"You look cheap."

My mother eyed me up and down as I entered the dimly lit kitchen. It was two o'clock in the morning and I hadn't expected her to be awake. Given her habits, she was usually out cold by eleven, but tonight she sat hunched over at the kitchen table, a cigarette hanging from her lips, her right hand wrapped around a half-empty highball glass filled with what must have been straight vodka. The way she slurred her words made it obvious that the clear liquid wasn't water.

"How are you even awake?" I mumbled. I wasn't in the mood to fight. I had only been home from school for two days, and had gone out earlier so that I didn’t have to be there. Anything to keep me out of that house and away from her. Unfortunately, since I had been sent away to a boarding school in another state when I was twelve, I didn't have a single friend in the area. I didn’t even know how many of my grade school friends lived in the neighborhood anymore.

So I ended up driving around on back roads for hours, listening to the radio and thinking about what I was going to do now that I was back in her house. But now I was tired and ready for bed, and of course my drunken bitch of a mother wanted to start a fight with me.

This was, in fact, the house I grew up in, but it didn’t feel like a home to me anymore. Not after everything that had happened in it. After the way she treated me. I didn't know how I was going to survive in this house with her now that I’d graduated from school and had nowhere to go.

I hadn't applied to college at all. I knew it was stupid but I really didn’t see the point. I didn’t have the money for tuition and I knew she wasn’t going to pay for my school anymore. The only reason she paid for the boarding school was because she wanted me out of the house, and now that I was eighteen I was sure she didn’t see me as her responsibility anymore.

My plan for now was to try and avoid the house as much as possible until I figured something out, which was what I had attempted to do tonight. Only now the crazy bitch was awake when she shouldn't have been. Sometimes I wished she would just keel over, but I knew that wasn't likely to happen anytime soon. She’d had me when she was really young—barely eighteen—so she was still considered young. Some people even said we looked like sisters, which pretty much made me want to vomit.

"What did you say?" She slurred at me, and then rose unsteadily to her feet. She ambled toward me and I looked at her with disgust, trying unsuccessfully to avoid her nasty alcohol-saturated breath.

"Don't look at me like that you little bitch." She threw her drink in my face with an ugly sneer. "And get rid of that cheap, slutty dress. You embarrass me, you little fucking whore."

She stumbled back to the table and fell into her chair, then filled her glass up again, spilling more on the table than she got into the wide mouthed tumbler. When she finally lifted her head up again she stared right at me with bloodshot eyes and heavily drooping lids. I noticed an open bottle of sleeping pills in front of her. When she saw what I was looking at she smiled at me lazily, almost daring me to stand up to her.

“What the fuck are you looking at?”

“Not much,” I said, looking down at the drips of vodka on the floor that had accumulated around my feet.

When I was a kid my friends all told me how beautiful my mother was. Everyone did. She was always the center of attention at any gathering and was the life of every party. They all thought she was perfect. But that’s because they didn’t know her like I did.

My mother was incredibly beautiful, or at least she could have been if she weren't so awful. She had thick blond hair, green eyes, and a full mouth—which I also had. People always said that I looked just like her. As much as I hated to admit it, I knew I was a spitting image of my mother—at least physically. But when I looked in the mirror I didn’t see it. I didn’t think we looked alike at all because what I saw when I looked at her was a wretched bitch who had turned her back on her only daughter. What I saw was a pathetic, addicted mess.

Alcohol and tranquilizers had taken over her life in the last eight years or so, and I could see that her age was slowly but surely making itself known. She was incredibly vain, though, and even though she took the compliments about us looking almost identical, I could tell she didn’t like it. She didn’t like the idea that I was beautiful too and was almost twenty years younger than her.

Ever since I had blossomed after puberty, some of my mother’s friends would even say that her daughter’s beauty had surpassed hers. Even my father would say it to her face, which was something that caused long screaming matches behind the closed door of their bedroom that went on until the early hours of the morning.

But when I had gone to my mother, crying and unable to bear the pain after my father had let it be known to me just how much he preferred me to his own wife, she had flown into a rage. But not at him—at me. She slapped me across the face and dragged me by my hair to my room and told me I was a filthy slut and a liar before locking me inside. The next day, she had my bags packed and I was sent away to an all-girls school across the country.

