I’ve been vomited on twice tonight.

She’s not been interested in eating today, but her appetite’s been declining for weeks. So I gently pushed it, but ultimately let her decide what and when to eat.

Isobel started as we were leaving Starbucks to visit the movie store. I didn’t notice until we were most of the way there, then looked to her snack tray to see liquid sloshing around. But she had a sippy cup, so, you know, it could have only come from one place. So we turned around, after pouring the snack tray on the ground. (Seriously, Vancouver may be clean, but you are nearly guaranteed to see vomit on the street at some point during a weekend)

Starbucks was a lot closer than home and she needed some serious cleaning up. She silently lost about a litre of stuff. All over her new dress and tights and coat and it even went through the coat to her hoodie underneath. Rolling down the ramp at Starbucks is when I saw where it all started. There was a trail.

She pukes like her mommy - silent, but deadly.

So 20 minutes of rinsing out coats and jackets and she’s all hyped up as usual and rockin some bare legs and runners and I have to carry her home cuz the stroller is um. Out of commission.

She pukes like her mommy - voluminously.

Home and then she’s hungry. She’s asking for some dessert tofu and I’m like NFW, we are not trying a soy-based food experiment, now. How about a banana? Two bites and she was done, but wanted some water. Obliged. Five ounces of water later, she wanted some yogurt. Well, healthy bacteria and all, I give in after trying to talk her into toast. 20 minutes later, she’s finished about 3 tablespoons and we’re getting her cleaned for bedtime.

Then she lost it in the kitchen. Twice. Then she was scared and so backed away, screaming, causing her to lose it in the bathroom. Then she felt better. So! Another clean up on aisle everything.

She pukes like her mommy - multiple times, till dry heaving.

We lie down and watch a bit of a movie in the bedroom after a dose of tylenol. Drink a bit more water and then, oh, what’s that? She loses it a few more times, on my bed, her favourite blanket and the second pair of pjs. That’s when I decided to close the window and strip her down to a diaper. Less laundry that way.

I explain to her that she needs some rest, after cleaning her up (and my bed) again. I let her have a couple of sips of water, cuz I’m seeing a pattern here - something goes in, a lot comes out. And, well, my kid never vomits. So um, it’s disconcerting.

She pukes like her mommy - infrequently, but hardcore.

I leave her for a bit. But she wants DUCE and she is not afraid to scream her words and I feel as if I’m starving her or something. So I go back and hold her and allow her some water and she gulps down about four ounces. And she starts to rest, but then I got the vomit shower. And just as I’m holding back from returning the favour to her, it happens again.

All over my last clean bra and pair of jeans. More clean up. This is a whole load of laundry creatin’ night.

Then I had to rock her to sleep. Then I laid her down and she started to freak but rolled into froggy position and is now snoring. I am seriously kinda worried about her asphyxiating. Cuz like I said, she never pukes. We’re both newbies when it comes to the experience.

She pukes just like her mommy - exhaustively.

Now, I have to mop three rooms, give her stroller a shower after dragging it up three flights of stairs and then shower myself off. The laundry? It’ll have to wait til tomorrow.

She had always been this tiny thing that people needed to touch. Even before she became small to the average eye, inside, where secret thoughts festered, she was miniscule. Women would come to sit at her yellow formica table to drink cup after cup of dark coffee from chipped mugs, happy to share their lives and breath with her father, happy to belong for just a moment in his world because his world was a sheltered, lonely place that no one was often allowed trespass to.

These girls would be enraptured that he would fill their mug at one time and then another, tell them they needed to leave him alone and that was how they found the secret passage into his life. They found his daughter, sitting in a corner, reading memoirs of Rodin and being a silent observer. They were jealous of his affection for her, something hard and fast and untouchable. Something they could never have priority over, yet something so unquantifiable as to be a ghost, never fully showing it’s presence in plain sight but knocking over papers in the night.

This man and his child, they were partners in crime because the women would come and want to love him and he wasn’t available for that but would provide company until his patience waned. That’s when their affection would turn to her and they’d stroke her hair and call her their little girl. She let them pretend that they were her everything, because really she had nothing.

Everyone wanted to touch her. And she would pay them for their affection with lies and hugs and help them with their math homework.

Inside, she was the oldest girl in the class of sixth graders, seemingly caught up in the usual drama of who wore Guess jeans and had their period. Which boys were cute and who had a boyfriend. By twelve, she was so far apart from these children as to think them her children. They needed to be coddled and have their egos fed, to know that they were the kings of seventh grade and that kissing with tongues made them adult.

A girl, the ruler of all by default of beauty and money, was the first to be known as hot. Brooke didn’t wear Guess jeans, she wore baggy Calvin Kleins that emphasized her prepubescent hips and the breasts that weren’t large and vulgar, but weren’t as flat as a wall either. Brooke was perfect in the eyes of seventh grade and she was going out with Spencer.

The child would arrive in class after a weekend of lies, being pawed for and she’d be sick to the bones from the weekend’s end and everything that meant left with it. And she’d stare at Brooke, this perfect little badass that knew the world revolved around her. She wished she was Brooke, with the innocent fumblings and first sips of beer and 16-hole Doc Martens. Brooke was as simple as she wished life could be.

And while Brooke was living this perfect existance with her Spencer and hand holding and kissing when teachers weren’t looking but children were, the girl wanted Spencer to stop calling her at 10 o’clock. She regretted Spencer knowing about her double life and the reason she didn’t wear sandles. She regretted letting him into her mind even once, because then all he wanted was to touch her, just like everyone else.

And once she let him, it cascaded into a flurry of untold truths and challenges and left him the only of their class to die by his own hand.