Want, стр. 27

I need you to go home, she tells me. I need you to turn toward your apartment and I’ll get in the car and meet you there. She’s hours from me. She says my name again. Her voice, I later learn, is thick with weed as well as all her worry, all her sad and sorry. Then, I think she has so much power, but later I will see all the ways she feels almost completely at the mercy of the wants and needs of other people just like me. I’m so happy that night, though, to have finally found a way to make her come to me.

She talks and cries and I hear her muffled voice and then another person. I hear her start her car, but I stand still. In my memory, she comes to the bridge, but I’m not sure this is what happens. In my memory, she saves me that night; that night I think maybe everything will be okay. It’s only the next morning that I see them, out front of our house while she sleeps in my bed and I sit on the roof: my parents, harried, exhausted, rushing out of a cab and coming up our front-porch steps.

Bitch, I say, beneath my breath, as I watch them ring the bell, as I hear her rustle, as I climb in through my window, knowing then that I am absolutely by myself.

Why the fuck, my mother will say later; they will walk me, both of them, to the university offices and tell them I am a danger to myself and must be monitored more closely. The university will balk and want to kick me out, but my parents will not agree to this and my mom will threaten various things, citing statutes that might be made up, and then the university will decree I see a therapist three days a week instead. I will be on probation and they will try sometimes, my parents, they will call and tell me to take care of myself and ask me about class. They will feel both wholly overwhelmed and scared. It will have been years, by then, of me being more than they can handle. They will have tried therapists and so many different medications. They will have tried yelling at me, begging; none of it will work. Sometimes, when my mother is too tired and she gets a bill from the therapist, she will call and yell at me and ask me why I can’t just suck it up and be better. What did we ever do? she’ll ask me. Why the fuck, she’ll say, do I have to pay someone to talk to you?

I’ll drive one day in the car with my father, going somewhere, the second time they come up to see me after she has called them, and he will look so revolted by the fact that I am crying. I think now: he must have been so scared. Stop it, he’ll say, over and over, but I won’t stop it. He’ll reach his hand up to my face as if he might stop the tears from coming and he will breathe in once, too tired to have hold any longer of whatever patience he might have had before this. He will slap me, once and hard, across the face.

And then Sasha in the background. They’ve always been nice to her. We’re young and she was scared. When she thinks “parent” she thinks a different thing than what they are. She writes me email after email and for a while, I like the feel of not responding. I like her asking, begging, saying that she’s sorry, until I can’t stand it any longer, not having her to talk to, until she’s desperate, until the man she’s been courting all semester has fucked one of her roommates and she’s begun to disassemble, until we’re galvanized, alone again together against every other thing.