dollhouse
K. Weikel
Copyright © 2014 by K. Weikel
Praise for Dollhouse
“…It’s so sad. It’s in its own way beautiful…”
“…This is such a truthful story because these problems actually exist and people don’t talk about them much...”
“Two words: Mind. Blown.”
For my parents and family.
And for everyone who is going through what is in this book.
Dollhouse
Intro
1. Doll-Syndrome
2. Secrets
3. Masks
4. Plastic
5. Crystal
6. Love
7. Family
8. Car Radio
9. John
10. Doll Face
11. Why
12. Breathing
13. This Is It
14. Headlights
Epilogue
About the Author
Other Books
Intro
My dad’s a doctor. My mom runs a bakery. My brother’s a superstar in high school. I’m one of the popular girls that everyone knows. We’re a beautiful family. We don’t argue. We don’t fight. We go to church. We know everyone.
On paper, we’re a perfect family living in our big perfect house with money to spend on anything we want to. But nothing is as it seems.
Nothing is ever as it seems.
My dad’s cheating on my mom with a nurse. My mom has a drinking problem because she knows about his woman on the side, but can’t confront him about it. My brother goes out to get high whenever he can and is starting to get bigger with his addiction, trying stronger things each time.
And none of them realize what they’re doing.
I see things that nobody else sees.
1. Doll-Syndrome
“It was so nice seeing you again, Karen! You have such a wonderful family!”
My mom walks away from Karen Morgan, one of her many distant friends. She’s been a whole lot quieter for the last few months, and I have a feeling that it has something to do with my dad. He’s been cheating on her for maybe four months now and she just found out about two months ago. She always had a problem with drinking, but it’s never been this bad. I think it’s because she doesn’t want to confront him about it in fear that she’ll lose him and tear apart this family and ruin our image as perfect.
But it’s just a theory.
We walk out the front doors of church and to our shiny new car. Dad just got a promotion and decided to congratulate himself with a silver Jaguar. He’s a doctor. I never thought doctors could get a promotion until it happened. I don’t even know what for. Might be because of his affair.
“Amabel, honey, could you do the dishes when we get home?” my mom asks with a smile. She has short blonde hair and bright blue eyes. It fits her square face so well that it makes her look way younger than she is. The sea foam green suit she wears with the shiny broach makes her look professional though, completely changing your mind on the whole twenty-year-old her face suggests.
“Sure,” I smile back, afraid to upset her. I don’t particularly favor her when she’s drinking, which is usually when my dad disappears. She can get really abusive, so I tend to leave her alone when she takes out the flask she holds in her purse.
“Aw, man, mom, I was going to do them,” Tobiah jokes, pushing me to the side a little bit. He’s my brother. He always wears too much cologne to cover up the smell of the stuff he smokes. His muscles are huge, mostly because he’s the star player on the high school football team. It’s his senior year after all, and he wants to go out with a bang. He’s worked hard to keep up with the scholarship to play football for college. He’ll get a free ride, even though he doesn’t need it. We have more than enough money for both of us to go.
Every girl falls all over him when he walks down the hall, and he knows it. He basks in the attention. He got my mother’s hair, giving him the look of a superstar, complete with the amazing blue eyes. It’s thick and light blonde, and he always has it combed back perfectly like a ken doll.
I guess it’s kind of ironic, the resemblance to a ken doll he has, considering our last name is Doll. Tobiah Doll and Amabel Doll.
“Yeah right,” my dad laughs. “You’ll probably head to the gym as soon as we get into the driveway.”
My dad works out with Tobiah a lot too, but only twice to three times a week. He’s busy the rest of the time. Work, he says. I don’t know how my mom didn’t see it...
But anyway, my dad has thick, blonde hair too. His eyes are always bright green, joyful to see anyone else but my mom. His eyes always seem to dull when he’s around her. I’ve always wondered why he looked at her that way. What’s so bad about her?
My dad slides into the driver’s seat, his smile filling his entire face as he rubs the steering wheel proudly. Tobiah, though we can both drive, slide into the back seats as my mom shuts the door. The car is quiet as always. When we’re out somewhere together, we talk. Always. It’s only when we’re alone where we see the walls go up between each other, my dad separating his secrets from my mom, my mom separating hers from him, Tobiah hiding his from all of us, and then there’s me. I hide everything I know from the people who don’t know I know their secrets. Even if they knew, I knew it wouldn’t change anything. They would put on their pretty fake faces, smile, and tell me how absurd it is for me to be thinking things like that.
Pretty little fake faces.
I have it too. The Doll-Syndrome. Fake it till you make it. Smile when you don’t want to. Be polite to someone who’s spitting in your face. Be what they want you to be. Do what they want you to do. Be a doll and shut up and play pretend. Put on your dress. Act like you care. Don’t tell the world your problems and you won’t have any yourself.
But I’m tired of the Doll-Syndrome.
I want to be human. I want to act human. I hate pretending that I’m something I’m not.