They divorced not long after that, but from that point forward she always seemed to view me as her competition. Every time I came home for the holidays, she made sure to have noisy, boisterous sex with whoever she had her claws dug into at that particular time.

I always regretted having come home for Christmas and summer breaks, but seeing her now in her drunken stupor, I loathed being in the same room with her.

“Why don’t you get out of here and leave me alone?” She downed her drink in one swallow and threw her head back in some kind of mock victory.

I narrowed my eyes into slits and glared at her. I could feel myself losing it, hatred bubbling out of every pore. "Fuck you!" I screamed. I felt the heat of rage rushing to my face. "I fucking hate you!" I screamed at the top of my lungs, glaring at my mother with disgust.

"Feeling's mutual, little girl," she cackled, putting out her cigarette on a plate of barely touched food. "Oh wait, you're not a little girl anymore, are you? Last I checked, I gave birth to you eighteen years ago. You're an adult now, so how about you get the fuck out of my house? Maybe you can find a man to sponge off of, because I am done supporting you."

"Supporting me?" I spat. "You have never fucking supported me! You call being a jealous bitch and shipping me off to boarding school support? You call bringing home random men and fucking them in front of me support? You're a fucking joke. An old, haggard fucking joke. Even with me gone, you still couldn't keep a man happy. You’re here all alone in this huge, depressing house with no one but yourself to drink with.” I was on a roll now, unable to control the words that were coming out of my mouth even though I knew that this was going to end very badly. It always did.

She looked almost hurt for a moment but then her eyes narrowed again and her mouth tightened up into a smirk. "You don't know what you are talking about, and you'd best watch your pretty little mouth,” she snarled. "I have given up so much for you, and this is how you treat me? I don’t need to justify anything to you, but I’ll have you know that there are plenty of men who spend time here with me. Plenty.”

“Oh, do you mean the doctor you bribe with sex so he will prescribe your damned drugs?” I asked incredulously. “The man you fuck so that you can get your fix? And you call me a manipulative slut? You're the one who’s taking advantage of someone to get exactly what you want out of him when it’s convenient for you.”

She stared at me for a moment, then looked down at the floor without saying anything.

“You didn't think I knew about that, did you, Mommy? I’ve known about you taking advantage of Dr. Max for a long time.“

I couldn’t help but know. I’d secretly been in love with him since the first time I saw them together. It was years after I’d been sent away to school and my father left. My mother had no idea, but I saw the two of them together, and I’ll never forget it.

Max was really the one I wanted to see when I came home for visits, but she rarely let me into the same room as him. I was sure she was afraid that I would steal him away from her. I hated her for keeping him from me and I hated the way she treated him. But I especially hated her for possessing the one man that I would practically kill for.

She took a step forward and slapped me hard across the face, her open palm leaving a stinging sensation that lasted long after the physical contact had ceased. But I was used to that feeling. The memory of the day that I ran to her, needing my mother’s love and protection and getting nothing but pain in return was what I had come to expect from her.

It all came flooding back into my mind, as if I were reliving that day all over again. The day that my mother betrayed me, the day that she not only didn't stand up for me, but stood against me, making it clear that she viewed me as her competition rather than her child.

I had no idea what I was expecting from her now, though. She had never been a mother to me. And even though it stung, her blow didn't even faze me. I went on, “You think hitting me makes you a better person? Really? Do you realize that everyone leaves you because you're just a filthy fucking liar. Your whole life is a lie. This act you put on for them? It isn’t you! You don’t show the real you to anyone but me! You’re a narcissist and a fucking sociopath! And you're going to die a lonely, ugly old woman! Go ahead and kick me out! I'm not about to stay under the same roof as you anyway! You're nothing to me. Fucking nothing!" I could hear the words that came screaming out of me. I could hear how childish they sounded, and I knew she couldn’t care less. But it felt almost cathartic, finally telling her how I felt—saying the words that I had wanted to for years, but had kept mostly bottled up inside.

I wanted her to know that I knew all about the manipulative little games she played with everyone in her life. All the bullshit she always thought she had gotten away with. Maybe they all did believe her lies, but I knew who she was. She called me a liar and a manipulator, but if I was, I had learned everything I knew from from the expert.

