When Corinne was in grade school, her school had “contracts” for behavior. Each student received a blank contract at the beginning of the week with a row for each class. If they misbehaved or weren’t prepared for class in some way, they received a check on the contract. Forgot to bring your supplies? ☑️ Talked too much in class? ☑️ Didn’t do your class work? ☑️

The idea behind the contracts was to encourage good behavior by discouraging bad behavior, to ensure that kids think about what they have to bring from one class to another, to teach accountability, to teach respect for the rules. And I think a lot of grade schools have something similar even if they call it something different.

By the time Corinne was in second grade, she hadn’t yet received a check on her contract (notice I said yet 😉). One afternoon, her teacher called me to let me know that Corinne had been crying in class and that it was the second time in about a week. The first time, the teacher knew that Dennis’s cousin had been visiting, and Corinne mentioned that he had left the day before. The teacher figured Corinne was just sad that he had left. The second time, she couldn’t let it go and decided to call me to let me know.

I told Dennis that I was going to pick up Corinne from school that day and take her for ice cream to see if I could get her to tell me what was going on. (Clearly, I’m not above bribery.) As we sat eating our ice cream, I asked Corinne if everything was ok at school. She said it was. I mentioned the call from her teacher, and she tried to play it off that she hadn’t been sleeping very well and was just tired. And then I said the magic words: “You know you can tell me anything, right? I won’t be mad.”

She double-checked. “Really?” When I nodded, she started to cry.

About two months prior, the class had been told to sit in a circle on the floor. Corinne had a popper toy, which she shouldn’t have been playing with during class, that “popped” out of her hand while the teacher wasn’t looking. Corinne grabbed it pretty quickly, but one of the girls in her class took notice. She threatened to tell so that Corinne would get a check on her contract. She didn’t tell, but the threat was out there.

Later in the day, while they were in P.E. class, this particular girl wanted Corinne to play with her. Corinne didn’t want to, but the girl told Corinne again that she would tell, so Corinne played with her. It never occurred to Corinne that there was nothing to tell by this point, that the incident was over. She just knew that she had never received a check on her contract, and she didn’t want one.

For two months, this girl would tell Corinne she was going to get her in trouble so she would get a check on her contract if Corinne didn’t do what she wanted. She would tell Corinne to watch and then raise her hand but put it down quickly when the teacher looked at her, or she would ask to go to the bathroom. Corinne felt backed into a corner because this girl knew about the popper toy. At nine years old, she was being emotionally blackmailed over checks on a behavior contract.

The next day, I talked with the teacher, who talked with the other girl. Corinne never had to sit near her again and certainly didn’t have to play with her. She also understood that she shouldn’t be playing with toys in class…and that she should talk to an adult if anything like that ever happened again.

Corinne eventually did get a check on her contract for talking during an assembly. She said that the boy next to her kept trying to talk to her, and she finally responded to tell him to stop talking to her. They both got checks on their contracts, and she was so mad that she got in trouble when she was just telling him to be quiet. (As she read this post over, she said, “I’m still mad about it! That kid was so annoying!”) I explained to her that it’s almost never the first child who gets caught. The first talker draws the attention of the teacher to wherever the talking is coming from. The second talker is the one the teacher actually catches talking.

She tried to rationalize it because she was asking him to stop talking. I told her she could have ignored him. She could have raised her hand and asked the teacher to tell the boy to stop talking to her. But this was a true life lesson, which I have repeated many times since then: You are responsible for you. Never put yourself into a position where someone else’s actions can get you into trouble.

So the talking was the first check, but it wasn’t her last. She got another one a couple years later (she’s still mad about this one too🤣) for forgetting a book in her homeroom and she had to go back for it. Her homeroom teacher gave her a check for being unprepared and for disrupting the class. Corinne insisted to me that the class hadn’t started yet because they had just lined up in the hall and that it wasn’t even the teacher for the class she was going to. That teacher had given her permission to go back in for her book. I told her it didn’t really matter. At the end of the day, she forgot her book when she left her homeroom. Her homeroom teacher could have let it go, but she didn’t have to. She wasn’t wrong for giving Corinne a check because she did leave class unprepared.

Now that Corinne is in high school, she doesn’t get in trouble for talking when she shouldn’t. She participates in class. And more often than not, she comes prepared. On the rare occasions that she does forget something, I let her make the decision whether she’s going to be late for school or live without it for the day. That’s the accountability part of growing up.

