Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [41]
One of us had to go.
“I just don’t know what to do with you, you’re making me frantic,” my mother said, chewing her thumbnail down to the quick.
“Well, I’m not going back to that school ever again. I don’t fit in there and I never will. I have to get out now.”
“But you have to stay in school until you’re sixteen. It’s the law.”
“I can’t stay there for another three years,” I screamed. “God, I wish I were dead. I should just kill myself.” I felt like a trapped animal.
My mother said, “Don’t even joke about suicide.”
“What makes you think I’m joking?” Maybe I could just kill myself and get it over with. Maybe that was my only way out.
She stopped typing and reached for her Wite-Out. “I don’t have the emotional energy right now to deal with you when you’re all wild like this.”
I had been chain-smoking all night and pacing around the house, consumed with dread about school the following morning. I had gone over my list of options in my head and the list was short: leave school now forever.
My mother was in the middle of writing what she considered to be an important poem. ”It’s fifty pages long and I truly do believe it’s going to make me a very famous woman,” she said out of the corner of her mouth that wasn’t wrapped around her More.
“I don’t care about that fucking poem. I’m miserable. You have to do something.”
She exploded. ”Well, I care very much about this fucking poem as you call it. I am putting everything I have into this writing. I have worked hard all my life to be able to claim my writing as my own.”
“Well, what about me?” I bellowed. I wanted to shove her typewriter on the floor. I hated it and I hated her. I wanted to be a Cosby.
“You are an adult,” she said. ”You’re thirteen years old. You’ve got a mind and a will of your own. And I have my own needs right now. My writing is very important to me and I should hope that it would be important to you.”
Somehow, my mother had managed to turn this all around to her. She had a knack for this.
“I’m not one of your fans,” I shouted. I had heard Christina Crawford say this to her mother in Mommie Dearest and I knew my mother hadn’t seen the movie, so it would seem original.
“Well, at the moment,” she said, “I’m not one of your fans, either.” She turned away from me and began typing.
I unplugged her typewriter, freezing it.
“Goddamn it, Augusten. What’s the matter with you? Why are you doing this to me? I need support right now. Not attacks from you.”
I told her to fuck herself and then I stormed out of the room and went outside to sit on the front porch and fume. A moment later she appeared at the door. “Dr. Finch would like to speak with you on the telephone.” Her voice was calm, composed, like a receptionist’s.
“Fine,” I said. I worried I might be in trouble for terrorizing my mother. He might tell me that I’d pushed her too hard and now she would go psychotic again, unraveling all the hard work he had done on her.
“Hello?”
“Well, hello there, Augusten. What’s this I hear about you not wanting to go to school?”
I couldn’t believe it. He was talking about me.
I told him about how miserable I was, how I didn’t feel that I fit in and how I felt trapped and depressed and just wanted to be left alone so I could go to movies and write in my journal.
He listened to me without interrupting except with the occasional, “Uh huh,” and “I see.” Then he said, “Well, the compulsory education laws are such that you have to attend school until you’re sixteen years old.”
“I know but I can’t,” I said. I was desperate. He had to help me.
“Well,” he said with a deep sigh. I could picture him leaning back, massaging his forehead with his free hand. “The only loophole, or way that I can see to get you out of school for any length of time, would be a suicide attempt. If you tried to kill yourself, then I could legally remove you from school.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you were to attempt suicide, I could explain to the school board that you were psychologically unfit to