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The World as I Know It- Chapter 11
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Prose/Short Stories Chapter 11
The next day it was my sister’s turn to try to get through to me. She was away at school, but my parents convinced her professors to give her permission to skip her classes to solve this dire problem.
The thing about my sister and I is that we have a love/hate relationship. She confides in me more than I confide in her. It was a better idea than a male practical stranger. But I was not budging.
Since this did not work, they tried the professional route again. This time with a psychologist I had never met but who was an expert at dealing with “troubled” teens. My parents told me I would seeing Dr. Stein each day until I was “better”. They said it like I caught the flu. I wish it was something like that that you could just sleep off. But this was something that would keep me from sleeping soundly for the rest of my life.
My daily routine became: get ready for school and walk in that direction but never arrive on campus. Then visit my shrink where we sat in silent for an hour followed by lying in my bed and crying myself to sleep.
Instead of going to class, I went to a strip mall halfway between my house and school. There was a mom-and-pop bookstore there where I spent my days flipping through the pages of novels. I didn’t bother trying to read any of them because my thoughts were otherwise occupied. The best part was that the owners of the bookstore left me in peace. They didn’t question why I was there every day or call the police to say that a teenager was loitering when she should have been in class.
After a few weeks, the secretary at my school called my parents to inform them that I was missing quite a bit and that if I kept missing I would have to repeat the 10th grade.
My mother confronted me screaming out “What is wrong with you? I thought you outgrew this phase? Why are you doing this to us again?”
I couldn’t believe my ears. She was acting like I brought this on myself. Like I asked to be raped. I was not the type of girl that wore provocative clothing and craved male attention. Now I could not trust my own mother with my secret.
