The Cow Ate My Homework

10. The Walls Start Closing In (Even More Than Before)

There he goes back to that melodrama territory, you think as you read the chapter title. Oh the walls are closing in, he's suffocating, so much worse than every other miserable high schooler trying to get through to the end of the year. I'm just sure things are so much more dire for him, you say with utmost sarcasm.

And I'd have to agree with that, that we're all just doing what we have to in order to get out of here in a few more days... except that everyone else hasn't had a cow eat their homework and been forced to scramble to undo the damage caused by said cow.

At the end of this miserable first day of the last week of school, I drag myself out to the parking lot at the end of detention. I'm too mentally drained to realize how terrible the conversation I'm about to have with my mom in a moment will be, as I walk toward our three-quarter ton farm pickup idling nearby.

I should actually be using this time to brace myself, to prepare. But since I didn't prepare, I'm hit hard with, "Detention! In your last week of school!" I wince, and she guns it toward the street before I'm even done shutting my door. "On the one day I tell you to come straight home—"

I can't. I interrupt, "Mom I've had a really rough—"

But she says, "Your father broke his leg!"

"Oh shit, are you serious?"

"Yeah, oh shit," she returns. "And yes I'm serious. That estupida perra charged right at him, and you know he's not exactly an agile spring chicken!" She looks at me as if even this last point is my fault, too.

I feel terrible. "I'm sorry I wasn't there."

She sighs, grips the wheel. Looks like she's trying to calm down a notch. "I know, I know. I have to go get him from the hospital, so you'll have to milk. And we're a good hour and a half behind on everything."

I nod in response, feeling utterly weighed down. Even more than I felt earlier, which I didn't think was possible.

#

I hurry through barn work as quickly as I can, which is not quick at all. My mom and dad got a few things started before the leg-breaking incident, but there is a long way to go for me tonight. This would have been a suckie situation on a normal day. On this day, it goes way beyond suckie. But I'm too busy obsessing about the impossible Rodney-assisting video issue to really dwell on the miserableness of the slow farm work.

I sloppily use voice-to-text to discuss the matter with Sarah while I work, which probably doesn't help my work speed but at least gets the mental ball rolling on my academic problems. The two of us settle on getting together "to light" (aka tonight) to work on taking care of these "tissues" (or issues, as a more skilled voice-to-texter might call them).

By the time barn work is all the way finished for the day, it's so late that I don't even eat dinner with my parents, I just bring my plate out to the garage to get to work.

Our garage doesn't have any cars in it. We've always parked our truck outside and used the space as storage, and a few years back I talked Mom and Dad into giving me part of the space as a makeshift music studio if I did the work of cleaning it out. So now, the area is one half carefully piled junk and one half sound equipment that Sarah and I use to write and occasionally record songs. And the music area seems to be a decent place to try to make a fake Rodney video.

Sarah arrives a couple minutes after I commence staring at my model-making materials while eating. "Hey, I see you're hard at work," she kids, reaching for a tortilla chip off my plate.

"I need some brain food first."

She takes a seat and pulls out her laptop, crunching her stolen chip as she opens up some editing software. "We are going to own this and be done in an hour," she announces through her mouthful.