But I have to.
I’m head of the Drama Club, head of the Debate Club, Homecoming Queen, the top of my class, the head of the Book Club, President of the Spanish Club, President of National Honor Society, President of the Recycling club, Class President, and the lead in a play. I can’t crack up now. Not in my junior year of high school. I have so many people counting on me... I can’t just change how I am and go through a mid-life crisis.
We pull up into the driveway to our three-story house.
“Oops, I left my light on,” I say, startling everyone in the car.
I jump out of the vehicle and pull my key out of my pocket, unlocking the green door. In the entryway, I place the pink key in the shape of a guitar on the table resting on the left wall. I start to climb the stairs to the second story, going through the living room, running my eyes over the green wallpaper because the pattern looks really interesting. At the top of the stairs is the game room, complete with a big TV and two couches, including a pool table and a Foosball table. Bounding up one more flight of stairs into the attic, I breathe in the smell of my room. It always smells like rain and wood up here.
We converted the attic into a room for me because I felt like I needed a bigger space. My old room is in the process of becoming a weight room for dad and Tobiah to work out together in.
The wooden floor is covered with a pink rug, my bed sitting on the opposite side with the matching comforter. We painted the walls white and I hung pictures and posters up all over them. My vanity sits on the left-hand side when you’re facing the bed, and my dresser is on the other. Behind the entrance to my room, my d
ad had constructed a closet that was big enough to hold all of the clothes that don’t belong in my dresser. The doors slide back and forth and they’re made of mirrors.
I absolutely love it up here. I can see everything on my street from the window above my bed, though sometimes that isn’t a good thing. It’s one of the ways I know how my dad is cheating on my mom.
But I don’t have to get into that now and ruin a perfectly good Sunday. God is good, and I want it to stay that way for the rest of the day. I don’t want anything bad to happen. No drunk mother, no cheating dad, no low-life brother, just me, myself, and I—and the dishes...
Yay.
2. Secrets
“Hello?” I hear my dad as he answers his phone. “Yeah, well, I can’t talk right now. Yes. Mmhm… Okay see you in a bit.”
I see my dad’s slight smile as he hangs up, his green eyes brightening. My mom walks up to him, clutching to her purse, as if she’s about to ask a question she doesn’t want to hear the answer to.
“Work,” he chuckles before she can ask, and slips past her to grab his shoes. “I’ve been asked to work on someone. The doctor that was supposed to got sick all of a sudden.”
“And you’re happy about that?” My mom asks, trying to smile, but I can see the hurt and the knowledge in her eyes. For a moment, I wish she didn’t know what my dad is doing behind her back. But I’d rather her know than find out in the worst way possible.
“Honey,” my dad says sweetly. Sickeningly. “I got a promotion. Of course I’m happy.” He rubs up and down on her arms, her hands white from clutching the bag. “I get paid more to do things like this. Have fun at your bakery, today, okay? I’ll even recommend it to the patient’s family when they come into his room.”
With that, he turns and leaves.
“I love you,” my mother says softly, just as the door shuts.
She knows where he’s going. I can see it in her body language. Her muscles are tense and her jaw is clenched. Her movements are rigid and sharp.
She (almost secretly) slips the flask out of her purse and takes a big sip of alcohol from it. She knows she can’t drink very much yet. She has a bakery to run, and she has to be there in half an hour. Not to mention that I’m down here and I would see her do it.
I place the last of the dishes into the dishwasher and rush up to my room. I don’t want to see what she does next, if she does anything at all. She is her own boss. If she wants to take off from work to grieve and drink over a marriage she’s so worried about losing but is doing nothing to save, she can, and she just might if she feels too stricken with grief to go.
I don’t pity her. She’s a drunk. I don’t pity my dad either though. He’s a liar. Why pity those who just constantly bring havoc upon themselves? All they have to do is sit down and talk about it. Then it could all be better. It could all work itself out, by the grace of God. What do they think will happen once they sin and its punishment falls on them? You can’t pretend to walk with God and then let the world control you.
The Doll-Syndrome comes back and I sit on my bed, pretending like my life is perfect and nothing could be better. I busy my mind with other things, like organizing meetings for school and doing my homework. I don’t know when my mom leaves, but I know that eventually she does, because I can smell the fumes from Tobiah’s room start to leak into mine.
I crack open the circular window above my bed and stick my face out to breathe in the fresh air. Does he not know what those chemicals are doing to his body? Does he not understand that?
And what behooves me is why does he do it alone? Usually people do those things together, but he’s all alone in there. I know this because if anyone came over, I would see him or her. I just have that kind of view from the attic.
Plus, nobody knows he does any of this. If they did, he’d be ridiculed and I would have known about it before I originally found out. I’m the girl everyone goes to when they want to gossip or when they need advice or when they have to rant… No one thinks that I know everything about them, but I do. I become a shoulder for everyone who needs one. That’s how it always has been. It’s how I have so many friends.
