Scoring My Way Out
Language: en
From the time I was seven years old, my mother ran our lives on a ledger. Ten points for straight A’s. Three points for cooking dinner. Minus five for answering back or making our parents sigh. Whoever reached one hundred points first earned a birthday wish—anything we wanted. For ten long years, I never slept past six in the morning. I never let Mom scrub a single greasy skillet. On my eighteenth birthday, my score stood at ninety-nine. My younger sister, Jenny, had forty-three. Then, without warning, Mom wiped my slate clean. Her reason? That morning, I hadn’t knocked on Jenny’s door to…