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.
