St. Agatha’s does not take its Stations of the Cross lightly. Every class has to do its own performance, and Maya says they are almost always the same. Girls basically all wear a blue sheet over their uniforms, while boys borrow altar boy robes, and sometimes (if they are really into it) they get fake beards.
When I was chosen, Sister Catherine seemed anxious about it, like she wasn’t sure that it was such a good idea for me to be on display in the middle of church, but she said nothing. She didn’t even talk to my mom about it, which I thought was odd, given the circumstances, but didn’t question it because for once no one was calling me crazy. After all, I am supposed to be the Lamb of God, here to remove the sins of the world.
“Adam, how do you think Jesus would feel at this moment?” Sister Catherine asked seriously.
Be nice, Jason advised, appearing out of nowhere. I tried to avert my gaze from his blindingly white butt cheeks as he strolled down the row of pews, but it was impossible.
I looked at the robe I was wearing and tugged at the fake crown of thorns, which actually did itch like hell, and wanted to respond to Sister Catherine sarcastically, but was saved from having to say anything when someone farted and the crowd immediately dispersed. Jason had already vanished.
It’s actually kind of fascinating. There aren’t many school performances that focus on the murder of the main character. The whole story is about my slow and painful demise, like a parade of inhuman suffering that keeps Catholics coming back for more.
Come see the junior class’s production of the Stations of the Cross. Watch Jesus die. Again.
I’m not one to beg for popularity, but if I had been just a little bit more likable, I probably could’ve gotten a sweet gig as a Roman soldier.
—
Maya came over later to watch me bake cookies. Before you ask, yes, we do go out, but for the most part we just hang out.
She never asks questions about baking, which I think is odd because she’s curious about everything else.
“Do you want me to teach you how to bake?” I asked.
“No,” she said a little too quickly.
“Why not?” I asked. It was unlike her to avoid learning something for herself.
“Cookies don’t require any thought if all you’re doing is eating them, but they require a certain degree of thoughtfulness if you make them for someone,” she said.
I could’ve argued, but I didn’t want to take that away from her. Sometimes you just want to enjoy someone handing you a plate of cookies.
DOSAGE: 4.5 mg. Same dosage.
MARCH 6, 2013
At some point, Dwight and I probably could’ve stopped meeting up on Monday nights and our moms would have been appeased. But we’re creatures of habit, so we kept it up.
And Dwight is actually pretty laid-back. Even though he talks nonstop, he doesn’t really go out of his way to make friends at school. It makes me wonder how he’d react if he knew everything about me. Not that I’m stupid enough to tell him.
Somehow our dads came up in conversation when I told him about my mom and stepdad.
“Dad left when I was eight,” I told him.
Dwight pondered this for a moment. “My mom was artificially inseminated,” he said.
There’s really no response to that. I think I stared at him blankly until he said something about his mom being too busy with her career to devote any time to dating, but I’m not sure if that was just what she told Dwight.
If I had wanted to mention anything personal about my own life, that would have been the moment to do it.
There’s definitely a divide between the people in my life who know everything about me and the people who don’t. It’s probably unhealthy to create that between the people I spend most of my time with. It probably means I’m trying to compartmentalize my crazy.
I overheard Paul on the phone with his mom the other day. Most people would say she’s a nice old lady. The kind who always has hard candies and would never dream of showing up at a party empty-handed. But she’s very comfortable with words like “Oriental” and “colored” at home, and whispers the word “Mexican” when we go out to eat. Nobody bothers to tell her that “Mexican” isn’t a dirty word.
Like I said, she seems nice, but she’s not. She doesn’t trust me. She said as much when she asked me if I could let her know when I was starting to lose control so she could do something. She pulled a can of pepper spray out of her purse and shook it at me. What the hell, lady? No, not to get an ambulance or alert someone to the fact that I was having an episode due to my debilitating mental condition. That bitch wanted to pepper spray me in the face. I didn’t tell my mom because she has a hard-enough time putting up with Paul’s mom in small doses. If she found out she’d said something like that to me, it would just make things worse.
When my mom got pregnant, Paul’s mom started calling more often. It was usually on Paul’s cell, but once in a while it was the house line. We must be the only family that doesn’t use caller ID, and my mom pays dearly for it every time her mother-in-law calls to give her unwanted advice about the baby. Like about how if it’s a boy, she has to have him circumcised, which she knows my mom is vehemently against. And yes, she was against it when I was born, too. So now you actually do know more about me than you ever wanted to know.
Anyway, I overheard Paul on the phone with his mom the other day and knew they were talking about me. To Paul’s credit, he actually didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. I overheard: “Yes, we’ve got it under control. No, Mother, I am not underestimating anything, and if you accuse me of not taking my child’s safety seriously again, I’m going to get very angry with you. Love you. Bye.”
Paul ends every phone call with family members with “Love you.”
No matter how heated the argument is. He could have had a conversation like: I HATE YOU AND I HOPE YOU REALIZE HOW MUCH SHAME AND DISHONOR YOU’VE BROUGHT ON THE FAMILY….Love you.
Since I can’t talk to Maya about this stuff, the business of being crazy, I talk to her about other, related issues, like the baby. The problem is that Maya has a pretty easy time ignoring me when she’s studying. She hears everything I’m saying, somewhere in the back of her perfectly cataloged mind, but she will not let anything ruin her concentration until she is finished with her thought. She can sit for hours with a notebook in perfect silence without letting anything interrupt her.
She’s trained herself to do this because she wants to be a doctor someday. Not a doctor who sees patients. A researcher. She doesn’t like people, and she definitely doesn’t like dealing with their problems on a human level. And yes, before you ask, that is something that I’ve known for a while. Maya likes “person.” Singular. People in a group basically suck.
With the help of my medication, I can hide my problems from her. Well, the big one. If she thinks it’s weird that I have chronic headaches and insomnia, she doesn’t say anything. Those things on their own don’t point to what I have.
She’s empathetic when she wants to be, but she does it in her own Maya-ish way: by pointing out a problem and then agreeing with you that, yes, it does in fact suck balls. Like when we were talking about the baby after Academic Team practice.