Now if I could just get her to actually hear her alarm when it goes off in the morning….

I don’t know whatever happened to the girl that threatened to get Corinne in trouble in second grade, and I have never been able to remember her name. (That’s probably a good thing.) But it makes me wonder what becomes of a girl who can be that manipulative in second grade. Does she use her power for good or evil when she gets older?

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Book Review

⭐⭐
2 Stars for Half Sisters by Virginia Franken

269 pages
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Publication Date: June 21, 2022
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing.

Publisher’s Description

After being gone for two decades, Maddy’s half-sister, Emily, is back in town to settle their late father’s estate. Emily’s not the troubled girl Maddy remembers from their volatile childhood. Apparently, all is well. It can’t possibly matter anymore that Maddy married Emily’s first love, but the pictures Maddy finds on her husband’s phone tell a different story. Suspicions of an affair are hard to ignore.

Then again, Maddy hasn’t been herself lately. She’s increasingly confused. She’s losing items that are precious to her. She forgets where she’s going. The line between what’s real and unreal has become a blur. Even the damning photos have disappeared. Though her state of mind starts to become everyone’s cause for concern, Maddy refuses to believe she’s losing her grip on reality. But the one thing she can’t deny is the secret from the past that rewrote all their lives ― a secret that’s ready to come out.

************

Main Characters:

• Maddy – 34 years old, a dance teacher, married to childhood friend Joseph, living in the home she grew up in, left to her and her half-sister by her parents
• Joseph – late 30s, works in music licensing, has struggled in the current market, Emily was his first love
• Bee – Maddy’s best friend since they were five, Joseph’s sister
• Emily – Maddy’s half-sister on their dad’s side, came to live with Maddy’s family as a teenager soon after her mother died
• Greg – Joseph’s oldest and best friend, works as a firefighter, has always had a thing for Maddy

     

I feel a little like Maddy when she first found out she had a half-sister. This book sounded exciting and I started out liking it, but I ended up not really liking it at all.

As a child, Maddy lives in Myrtlebury, California, a relatively small town outside of Los Angeles. She has known her best friend Bee and Bee’s older brother Joseph since she and Bee were five years old. When Maddy is in her pre-teen years, Emily comes to live with them because her mother died and her uncle was abusive.

Emily’s age is never disclosed, but we know she’s a few years older than Maddy because she and Joseph are close in age. (In the present day in the book, Maddy is 34 and Joseph is “not yet 40,” so we can assume probably around 39.) My guess is that Emily is about 14 when she comes to live with Maddy’s family, and having a talkative, excitable, nine-ish sister is annoying at best.

Maddy’s parents try to shield her from Emily’s abuse injuries, so they tell Maddy to leave Emily alone. Being an excited younger sister, Maddy sneaks into Emily’s room after three days. As Maddy becomes increasingly annoying, Emily lashes out, and Maddy bumps the dresser but isn’t badly hurt. When Maddy’s mom sides with Emily, the stage is set for Maddy to start disliking Emily instead of enjoying having her around.

Fast forward to the present day, Maddy’s parents have both died—her mother from dementia and her father just a couple of years ago—and the family home has been left to both Maddy and Emily. Maddy and Joseph have been living there to save money. Maddy teaches dance classes for not much money. Joseph works in the music industry and has been struggling lately, and they are nearly broke.

Emily left town as a teenager, and Maddy and Joseph don’t know where she is. If they sell the house, Emily’s half would go to the county comptroller, but if she doesn’t claim it, that half goes to the state. If Emily isn’t found within five years, however, Maddy and Joseph can sell the house and keep all of the proceeds.

When the book begins, Joseph has found Emily at a party in New York where they have a mutual friend in the music industry.

Now for the spoilers outlining how the book falls apart for me. If just one of these storylines had been the storyline, it would have been better. As it is, the book is so convoluted that none of it ends up making much sense. And because there are so many people doing the wrong thing, there is no one to root for here.

***SPOILERS*** SPOILERS***SPOILERS***

At the beginning, Joseph and Maddy are made out to be this loving couple. They’ve known one another all their lives. Selling Maddy’s parents’ home will help them recover financially. They just needed to find Emily. There is also an underlying concern that Maddy is beginning to be forgetful and confused, and Joseph is worried that she’s beginning to show signs of the early onset dementia that was so traumatic for them with Maddy’s mother.

