Freedom of Sketch

Don't Call Me Crazy

The last traces of red evening sunlight cut the neighborhood into a cardboard mountain range of peaked roofs and smoking chimneys. I numbly stare at the passing two-story colonial houses, which proudly stand on their frosty but manicured plots. A gang of gawky preteen boys plays an aggressive, pre-dinner game of basketball in someone's driveway. Their winter jackets lie in a discarded heap on the lawn.

My mother navigates around a line of gleaming SUVs and sports cars parked along the curb of one glowing brick McMansion. The family inside is throwing some kind of Suburbanite dinner party, complete with homemade casseroles and dry conversations about taxes.

"Looks like Marianne Palmer is hosting another one of her get-togethers," my mother observes. "I wish her guests would learn to carpool. It's so annoying when they take up half the street with their ridiculous Hummers."

I roll my eyes. My mother is jealous of these upper middle class cult families with their white picket fences, 2.5 children, and golden retrievers. As hard as she tries, she'll never be able to fit our oddball family - the divorced and overworked middle-aged mom and her rebellious, crazy teenager - into the neat little boxes that define the American Dream. Now that she's driving me to a mental health clinic, it's like someone's throwing dirt in her face.

When my mother leaves the confines of our pretentious, white-collar subdivision - named Wildwood Estates - she sighs and blathers on about how I'm attention-seeking and acting out to punish her for the divorce. She also includes me in a short but passionate rant about "kids these days".

"God, if you're so sick of me, just give me up for adoption or something," I grumble. "Maybe I can finally find some parents who appreciate my individuality."

Mother: "I swear you were switched at birth, and my real daughter is off being raised by a pack of wolves somewhere."

Me: "It would be better than living with you."

Mother: "You are such a snot. Is this just a phase? Tell me this is just a phase. You're driving me nuts." She speeds through a threatening yellow light.

Me: "If you're nuts, why am I seeing the shrink?"

Mother: "Because of miss what's-her-name and the damn school you set on fire."

Whoa, she's already cursing and escalating to "miss what's-her-names"? "I didn't set the school on fire!" I snap. "I'm so tired of everyone blaming me for everything. Can't I just get a break for once?"

"Oh, Shiloh." My mother brushes a tangle of hair from her forehead. A deep frown line divides the space between her dark, arched eyebrows. "Believe it or not, the world doesn't revolve around you. No one is out to get you."

I pick at my split ends and remember I need to trim my hair. "Just stop. I don't even want to talk to you anymore," I sigh, leaning against the cold window. I breathe clouds of fog upon the glass.

Unfortunately, my mother is unwilling to end our verbal tennis match, our insulting words catching fire as they sail between fierce blows of our tongues. She targets me with a surprise strike. "Are you doing drugs?"

"Oh my God, what!?"

My mother taps her matte beige fingernail upon the steering wheel. "I'm serious. Are you on drugs?"

"NO!" I shriek, agitatedly flustering with my hair.

"Just asking," my mother says coolly.

I feel like I'm going to barf. I leave sweaty hand prints on the cover of my sketchbook and try to wipe the sticky marks off with the bottom of my sweatshirt.