What teen girls are made of

"Bloody Red Heart" by Emma Considine, 16

The separated family is a seemingly taboo topic, morally wrong. But look around, everyone's doing it, it's a fucking fad! Take my family for instance. It is the reason for lost earrings, homework assignments left unfinished because the textbook is at Dad's, and aching legs due to walking from one cramped house to another five times a day. My separated family wouldn't function without 20 phone calls a day, concerning Geico, school tuition, and what Emma wants for Christmas. It smells like stress and is the reason for my unhappy elementary school years. My expensive family, my impractical family, my idiotic family, my depressed family, my dysfunctional family, my embarrassing family.

The basic separation comes with the following accessories: two rent checks, a miserable 10-year-old, a nosy babysitter, unsigned divorce papers, lots and lots of phones (three cell, four cordless), one pissed-off wife, cat food, adultery, one lonely husband, eight confusing Thanksgivings and counting, two guilty parents, a move, a car, a slamming door, a mouth.

The daughter of separated parents is not easy to spot. She can wear expensive jeans and speak English, just like her friends whose parents live under the same roof. Oddly enough, she looks like a regular 16-year-old. Her epidermis is still showing, and she has a functioning bloody red heart. However, according to statistics, she may not be able to use it as well as some of her friends.

Getting out of the car, he picked me up and put me on his shoulders like I'd begged him to. In my hands was a book on Helen Keller. Even though I was only 4, I loved reading more than anything else. That and when my parents got along.

"Be careful," she warned, lifting grocery bags out of the trunk.

Almost as if in a demented sitcom, he tripped on a stone just as she said it. He fell slowly, landing on his knees and scraping them on the pavement, not able to make his collapse graceful because he was holding so tightly onto my legs. I remember starting to cry, not because I was traumatized or hurt, but because he was bleeding on his hands and knees.

She rushed over. "I told you to be careful!" she hissed at him.

Then she grabbed my hand and opened the door to the house. "Are you OK, sweetie?" she asked. I could hardly look at her. She'd left him outside bleeding on the ground, when it was obvious that I was fine.

"Stop!" I cried and pushed away from her, running.

"Always going to daddy," she said, rolling her eyes. "Never listening to me."

The separated family has many uses. It's a way to get more presents, sneak out of the house, guilt-trip parents, become 40 dollars richer, get out of a homework assignment, and have a good cry. The separated family is all over the nation, in every 7-Eleven, public school, volleyball tournament and perfume store.

It splits up friends, ruins Christmas, and makes money tight. People sympathize, and the occasional friend wishes that her parents were divorced too. No she doesn't. It takes weeks, months, years to get over the fact that you will never have a family that's intact again. Your mom is never going to marry some architect with five kids and start her own little Brady Bunch, and even if she did, you wouldn't be fine with it. You'd cry. You'd ditch the wedding. You'd be sent to a therapist.

Every divorced family contains at least three brains. Handy, but two of those brains are the reason you can't hire a tutor for 200 dollars a session. (Your parents have to pay twice the rent now.) Those brains ruined second, third and fourth grades. Those brains agree on the Bush administration, the science department at your school and cats. Those brains don't agree on what's for dinner, who's going to park the car, and my grandpa's cancer. One has to outweigh the other.

That's why the third brain is so sad, why it feels so cut off. Its parents screwed it over. Some doctors did a lot of tests and determined that brains with divorced parents face a 70 percent greater chance of having a failed relationship when they grow up. It doesn't make sense. It was eight years ago. The times they are a-changin'. How will my mom's stupid mistakes account for my future? What a bitch.

Next page: "The Internet isn't stuffed full of seedy 60-year-old perverts but people like me, who live wherever, doesn't matter, posting adamantly about favorite bands, arguing video game nuances"