‘Friends.’
If you can call them that.
They’re mostly absorbed in themselves and I feel like they hang around me because I know all of their secrets. I wish I could tell them that friendships aren’t just built on secrets. You need trust and love and…
Forget it.
The stench coming from Tobiah’s room is getting to be too much to handle for me. I start to cough and pull the collar of my dress over my nose to filter out the smell. I make my way down the stairs to the game room and open up all the windows, along with the ones downstairs.
I open up the back door and sit in the grass, a ways away from the house. I feel lightheaded from holding my breath for so long, but it goes away after I lay in the grass for a while.
The sky above me is crystal-clear and the perfect shade of blue. Only a few fluffy white clouds float high above me and the sun shines down happily onto the Earth. It almost reminds me of a movie, how perfect it all is. Perfect like how my life is supposed to be.
I pick a yellow flower from the ground beside me and smell it. The scent is sweet, but it makes me sneeze. I laugh at myself, as if my brother isn’t experimenting with drugs inside the house while my parents are gone, and my dad isn’t out cheating, and my mom isn’t an alcoholic. I laugh at myself like I have no worries in the world. Like I don’t have secrets swarming around in my head and like I’m not sitting outside because of my brothers’ addictions.
I sit up to look at our house. It’s white walls stare back at me, glistening with secrets that I don’t even know yet, and it’s green window panes watching me, as if telling me to come back inside and stop what’s happening inside of it.
I hear a car start and pull out of the driveway. It’s Tobiah’s. He’s most likely going to the gym, like my dad predicted. Unless he ran out of drugs.
I wait a few more minutes for the house to air out, and then I make my way inside. The smell is gone, but I still take the spray from the bathroom and cover every inch of the house, especially my bedroom. The after-smell of his drugs always to gives me headaches.
Shutting all of the windows, I finally make my way down to the basement. It’s where my dad works when he’s researching or studying something. He’s always been an intelligent man, or at least I always thought he was, until the whole other woman thing happened. How stupid do you have to be to cheat on your wife? And with a nurse too? Aren’t they both supposed to be near the top of the list of the smartest people in the world? Seriously?
I sit at his computer, as I often do when I think, and I move the mouse. On the screen is a picture of our family, our white teeth gleaming in the sun with our house standing proudly behind us.
I open up his pictures to find more of us to look at. It’s comforting to me to look at these pictures. It makes me feel like nothing is wrong and like we really are a perfect family. It’s like I’m having a dream.
As I’m flipping through the familiar pictures, I come across ones that are new, ones that no one should send to anyone. It’s disgusting and wrong and just… ugh.
My perfect little dream moment is over.
I quickly look away from the woman, making sure I change the screen as fast as I can. I feel tears well up in my eyes, my brain unable to keep my dad’s secret from the front of my mind anymore, and they spill over.
My family is a wreck. We’re all screwed up in one way or another. Everyone thinks we’re perfect, and at times, I do too. But I know better.
I’ve always known better.
I start to sob and I pull my knees up to my chest, twisting away from the computer in the swivel office chair. I know way too much. Why can’t I be five again when all I worried about was whose birthday party I was going to and what my favorite color was?
I wish I didn’t know the things I know.
I look up at the scr
een, a more decent picture of the woman smiles seductively at me. She has long black hair and light brown eyes. She looks like a raccoon, if a raccoon was a model with big, fake boobs. Her body is Photoshop perfect and her eyelashes are longer than a human’s should be. She looks like she’s more than ten years younger than my dad.
I shiver disgustingly and sniffle sadly as I close out of the window. I think I’ve seen enough for today.
Those pictures are recent. I’ve never seen them before.
He’ll probably delete them later to cover his trail.
I look out into the room, where the long couch sits with its back to the white wall. A glass coffee table stands before it, with two more recliners that match the couch on the other side of it. We have a living room, but this is more of the work-room-slash-relaxation-room.
I’ve always loved it down here. Always, until the night my dad brought that woman home. He brought her down here. I heard him come in in the middle of the day on a Saturday with her. I snuck down to where I could hear them, and he was talking about going down to his office to “work,” as if he was paranoid about someone listening or worried about someone disturbing him.
Even after that event, I still came down here to think. I don’t understand why; it seems like I would abhor this room because of it. But maybe it’s because it helps me try to understand my father, even if it doesn’t really do that. Maybe it helps me figure out why he does what he does. Why he brought home that strange woman that day.
The day I learned my dad’s secret, four months ago.
3. Masks
“Are you not hungry, Amabel?” My dad asks as he sits down at the table. He’s obviously in a great mood, and obviously not because of anyone in this house.
I shake my head and pull my knees to my chest. The food looks delicious, but it makes my stomach churn. I can’t tell if it’s because I’m sick, or if it’s because my family makes me sick.
“Your mother worked hard on it,” he says as he reaches for my moms and brothers hands to pray.