Dog Medicine by Julie Barton Page B

building.
    Being home wore on me. One day, when the feelings took over, I took a knife from the butcher block, ran to the basement and pressed the blade into my skin until I felt pain. That same day, my mother made me come to a birthday dinner for Clay at a fancy restaurant. She was scared to leave me alone, so I was forced to sit, looking disheveled, with Clay and his latest girlfriend as my dad and brother made jokes that struck me as wildly sexist and rude. On the way home from that restaurant, I tried to jump out of my dad’s car while he sped along the freeway at 70 miles an hour.
    The next day, my mother made my first-ever appointment with a therapist. I went with curious reluctance to her office, sat down in a depressing brown room and heard, for the first time, a professional say, “Your parents tell me that they’re worried about you. Can you imagine why that might be?” I explained my circumstances, then couldn’t stand listening to the therapist say in a sickly sweet tone, “An older brother is supposed to protect his younger sister. He’s supposed to help her, teach her, be kind to her.”
    â€œOn TV, maybe,” I scoffed. “Whatever. All siblings fight.”
    â€œYes, but not like this, they don’t. Not like this,” her tone shifted and I wondered if I’d exaggerated the stories.
    â€œJulie, you have every right to tell your brother that what he’s done to you has affected you.”
    â€œSure, but you don’t know what he’ll do if I confront him,” I said.
    â€œDo you mean that he’ll harm you if you bring up the fact that he hurt you both physically and emotionally when you were a young child?” Her nostrils flared in outrage.
    â€œNo. No,” I said, laughing a little. This was getting ridiculous.
    â€œI doubt he realizes how his treatment affected you,” she said. “He needs to know, for his own sake.”
    â€œWhy?” I asked.
    â€œHe’s got to know how you feel, that he hurt you, that his treatment was intolerable. That he can’t go around treating people with such disregard.”
    â€œI would never say that to him,” I said. “Intolerable. He would laugh in my face. Besides, he’s not awful to everyone. Just me.”
    â€œJulie, you need to remember this: His treatment of you has nothing to do with you,” she said, so sure of herself.
    What? It had everything to do with me. He really hated me, which in turn, made me hate myself. He was my older brother, my role model, the male with whom I spent most of my waking hours. And he hated me. This was what I knew, deeply, at my core. How was I supposed to learn that I was anything other than what he told me? Asking me to stray from the knowledge that he hated me would be like asking a baby born in zero gravity to walk. No matter what inflated praise my father infrequently showered upon me, or how often my mother made me a nice meal, I wanted, above all, for Clay to love me. Instead, he hit me, insulted me, knocked my door down, stepped on my head, argued with me, then pushed me to the ground until I submitted, and this left me dead inside.
    Over three sessions, my therapist convinced me to confront him. I rehearsed what I would say. I practiced in the car and in the shower. That weekend, when he stopped home for a visit, I asked him if I could speak to him alone in my bedroom. This itself wasunusual. We both acted nonchalant, though we knew this was something we did not do—talk.
    I sat on my bed and waited for him to come to my room. He arrived eating chips, a handful cupped to his stomach. “I’ve been talking with my therapist,” I said, shaking slightly, squeezing my flattened, sweaty palms together. “And I want to tell you that the way you treated me over the years has really hurt me and she says it even qualifies as abuse. Like, sibling abuse,” I said. Looking back, I don’t know what I was