Rule 11 (An excerpt from 101 Rules to Survive a Crazy Life)

Rule 11.

Never let your parent drop you off at school

“There’s a big yellow thing. It stops in front of the house every day. It’s called a school bus.”

But my parents insisted on driving me to school that morning. I didn’t know why. I’d just started my junior year. I always took the bus. So why did they want to drop me off now?

Really, I thought that parents, from time to time, contract some kind of virus, a virus that causes unusual behavior. I called that virus Brady-Bunch-itis. Once they catch it, they have the urge to do really wholesome things, like having the entire family sit at the table and eat dinner at the same time, or going to an orchard and picking apples, or singing carols door-to-door at Christmas time. Or like driving your daughter to school when a perfectly good school bus stops on the street at the end of your driveway at 8:10 every morning.

The problem was that my parents weren’t like that. Brady-Bunch-itis in them presented itself as a type of psychosis. But what could I do? I was sixteen years old. In the eyes of the law, I was still their property. So I grabbed my backpack, and let them drop me off, hoping that whatever was going through their systems went through fast and I didn’t have to endure this tomorrow morning as well.

Our mini-van was in the shop for a new transmission. So they had to use my dad’s work truck. It was one of those small Chevys. It only had two seats, so, yeah, mom and dad got the seats, and I had to ride in the truck bed with dad’s tools.

Dad always wore a Texas Ranger baseball cap. No matter how worn and ratty the cap got, he refused to part with it. Nobody really knew why. He was no fan of the Rangers, or of baseball in general. As far as anybody knew he had never even been to Texas.

For as long as I could remember, he had worked as a handyman. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do anything else. It was his calling in life: to fix little things around peoples’ houses. He was proud of his occupation, too, which often led my mom to say that dad was walking proof that marijuana kills brain cells. Apparently dad had been quite a pothead in the day.

Mom was even harder to figure out than dad. She worked part-time at the local library and shushed noisy visitors. That was her job. She was good at shushing. Her joy, though, was knitting. She was always knitting around the house during her free time. She’d start dinner, and then go back to her knitting until dinner was done. She’d sit in the living room and watch baseball games while she knit. She knit when she was sick, or couldn’t sleep at night. She knit spring, summer, autumn, and winter—especially in winter when she knitted stocking caps for everybody she knew. When she ran out of people she knew, she knitted stocking caps and dropped them down at the homeless shelter so that poor, disadvantaged people would at least have warm heads.

On the way to school that morning, dad drove like a maniac, and mom sat in the passenger seat knitting. I bounced around in the truck bed with two five-gallon buckets of Sheetrock. My hair whipped around wildly in the cool early autumn wind. By the time I reached school it would look as though I was wearing a bird’s nest on my head.

When we were stopped at a red light, I leaned toward the driver window and suggested to dad that he drop me off a block away from the school.

“A block away?” he called back. “Why would you possibly want to walk when I can drop you right at the front of the school?”

          I started thinking that mom was right about that whole dead brain cell thing.

Dad stopped the truck directly in front of the school, where throngs of kids were heading toward the front doors.

I jumped out of the back of the truck. I didn’t have the courage to let anybody see me saying goodbye to my parents. I started for the long walkway that led toward the doors, trying to blend quickly with the other kids.

For a second, I thought I would be all right. I got the warm cozy feeling you get when you’re surrounded by your peers, so that you lose your individuality and become just one anonymous face in the crowd.

Then I heard my dad calling from behind me.

“SARAH!…SARAH!…SARAH!…”    I shuttered.  Although I didn’t want to, I looked back over my shoulder.

Dad was standing on the running board, peering over the roof of the truck, and waving his arm back and forth like somebody stranded on a desert island trying to signal a rescue plane. I could see mom sitting in the passenger seat. She was looking out the side window, a strange smile on her face. Although I couldn’t see her hands, I knew they were still working the knitting needles.

“SARAH!… SAAAAR-RAAAH!”

I thought I was all right. Mine was a medium-sized country high school; there must have about thirty other girls named Sarah. I hugged my backpack to my chest, and keep heading for the doors.

The kids around me started to look back over their shoulders. I looked back, too, just one in a crowd who was wondering, Who in the heck are those people anyway?  At that moment, I saw my parents through the eyes of the other kids: they looked like Forrest Gump and Madame DeFarge.

Then I noticed that my dad had something in his hand, the hand he was waving back and forth. I slowed down, as I tried to figure out what he was waving. It was a small object. It looked like a package of some sort, a small blue package of—something. What in the world was that? And then I realized what he was waving. The horror sucked the air out of my lungs. My dad was waving my tampons!

“SAAAR-RAAAH!… SAAAR-RAAAH!…”

Okay, I’d forget the damned things, but—damn! I didn’t really need them right now, and even if I needed one later in the day, I could get a spare from the school nurse. I mean, it wasn’t as though they were the last damned tampons on the face of the planet.

I continued toward the front doors. I figured I was still all right. The crazy tampon-waving guy out on the street could be the dad of one of the other twenty-nine Sarahs in school.

Then from behind me : “SARAH SUTTON!”

Damn! I could feel people watching me. The doors were still ten feet away, and kids were starting to get log-jammed entering the building. I thought I might still be okay; I knew there was at least one other Sarah Sutton in school, no relation, a freshman, and nobody liked her anyway.

“Hey, I think that guy’s calling you,” a voice squeaked behind me. It belonged to scrawny acne-riddle guy—Melvin Something—that nobody paid much mind. “You know that guy?” he asked.

“Uh… never saw him before in my life,” I said.

Then, mercifully, I made it through the doors and the safety of the hallway.

As I walked to my locker, I started to breathe easier. Then and there I made myself two promises. I would never let my parents give me a lift to school again, and I would never, ever, be tempted to smoke pot.