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matter how much you
    drink, snort, or shoot into your veins. The memory stalks you forever and creeps up to maul you like a rabid dog, when you least expect it.
    Like now.
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    Vanessa
    Thank God
    The intercom squawks.
    Okay, Happy Campers, dinner is served.
    Happy Campers? Must I join that sorority? Doesn't much matter. My days of dinner arriving by burly butler have come to a Level One end. My (non) performance at group today has netted me a trip to the communal dining room. Mmmmm. Can't wait to share meat loaf or fish sticks with a table of friendly, smiling faces.
    Like Dahlia's and Lori's. I wonder how you make friends with people who think everyone is out to get them.
    What is friendship, anyway? I have no clue, never lingered long enough in one place before, 89
    94
    not with Dad in the military. We only settled down in Reno when Mama got so bad she couldn't find enough white space to grocery shop or get us to school, let alone make sure we bathed and brushed.
    Grandma, the fool, stepped up to the plate, volunteered to look
    out for Bryan and me. Poor woman had no idea what she was getting herself into--
    that Daddy had not only married a gear shifter but fathered one too. 90
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    I Didn't Realize It Myself
    Until a couple of years ago. Interesting, considering I'd watched Mom straddling that seesaw for as long as I could remember. Except her highs and lows lasted for days. So when I started shifting gears three or four times in a twenty-four-hour period, at first I blamed hormones.
    Didn't PMS make you irritable? Didn't boy trouble drop you to your knees (in more ways than one)? Normal adolescent feelings, right? Well, no, see ... not when your mother's a stark raving psycho. For years she went undiagnosed. 91
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    "Bipolar" had no meaning when I was a little girl, and "schizo"
    wasn't short for schizophrenic, not in the clinical sense.
    It only meant that some
    days Mama was fine--
    eyes not muddied, hair
    combed into submission, speech precise. Those days, her hugs and kisses were warm as summer rain, washing away the hurt.
    The hurt that was sure to fall again. We just couldn't guess
    exactly when.
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    When It Fell
    It was a rock slide, crushing, smothering, bruising, bone twisting. By the time I was ten, I knew to hide when Mama started talking to the air.
    Don ' t worry, Nessa, He ' s an angel. Can ' t you see
    him, standing just there?
    I figured if someone was there, invisible and all, he must be more demon than angel, especially when Mama started yelling.
    Go away, you bastard. I ' m tired of listening to you. You make my head hurt.
    That was the thing about her manic phases. 93
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    They didn't always make her feel what you might call good. Sometimes they made her head hurt.
    He ' s pounding nails into my brain. Stop!
    Make him stop!
    Angel. Demon. Whoever he was, inside her head, his pounding made her rage. Rant. Weep. Sometimes, to make herself feel better, she took to hitting things with her fists.
    Walls. Doors. Herself.
    Me. 94
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    Ten Days Now
    All by myself in this peppermint green room, nothing to do but read, eat, collect lint, reflect on afternoons lazily spent, in the arms of my
    Emily. Yeah, yeah, I'm focused. Bent. Obsessed.
    I have to see her again, which means I've got to lie
    my way out of here, make the perfect self-sales pitch.
    Dr. Starr will never buy into "Conner the saint," but Dr. Boston might award me that honor.
    I've almost got her right
    where I want her--on her knees, my hands caught in her silky blond hair as she
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    whispers, I want you, Conner
    Let me chase away thoughts of your Emily. Come to me
    when you get out of this place.
    I ' ll show you how a real
    woman makes love to men
    such as you, and I don ' t give a damn how high the stakes are.
    Think it's all smoke and mirrors? Perhaps. But at our last session, I noticed a small lapse of judgment. 96
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    It Was Our Second Session
    The first session, I'd pouted, told her nothing except that life was tough at home, and I was