Problems Read Online Free PDF

why she was fucked-up.
    â€œEight,” I said, looking down to avoid her stare.
    â€œLooks bigger,” she said. Was she crazy or lonely? Crazy people could be lonely. Loneliness could drive you crazy.
    I put my bus pass in the slot. The driver smiled at me. Hot black guy. He had a shaved head, and I could see how muscular his body was through his blue MTA shirt. I imagined lying flat on my belly. How he would spread my ass cheeks so he could get a good look at his cock going in and out of me. Take out all his aggression about his stupid life driving in circles. The smell of potato chips hit me as I walked toward the back of the bus and sat next to a window. Someone’s headphones were too loud.
    My phone was ringing.
    â€œHave you heard back about your thesis?” my mother yelled into the phone.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou should e-mail him.”
    â€œIt’s only been three days since I turned it in.” This was a lie. I hadn’t turned in the fucking thing. It was another cloud hanging over me.
    â€œIf you don’t hear back by the end of the week—”
    â€œI will, I will,” I said, regretting I’d picked up the phone.
    â€œDid you read the story I sent you about the baby eagle in Mexico?”
    â€œNo, I didn’t,” I said, feeling guilty I had deleted the article.
    â€œThere was this boy named Miguel,” she started.
    The guilt instantly turned into annoyance. Not now. Not now . “I’m on the bus,” I said, digging around for ChapStick.
    She kept saying, “What?” and I kept screaming into the phone, “I’m on the bus, Mom. I can’t talk right now!” Why did the whole bus decide to be completely silent while I was on the phone? No teenagers laughing, no cell phones ringing, no mothers yelling at their kids not to touch the gum squished between the seat and the window. That feeling of embarrassment that fills you when you see people be mean to their parents. “I can’t talk to you! Because I’m on the bus!”
    Finally she understood, but she took it as a piece of information, not as a reason to stop talking and get off the phone, because she wasn’t a normal person. She was a mother. Her frontal lobe had come out with her placenta. “So what day will you be coming up for your uncle’s retirement party?”
    This was a setup. She asked the question as if we had previously discussed it. When I told her I wasn’t coming, she would act shocked and demand to know why, and then it was just a short hop and skip to the guilt trip, with a brief layover in Obligation City. These were our roles. This was our script.
    â€œI can’t come because I have to work.”
    There was a pause. I was off script. She had to improvise.
    â€œWhy can’t someone just cover your shift?” Pretty good.
    â€œI asked, but nobody can.” Volley it back.
    â€œIt’s just a bookstore! It’s not like a real job.”
    â€œThanks. It’s just my life!” A fat woman I didn’t know existed till that moment turned around to stare. It was as if God had put extras on a bus to remind me what a brat I was.
    â€œWhen are you going to start sending out those applications for teaching?”
    â€œI have to graduate first! God! I told you that!”
    â€œThen if you turned in your thesis you need to bother them.”
    â€œIt’s only been three fucking days since I turned it in!”
    When I was a kid, I brought home a picture from art class. My mother stared at it with a puzzled look and said, “Trees aren’t purple. What is wrong with you?” I watched it sway in the air before it landed in the garbage. On the fridge was a test my brother had gotten an A on. A concise little story that played well in therapy.
    Before I was about to hang up self-righteously, she said, “I’ve had trouble swallowing lately.” And just like that, she’d won. It didn’t