The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [8]
“I’ll take care of it, Saffron. Don’t worry.”
“Do you want a cuppa before you go upstairs?” my mother asked, already at the whiskey cabinet.
“Sure.”
“We wanted to talk to you anyway, while Junior was out,” she said.
“He’ll be sorry he ever came home,” my father muttered, his hand still tightly fisted. Was he making Junior play Russian roulette, like in The Deer Hunter?
“About what your guidance counselor said on the phone,” my mother continued. “She said your grades are so good you could get a full scholarship, but you don’t seem interested in applying for them. You know, dear, these things don’t just walk up to you and bite you on the nose. You have to find them and apply. And you haven’t taken one college handbook home with you, she said.” My mother sighed. “She told us to be concerned that you haven’t talked, at all, about any of it. I told her I already was. I mean, what does she think I am, some sort of eejit? I know it when my own daughter is lost.”
“I’m not lost,” I managed, stabbing her false self-confidence into her ear with a marlinspike. “I’m about as far from lost as you can imagine.”
“Well?” my mother asked, sitting down with her glass, my tea, and a beer for my father.
They stared at me silently.
“I mean, maybe I won’t go to college. Maybe I’d be better use to you in other ways.”
Silence, then sighing.
“Maybe you won’t go to college?” my mother asked her empty glass of whiskey, after staring at me wide-eyed for about twenty seconds.
“Yeah, maybe not. I do, uh, I do have a plan, though. I just can’t tell you about it yet.”
“A plan?” This was useless. She was as stupid as a ship full of whores.
My father stared at his beer. “Is this why you told us about Junior?”
I shook my head no. My mother stood up from her chair and leaned toward me over the table. She was shaking all over; her blue-white skin jiggled just on the surface of her angry muscles.
“If you think that having a son on drugs is bad, try having a son on drugs and the only hope of your family telling you she doesn’t really like the idea of college, all on the same night!” she sputtered, tapping the Formica with her index finger. “Don’t think that you can just make your own decisions about this! We worked our whole lives waiting for the day you would graduate and maybe—maybe start a family practice here. Or something. ”
“Maybe you should have let me decide for myself.”
“Don’t be smart with me.”
“Don’t be smart with your mother, Saffron.”
“I’m just saying that maybe if you’d gone easier on me, maybe put on less pressure …” I felt bad for making it sound like her fault, and yet wanted to scalp her right there in her own kitchen, with her own blade.
“Well, you haven’t decided anything yet. And I promise you one thing. You will succeed and that’s final! You will go to college and that’s final! I don’t care about what you think! You live in my house and you will do as I say!” she yelled.
My father looked to her. “Is she the same age as Patricia was, when—”
She nodded.
“Oh,” he answered, looking away.
“I know what you’re talking about. You don’t know enough to start diagnosing me here at the kitchen table. What do you know about any of that, anyway?”
“Don’t put down your father.”
“I’m not. It’s true.”
“Just go to your room and study!” my mother yelled. “Don’t come down until tomorrow. We have enough to think about without you going mad as well.”
I walked into the hall and closed the kitchen door. The minute I was alone, I regretted saying anything. But it seemed my guidance counselor (who I was now dismembering, phalange-by-phalange) already had the ball rolling. Maybe it was a good thing that I told them then. I was halfway through my junior year and in sixteen months, I would be eighteen. Free to go and pursue my old business, my old life, and get out of their house.
My father’s assumption that I was acting on hormones incensed me, and made me feel a familiar trapped-with-the-ignorant feeling I’d felt my whole life. It seemed that the more I matured as a human, the more I wished to be back in a coat of canine