Anyway, I’d looked around for Ruby before school and between classes. When I found her, though, she gave me the frozen snub. Turned away like I was dirt.

Fine. Forget about it, man. Forget both of them. Sarah, Ruby. There’s plenty more chicks out there. Who needs these two loony birds?

Sarah

My mother was a mess. She picked me up from school, again, and said she thought this whole thing was my “desperate cry for help.”

She said I’m testing her and she’s afraid she’s failing the test.

La.

“No, Mother, it’s me that failed the test—the geography test.”

Ho-ho-ho.

Then she said that:

It’s harder than I think to be a mother alone.
She did the best she could.
She hopes I won’t repeat her mistakes.
She hopes I won’t marry too young.
She hopes I won’t marry someone like my father.
Although (she says),
Daughters always do.

So she made an appointment for me to see her psychologist, Rachel-Ann Weisenthal, tomorrow. She said she wants me to have my own therapist, but this is too much of an emergency to shop around for a kid shrink right now.

Kid, schmid. The dreary Ms. Divan is a counselor who supposedly specializes in kids, and she might as well be from Neptune for how well she understands me.

I don’t know, maybe my mother’s right. Maybe I do need help.

So why doesn’t she help me? Like she used to help me tie my shoe or reach the sink. How different can this be from shooing bearded gnomes out of my closet at bedtime?

I used to be able to tell her when I was scared. I remember crawling into bed with her when I had bad dreams. She’d kiss my ear too loudly and I’d burrow into her armpit where it was warm and safe. When did that stop?

*   *   *

My mother went back to work, leaving me home alone (la, one lone eon, no?). I stood at the kitchen counter while the TV yabbered commercial after commercial as if they’d forgotten to stick a program in there.

I was about to make a tuna sandwich, when my father’s newest secretary called. (He goes through them like tissues.) Anyway, I don’t know her name and I doubt she even knew she was

Dialing

Dad’s

Darling

Daughter.

She just said, “I have a call for Sarah from Martin Collier.”

And I said, “That’s me,” while turning the TV volume down.