She stared at me, stunned. “I don’t need this!“ She screamed at me, completely irrational now. "Does seeing me like this make you fucking happy?" She grabbed a little brown bottle from the table and poured a few pills into her hand, popping them into her mouth and washing them down with a swig straight from the vodka bottle. “I should have had a goddamned abortion.”

She steadied herself, shaking the pill bottle in my face like a mad woman. "I love that man and he loves me and there’s nothing you can do to take that away from me! I’m not going to let you take him away from me!” she screeched. She pointed her finger right in my face. "You're just jealous that you couldn't steal him from me, too." Her face took on an even darker look—one that always betrayed the amount of drugs and alcohol she had swimming around in her blood stream.

The fact that I was standing in the kitchen at 2 a.m.—soaked in the booze she had thrown on me, a stinging handprint across my face, and having to listen to threats she screamed at me like a mad woman—made my blood boil. In that moment, I felt like I was someone else. I was no longer the helpless child, the little girl that wanted mommy to love her. In that moment, I was overtaken by sheer rage.

A flood of memories came rushing back into my mind. The awful things she had said and done to me over the years all happening again—simultaneously in my mind, like images piling on top of each other—until all I could see was the pain and the loneliness and the never-ending manipulation and lies that were the only legacy she was capable of giving me. Even though I was right there in the kitchen—my physical body standing there locked in hell with this woman who had given me a life that I now wanted so desperately out of—in my mind I went somewhere else. I wanted to throw her down onto the ground and kick the shit out of her. I wanted to make her hurt every bit as much as she had made me hurt all my life.

But I didn’t. I sucked it all up once again. I turned and walked away from her, making my way through the dark living room until I found the smoothly carved bannister of the stairway. Although I didn't quite know what I was going to do, I couldn't stand to be in her presence any longer. When we got like this there was no calming down for days. Besides, she had just kicked me out of the house. I wasn’t wanted there. I didn’t know where I was going to go but I had to get out.

Anywhere but here, I thought. I threw open my bedroom door, picked up the suitcase that was still half packed with school uniforms, and dumped them onto the floor. I furiously kicked the heap of clothes out of my way, pulling the few normal outfits that I owned off of their hangers and shoving them into the suitcase. The panic that I had nowhere to actually go—the fact that I didn’t have many friends nearby and hadn’t for years—was dawning on me, but I had no choice at this point. My chest felt like it was going to cave in on me, making it difficult to breathe.

When I got everything into my suitcase I threw open my bedroom door, and there stood my mother wearing her classy silk robe—the wrinkles on her face suddenly accentuated by the shadows in the poorly lit hall outside my room. I pushed past her, no energy left for another screaming match.

As I passed her she actually called after me, her voice hoarse from all the yelling we had done downstairs.  For a split second, I thought maybe she was going to apologize, that the time had finally come when she realized what a shitty mother she had been, and was ready to make amends.

"Emily, dear …” she said quietly to my back. I didn't turn around at first, I just kept walking toward the stairs.

I heard her footsteps behind me. She was following me. A part of my mind conjured a fantasy, a world where when I reached the top of the stairs I would turn around and I would have a real mom. One that would wrap me in her arms and tell me she was sorry, and that I was beautiful, and that she would always protect me. She would beg me not to venture out into an unfamiliar world in the middle of the night, but to stay here where I had a home, where I was loved.

Tears welled in my eyes. I wanted so badly for her to stop me. To put her arms around me and ask me to stay. When I reached the top of the stairs, she was right behind me. I could feel her presence and hear her breath in my ear as we both stood at the top of the stairwell—me with my hastily packed suitcase in one hand and her with that damned glass of vodka in hers.

"Emily ..." she said again, quietly.

"What?" I asked, more exasperated than anything. I turned to look at her, hoping for just a shred of decency. I was willing to give her one last chance.

"Give me your house key," she said sweetly, flashing me a smug, boozy grin. "I don't want to see your face in my house again."

I set down my suitcase, and stared her in the eye. "Fuck you," I nearly whispered, calmly and quietly with tears streaming down my cheeks.