A Really Awesome Mess Read Free

million hoops.
    “Looking forward to seeing you again at the end of summer term for Family Weekend,” the woman in the sweatshirt called after my mom and sister as they left my room. Then she turned and handed me a striped hospital gown. “I’ll need you to get undressed and put this on, Mei-Xing.”
    She said it like this:
Meee-zing
.
    I glared at her. “First of all, it’s pronounced
May-shing
. Second of all, I go by Emmy, so don’t ever call me that again. And third, I’m not carrying or packing, so I won’t be needing this.” I threw the gown back at her.
    The woman just smiled and handed it to me again. “You’ll get used to the rules here soon enough. And rule number one is thatevery time you come in from being off campus, you have to give us a urine sample and have a strip search.”
    “And if I don’t do it?” I asked.
    “I’m confident you’ll make the right choice. Because let’s face it—all the wrong choices are what landed you here in the first place. And I’d hazard a guess that what you want most right now is to go home. Following the rules is your quickest way back.”
    The lady was right. I was completely screwed, so I grabbed the pee cup and gown and did what I was told.

ACETAMINOPHEN .
    This is the word that should pretty much convince anybody it wasn’t a serious suicide attempt. I mean, it’s freaking Tylenol. We’ve got a three-story house. A header off the roof into the driveway would have finished me off way more efficiently than seventeen over-the-counter painkillers.
    Which, as it turned out, would have finished me off in a pretty nasty way if I hadn’t received medical intervention. Yeah, I’ve got Internet access like everybody else, so I could have looked it up, but I honestly didn’t know. I figured, pop a few Tylenol just to put a scare into Mom, no big deal. Turns out the dose I took actually would have been fatal if I hadn’t gotten the old stomach pump (inaccurately named, by the way. It was actually a stomachvacuum. Like they literally snaked a tube down my throat and sucked out everything in my stomach. It would have been cool as hell if it were happening to somebody else).
    And then some medicine to make sure my liver didn’t shut down.
    It wasn’t a fun night for anybody, but, I mean, okay, classic cry for help, we’ll deal with it in therapy.
    But then I guess I was “acting out sexually.” Apparently this is some kind of sign of adolescent mental health issues. But as far as I could tell from everybody I know, it is not acting out sexually that causes the mental health issues. Those kids with the “purity rings” at school? Those were some psychos. Me?
    Well, I got flown out to Dad’s house for Memorial Day weekend because Mom thought reconnecting with him and getting a change of scenery would help me. Those were her words, though I would not have used “reconnect,” because it implied there had once been a connection. Mom left Dad when I was two and a half, and he hadn’t been much of a dad since then, so if there ever was a connection, it was from before I remember, which means it didn’t count, at least as far as I was concerned.
    I guess Dad didn’t really want to reconnect, or, actually, connect either. He bought me a weekend pass to King’s Island, borrowed Aunt Meg’s old Infiniti for me, and said he had a lot of work to catch up on, good to see you buddy.
    Which was how I wound up acting out sexually. Getting ablow job at Dad’s house from a girl I’d just met at King’s Island. After we rode The Beast. Write your own joke, and while you’re doing that, I’ll just remember … I think her name was Caitlin, but it could have been Kristin—something that ended in “in.” So we rode The Beast together, just because we were both alone in line at the same time, and then I was like, let me buy you something fried and disgusting, and she was like cool, and then she was talking about her stupid boyfriend who she just dumped in the