Not Your Average Nerd

Chapter Two

2

It was late at night and pretty darn stormy when my mother decided to call. I honestly hadn’t bothered to call any of my relatives since my sophomore year of school because it seemed that all they wanted to do was bitch me out about things they found disappointing.

            “Why do you only call when we remind you to?! Is family not that important to you miss future-lawyer?”

            “How come you don’t ever bother to take a plane to Oregon to visit us? What, you can’t take a week off of school and your job to visit the family? Do you hate us now?”

“You know I still hate that you’re a vegetarian. Why can’t you eat meat? Are you too good to eat animals? Do you hate your family so much you can’t represent our culture by making our dishes?”

“Why did you answer the phone in English? Are you forgetting your roots? Did you already start forgetting Romanian?”

The conversation started off by her complaining about my ‘lack of culture’ that she could sense in my voice. She then transitioned it complaining about how I will never give her a grandchild or a son-in-law because, “since I’m a bad Romanian, no man will ever want me.” If I didn’t know my mother so well, I would have hung up on her. But I knew that the next time she called (no matter how long that could have taken) she would have spent hours complaining about my lack of respect.

“You know,” she said, finally calming down from her previous hissy fit, “the whole family misses you.”

I blinked. “I miss you all too,” I said quietly while pushing my glasses up on my nose.

“Are you sure you can’t take some time off to come spend at least a week with us? I know that Oregon misses you. We still have your room, um, almost exactly like you left it.” She paused for a second. “Anica moved some things around when she took it over, but other than that, it’s still the same. I’m sure she’d let you have it back for your stay.”

I wanted to laugh. ‘Oh you know, it’s still your room! It’s just… your sister kind of moved in, repainted the walls, changed the furniture arrangements and completely redecorated. Other that that, you know, it’s still yours.’ I’ve been asked so many times by both my mother and father to come back home for a visit and each time I told them no. Well, not directly ‘no’ but in the form of an excuse.

“My boss has me working crazy hours this week. I can’t take off.”

“There are some big tests coming up soon. I’m going to be stuck studying for days.”

“There has been a rising number of wild pigs here in Texas. They’re scared of letting anyone leave the state in fear of one sneaking into someone’s luggage and spreading throughout the country.” (To my surprise, she actually bought this one.)

It’s not exactly ‘nice’ to avoid family the way I had been doing by making up excuses each time the subject of “coming home” came up, but I couldn’t bear to go back to that place. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see my family, because I really did miss them. I missed the way my dad would cuss whenever he would accidently drop something or the way my mother would fall asleep in front of the TV any time someone turned a cooking channel on. I missed watching Adrian sing and dance to him self (thinking no one was watching him) or how my sister Anica would mock me thinking it annoyed the crap out of me when in reality I didn’t really give a damn. I knew I shouldn’t have taken it out on my family by never visiting them or acting like they didn’t exist, but I couldn’t go back. The thought of returning to Oregon, where I was known as Dracula’s Bitch, made my skin crawl. I decided to go to school out of state to get the hell away from that place. Why would I go back?