So let’s deal with the idea of Joseph and Maddy being nearly broke first. Joseph has been telling Maddy that his music industry work has been drying up, and of course, Maddy shares that with her best friend Bee. When Bee hears about a licensing deal that Joseph brokered with Apple and that he must be doing well financially, however, she confronts him. Joseph tells Bee that he’s planning to leave Maddy because he doesn’t want to end up caring for her with dementia like Maddy’s father did. He’s squirreling away money to avoid paying too much in alimony, figuring the sale of the house will be enough to sustain Maddy.

Bee and Joseph already have a rocky relationship, so this doesn’t really fix anything. When she begs him to tell Maddy the truth, he says that he can’t, that Maddy is not totally innocent but he can’t say anymore because it has implications for Greg as well.

Being the nosy town gossip, Bee then confronts Greg, asking if he and Maddy are having an affair. Greg has always been fond of Maddy, but he just loves her from a distance since she is with Joseph. When Bee tells him that Joseph is thinking of leaving Maddy, Greg thinks maybe he can just take Maddy and move away. So then he tells Bee a long-kept secret that he promised Maddy he would never tell about a fire that started in the girls’ school that Maddy and Bee attended when they were 14, a fire that changed everyone’s lives when it happened. The secret is that it was Maddy’s fault. (It’s actually kind of Greg’s fault too but mostly Maddy.)

At this point, Bee starts to second-guess everything that Maddy ever told her, especially about Emily, because Emily was accused of setting the fire. Because of her past, Emily is sent to juvie for setting the fire, and it was the end of her relationship with Joseph. So now Bee starts to do things to separate from Maddy and begins to rebuild her relationship with her brother.

Even from this point, there’s so much to uncover, so I’ll try to break it down into small enough pieces. Bee resents Maddy for lying to her for their entire lives and basically destroying her brother’s life. Maddy believes that Joseph is hiding a rekindled affair with Emily but she can’t prove it because Joseph is gaslighting her (and everyone else) and convincing her that she’s suffering early onset dementia.

Emily tells Maddy and Joseph that she’s going to buy them out of the family home because she wants to live there when, in reality, she wants to tear down the house and build apartments or condos just to punish Maddy for ruining her life. Emily and Joseph actually have rekindled their relationship, and Joseph found Emily two years ago right after her father died. The assumption we’re supposed to make is that they have been hatching this plan for the past two years because Joseph has been funneling money into an account that’s in Emily’s name.

When we get to the end of the book and Maddy figures out everything, Emily implies that the only reason Joseph married Maddy 15-some-odd years ago was because she reminded him of Emily. And by the way, Joseph has still been having sex with Maddy after finding Emily because they were trying to get pregnant. He’s avoided going to a fertility doctor because he had a vasectomy when he found Emily because he knew Emily didn’t want children.

So he’s hatching a plan to go back to Emily but still having sex with his wife, and Emily is ok with that? To say nothing of the fact that he didn’t go looking for her sooner? Oh, and to top it off, Maddy is kind of crazy in that she sliced her arm open as a kid and blamed Emily, told her parents that Emily and Joseph were having sex in the treehouse, let Emily take the blame for the fire in the school, and so many other things.

I’m a fan of a story with twists and storylines that make you second guess, but come on! At the end of the day, we spent the entire book assuming that Joseph is trying to convince Maddy that she’s getting sick. In actuality, she’s already a little out there! Gaslight her…OR let her have antisocial personality disorder…we don’t need both! It was just all too confusing, and at the end of the day, not a single character in this book ended up being likeable…not even as a villain.

And then Maddy just drives away. After confronting Emily and Joseph at the house that Emily bought (not their family home) and after Joseph admits to having a vasectomy, she tries to run them down with her car. But then she just drives away, thinking about how she is the monster they turned her into. Umm…she sliced her arm open with a knife when she was a kid just to try to get her sister in trouble. I think she was already a monster…an antisocial monster.

The only reason I gave this 2 stars instead of 1 is that each of the options—either Joseph and Emily gaslighting Maddy or Maddy actually having antisocial personality disorder—could have made for an excellent book.

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