Diane was lounging about on the couch, stressed and fatigued from her new job's trenuous tasks. She was a receptionist for a well-respected law firm in town. These past few weeks she was working her fingers to the bloody bone, trying to get back into the swing of things; she hadn't worked in 5 years. Engrossed in the latest Danielle Steel's novel, she lifted the tension off her eyes and head by leaning back on the sea green couch, the golden sun basking on her dark motique. Her eyes popped open; running to the front yard like energetic children. Her face became a clown's, her eyes dancing to their own drum as she saw McKenzie walking closer to the house. She was strolling with a girl Diane had never seen before. She prowled up on the couch on her knees, looking quzzatively to the left at the two girls holding hands. Her gaze followed the girls closer and closer to the house like radar, ready to strike at a commander's instruction.

Diane's mouth dropped like an anvil in an infamous Wile E. Coyote sceme. The two girl's lips touch for a few painstaking seconds, then parted with replacing smiles. The dark-haired girl went on her way as McKenzie jogged up the brick pathway to the house under close observation. Her hair bounced without control at her chin, thrusting the door open and slamming it with just as much potency. The sardonic clammer that jolted through the house was nothing compared to the wrath Diane was about to unleash on her unsuspecting victum.

McKenzie dropped her backpack by the coat rack and turned to the right into the livingroom. She slowly paused, an utterly frightened expression plastering her face, glimpsing at her mother's enraged grimace and throbbing temples.

"What was that?" Diane asked rather becalmly, dropping the thick book from her hand onto the coffee table with a clattering thump.

McKenzie was hesitant to answer, trying to pick the right words so her mother wouldn't wind off on a raging, irrelevent tangent that she was famous for. "Can we talk about this rationaly?" McKenzie asked with jittery composure, cautiously stepping to her time bomb of a mother.

"Rationaly?!" her mother shrilled, catching sight of a conserned Lea proceeding down the stairs, clutching her math text book close to her chest. "Follow me," she hushly demanded, bulldozing through the house and to the backyard. 'Here we go again,' McKenzie dredded, laggardly weaving behind her enranged mother.

As soon as the back door was shut, Diane began thrashing McKenzie with a verbal assault. "What do you think you're doing?!" she demanded, staring down at McKenzie, treating her as if she was still a child.

"Now you ask me that?" McKenzie asked, fear slightly hindering her voice's potential power, backing away from her mother slightly, her blue Sketchers sneakers squeaking with fright against the slick patio's surface. "Where have you been the last 5 years?"

"Don't get off the subject," Diane warned, fire flairing up in her pupils, red inching steadily on her heated face, "Why did you kiss that girl?!" Before McKenzie could speak, Diane jumped to a radical conclusion, taking a side-step to the picnic table and plummeting her fists violently on it, "Is this my punishment for leaving Rob? God, you kids..."

"Mom!" she screamed in protest, fustration streaming through her body, misconstruing what she planned to say. "I wanted to leave just as bad as you, if not more. Not every thing is about you! Can't you just leave me be? Maybe I have romantic feelings for her..."

"You don't know the first thing about love," Diane told her in a low tone, folding her arms agressively across her chest, wrinkling the delicate material of her periwinkle long-sleeved blouse. Her eyelids lowered into small, tight slits, her pupils hard to conceive under her anger. "You're not even 15!"

"You're the one to talk!" McKenzie snapped back, her sharp tounge trying its best to fend her mother's undying, nasty tone. She received a quick, afflictive slap stinging across the left side of her face. McKenzie staggered back, stunned by poison leaking from her mother's touch; Her mother had never hit her before. She rubbed at her cheek gently, not willing to let her mother see the grief leak from her eyes. Diane grabbed at her heart and her face sank faster than the Titanic, regretting her action before she thought it through. She approached McKenzie cautiously, gawking at the red, ugly mark of rage tattooed on McKenzie's face.

"What are you going to do now, Huh, Mom?" McKenzie cried, fear still strickening her from looking her mother in the eye, a couple of tears dropping onto the rising mountain of agony. "Ground me? Take me out of school to teach me a lesson? Oh no, 'cause your abuse and ignorance will land on deaf ears! I was willing to talk to you about this, I was willing to act mature about this matter, to make you not understand, but at least accept my POV, but you have to be the bigger woman and hit your daughter." McKenzie's words clawed viciously at her mother's heart, affliction resembling the stabs and prickles of knives and needles sparking through her heart and then pumping through her insignificant body, soon only worthless veins and fleshy muscle would remain intact. Her mother backed away as if in slow motion to the house, the vision she portrayed of her perfect daughter crashing around her like trees in a hopeless struggle against the winds of a surging storm.

"I've been gay for a year and 1/2, a year and 1/2! You drowned yourself in chores and committees to not notice me, not praise me, not love me. My friends cared for me, those who I felt something for and those who I didn't, they acknowledged me. Heidi, Racheal, Mandy, yep, all those girls who slept over, who baked cookies with me, who went to my award ceremonies for school, it was them who loved me, not you..."

"They transformed you," her mother meekly accused, her voice barely flying over a whisper, still wrapped in a sheet of shock, but still able to keep her body from failing on her and hitting the floor.

"No," McKenzie firmly retorted, walking over to take a seat on the picnic table bench, her eyes levetating her mother's. Diane couldn't look at them; the eyes are the windows to the soul and McKenzie's were dark and unpenetratable because of their past. McKenzie wanted to have her feel what it was like to be gawked at for what she believed in, "They showed me what love was, what it felt like. You did nothing, nothing to make me feel like you adored me, loved me. It's like when Dad left, you felt no reason to give you love out. You know who I always used to get Valentine's day cards from, huh?"

"No," Diane replied, the reality of the things she'd done wrong bombarding her mind with inflicting penetration, making her wish she could turn back time.

"It was Jesse," McKenzie simply informed her, raising her shoulders and eyebrows at the thought of it, her eyes lost in the intricet grain weaving on the wooden picnic table. She ran her fingers around the waves of grain, her tone transformed from harsh and objective to soft and reminiscent, "He was the only one who cared, the only one to make an effort. My spirit died when we left here, and ventured downhill from there into the firey, freezing pit of incomprehensible dispair. Thank you, Mom. Thank you."

McKenzie rose from her seat and stomped passed her mother, rage and satisfaction filling like a balloon in her chest. Her heavy feet resembled a massive stampede until she reached the patio door. She opened it and then bashed it close, loosening the secure nails and shutters fastened strongly to the house that lasted through storms much more destructive than this one. Diane was left alone with no one to love her, the light whistling of springtime birds the only assurance of life in her bleak, shattered world.