The Kids Aren't Alright

Chapter 7: Ronan

I don't get any sleep the night before I leave, which isn't a surprise. I can't even sleep when I'm relaxed, and after Sabrina has dropped her bombshell about summer camp even the thought of closing my eyes was impossible. After lying in bed for three hours, I deduced that Sabrina had finally gone to bed for real, and decided to get up and boil some water for pasta. I was hungry for food that wasn't a Blizzard, and carbs seemed appropriately filling.

Afterwards, I sat on the couch in the living room and ate my lukewarm pasta without sauce or butter or even salt and looked out the floor-to-ceiling window at the glittering New York skyline with all its windows and cars and planes and felt perfectly terrible inside. The city looked like a model, or a diorama. I had never felt so far away.

I've lived in a lot of different cities— Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles— but none of them resonated with me like Manhattan did. All those cities were all just stops along the way; never the final destination, never my home. I never missed them when I left.

It's funny, almost, that I didn't realize how much I'd miss New York until the day I was forced to leave it all behind.

***

This morning I found myself sprawled out on the couch, absolutely bone-tired. I felt like one of the shuffling corpses from Day Of The Dead. (I'm sure that I was grumbling like one, too.) I was also more irritated than usual, which is saying something because annoyed is basically my natural state. In every cell in my body I knew that it was not going to be a good day.

Sabrina was looming me, her lips pinched together like little bow-ties of disappointment. "Get up," she told me. "You have a lot of packing to do."

For the next two days, my life was whittled down to three things: my suitcases, my mother, and my self-pity. I packed. Sabrina watched me pack. And I felt like shit while I was packing and being watched by Sabrina.

The omniscient presence of Sabrina didn't make me feel better. She never fails to make life more miserable, even when it seems like you've already hit rock-bottom. Right now she's watching me, impatiently, from the curb outside the apartment, not out of courtesy, but to make sure that I actually get into the cab that's supposed to drive me to the airport instead of doing something else duplicitous and criminal. The way she's looking at me with her narrowed eyes would make you think that I'm about to steal the taxi, too; which is a thousand degrees of insulting because I would never even think of stealing a car that wasn't specially imported from Europe, and especially not one without genuine leather seats. Car theft is one crime, but so is settling for anything less expensive than a Lincoln.

It's early in the morning and Sabrina is dressed to kill. Her black hair is pulled back into a slick ponytail and her dark pantsuit has been ironed into angles sharp enough to cut yourself on, not that she would let you even think about getting near her Armani in the first place. She looks like the evil alter-ego of a socialite businesswoman, and the slight curl to her firetruck-red lips says that she damn well could be one, too.

Sabrina may be dressed impeccably, but you would sooner catch me dead than matching her nouveau riche wardrobe. My fashion style consists of whatever she hates.

A list of what I'm wearing:

1) A black t-shirt with the cover art from the One Of These Nights album printed on the front. On the back: "Don't worry. Nothing will be O.K!" (In the eyes of Sabrina, rock music is a fad that should have ended in the 60's.)

2) The army jacket I found at a thrift store with Jesse, who said that it would be such a fucking sin if I didn't buy it. (Sabrina's take on the jacket was not as positive; I believe that her words were take that disgrace off, you're not in the bloody military for God's sake.)