The St. Ambrose School for Girls(51)

They are my weather-related disasters, not hers, and I want to control how they are dealt with. Even though I am not handling any of this well. Even though I tried to buy the aspirin and the Orange Crush. Even though I am only a child still.

I close my eyes. Put like that, I should tell her everything. As unpleasant, invasive, and commandeering as adult solutions have proven to be, at least none of what the older generation has done to me involved my dying on the floor of the boiler room down in the Tellmer dorm’s basement.

“Do you want to come home?”

I’m so surprised she asks this that I turn my face to her. “What?”

“Do you want to just pack up your things and come home?”

I think of our house full of magazines. And of her exciting new boyfriend she told me about when we spoke on our regularly scheduled call this past Sunday. I imagine her smoking inside with the windows all closed up because the weather is turning cold and we have to save money by conserving heat. I hear her voice, calling out to me through the little rooms, pushing words about some article covering the love life of Kevin Costner. I picture whatever middle-aged man with an alcoholic’s florid complexion and blooming nose tissue that she’s pulled out of the plenty-of-fish sea sitting on the sofa, smoking with her in his undershirt.

I would rather roll my dice with Greta.

As I tell her no, I do not want to leave, a prevailing sense of helplessness comes over me. I do not want to be here, no. But there’s no home I want to be at, either. And no matter the school I attend or the bully in my class, I will still have my head attached at the top of my spine. I will still take my illness with me wherever I go. There’s no relocation that can solve what is wrong with me.

Other than that of the grave variety.

“Do you want to talk to Dr. Warten?”

“No,” I tell her. “And you really didn’t have to come.”

She drops my hand and sits back a little. I can’t tell what she is thinking, but I’m not surprised by what she does. She reaches for her purse, catching one of its straps and dragging it across the floor not because it weighs much, but because I suspect she feels the same kind of helplessness I do and impotence does tire a person right out. That she lights a cigarette in this apartment that isn’t her own will likely be forgiven considering the circumstances of her daughter, but I wonder if it would have occurred to her for even a second to ask permission. I wonder if Nick will resent the smoke. I wonder all kinds of things that are hardly relevant to my situation because I am overwhelmed by the issues at hand.

Still, no is the only answer I will give her right now. No, I don’t want to go home. No, I don’t want to go to a hospital. No, I don’t want to leave this dorm.

“I don’t know what to do with you,” she says on an exhale of smoke.

The secondhand intrusion of what she expels from her lungs makes my eyes water and my nose itch. I sneeze and sit up higher, no longer slouching.

“You don’t have to do anything with me.” I shake my head, as if that will dismiss everything: Phil the Pharmacist’s phone call to the school clinic, the nurse’s call here to the dorm and elsewhere on campus, the administrator’s call to my mother at work. “This is all a lot of nonsense.”

I try to sound adult. I try to sound secure. I create a repeating ticker tape of thoughts in my head that I am adult, I am secure, I know me better than everyone else. I tell myself to fucking concentrate on these statements and make them real, goddamn it. Otherwise, I’m going to lose my shot at talking with Strots as well as my exit stage left in the basement, which remains my ultimate goal.

“I’m taking my medicine.” I shrug. “I’m going to class. I’m happy here.”

I have not been taking my medicine, I missed class this morning because I fell into the Big Bang while sitting on my bed, I am unhappy here.

“You are?” she asks, covering all three lies at once.

“I am.”

She lets herself fall back so she is nearly lying down on Nick’s sofa. As she smokes and stares at me, I know she is reviewing old tapes in her head, the home movies not pleasant in the slightest. I regret this. I wish she had more of what she had no doubt hoped and dreamed for out of a daughter. Instead, she got me.

“Sarah,” she says softly, “you’re so much more than that shitty little town we live in.”

My mother does not swear. Ever. It’s the cheapest and easiest way for her to deny how cheap and easy she can sometimes be. And just as shocking, she’s used my given name twice now.

She exhales smoke from her un-lipsticked lips. “I know you got angry at me for sending that essay I found in your room to the admissions committee here. I get it. And I’ll tell you I’m honestly sorry for the invasion into your privacy. But I won’t apologize for the opportunity it got you. This place. These people…” She looks around and then sits forward again so she can pick up a book that’s lying on Nick’s coffee table. Turning the spine toward herself, she frowns. “An Artist of the Floating World. Ka-kazuo Ishi… who is this author? What’s it about?”

“Ishiguro,” I say. “And it’s an examination of postwar Japan and intergenerational conflict.”

“And how do you know all this?”

“I read it.”

“See?” she says as she tosses the book back on the table, the bang it lands with like the period at the end of her statement of proof. “You belong around people like this. You belong around books like that. Your mind is something else, Sarah.”