Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [99]
Then she was listening. And I watched as her face transformed from annoyance to anger to rage to complete calm. Her foot stopped tapping a rhythm on the carpet. She hung up.
“So he says his maid didn’t steal them. He says I lost them.”
“Fuck,” I said. “Oh well.”
“Oh well?” She looked at me with her eyebrows raised. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, oh well. No more earrings. It sucks, but that’s life.”
Natalie folded her arms across her chest, bunching her uniform under the arms. “You have a very bad attitude,” she told me. “Haven’t you ever heard the phrase, ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade’?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Here,” she said bending over and gripping the side of the mattress. “Help me with this thing.”
“Huh?”
“Help me lift this fucking mattress. We’re going to turn a negative situation into a fun situation.”
We were able to ease the mattress into the swimming pool out front without making so much as a splash.
The television set, the chair and both nightstands didn’t make much of a splash either.
“Hey motherfucker,” Natalie screamed toward the front office of the motel. “I did like you said and looked everywhere and I still didn’t find my earrings.”
As the manager opened the door to see what all the shouting was about, Natalie and I tore off into the cool, salty Hyannis night. I grinned as I watched her sprint ahead of me, her long hair whipping behind her. Just your everyday McDonald’s counter girl, on the run.
YOU’RE GONNA MAKE IT AFTER ALL
W
HEN I WAS SEVENTEEN AND NATALIE WAS EIGHTEEN, WE moved into our own small apartment in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Natalie had enrolled in Holyoke Community College and the apartment was close to school. Inspired by her, I took—and passed—my GED exam. This wasn’t difficult, as the questions were things like “Spell cat.” Then I, too, enrolled in the community college.
As a pre-med student.
To pay my way, I applied for and received a slew of student loans and a Pell grant. Most of which I spent on new clothes and a 1972 Volkswagen Fastback that I chose not for mechanical soundness but because it didn’t have any scratches and was showroom-shiny.
The best part about being a pre-med student was that my laminated student I.D. stated my major: pre-med. I carried it in the front pocket of my jeans so that I could remove it throughout the day and gaze at it, reminding myself why I was there. When overwhelmed by a tedious microbiology lecture, I would simply pull out my I.D. card, look at my picture along with the words “Pre-med” and imagine myself at a future point in time double-parking my Saab convertible.
Natalie worked very hard, studying well past midnight each night. She was taking more advanced classes than I, so we didn’t study for the same courses together. This meant that I was forced to study alone. Instead, I sat in my small bedroom and typed short stories on my manual typewriter for English class.
English 101 was mostly about the technicalities of language—verbs, adverbs, what’s a split infinitive, what’s a double negative. I found all of this mind-numbing, so instead, believing my professor would be thrilled, I wrote ten-page essays on such topics as My Trip to the Depressing Mountain Farms Mall, Why Are There So Many Brands of Hair Conditioner? and My Childhood Was More Screwed Up Than Yours.
By midterms, it seemed I was going to fail English class. As well as chemistry, anatomy, physiology, microbiology and even choral.
The only bright spot was that my English professor routinely wrote notes on my essays. “Wonderful and strange, but this was not an assignment. If you could focus on the core materials in the course, I believe it would help your creative writing. You do show a flair.”
My anatomy professor also took pity on me and called me into her office one afternoon after