Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge - eARC Read Free Page A

gleefully. “You can make a wig out of it!”
    Since New Orleans I’ve shaved my head bald. Not that it matters to my mother anymore. We haven’t spoken since Thornton’s funeral nor do I ever intend to see her again.
    About that time, my mom arranged for a series of psychological and learning tests through one of her “close personal friends” at the University of Kentucky. (Did I mention Mom eventually went gay?) I had become “obsessively violent” (I really wanted to play football), “sexually dangerous” (I was dating a seventh-grade cheerleader) and had “clear learning disabilities” (perfect straight-C average).
    Between bouts of testing I was subjected to “therapy” which consisted primarily of ongoing militant feminists rants about the evil male patriarchy. The tests came back that I was:
    Borderline paranoid schizophrenic, check; oppositionally defiant, at least with idiots and bitches like my parents and their friends (well, except for some of my dad’s “close personal friends” who even at the age of twelve I tried like hell to pick up); obsessive heterosexual (that means so straight you can use me to adjust lasers); and, oh yeah, that IQ test?
    My bastard brother had crowed like mad when he’d tested as a 136 IQ and immediately joined MENSA. My parents were both high IQ academics, proud MENSA members with letters after their name and papers to their credit. I was the official family moron.
    It was like that line in The Princess Bride.
    “Have you ever heard of Aristotle? Socrates? Morons!”
    Yeah. It was like that. I’d decided to just see if I was as smart as I thought I was and blasted through the test full bore.
    Einstein would have gone “Whoa!”
    “Figures,” I said when shown the results.
    “How can you have this IQ and get straight Cs ?” my mom shouted at me.
    “Got any idea how hard it is to get straight Cs?” I asked. “I mean, a perfect C average? You said I needed to be ‘socially appropriate’ in my academics all the way back in kindergarten and what’s more ‘appropriate ’ than absolutely in the middle of the pack?”
    I’d carefully kept from her that I was already reading some of her research material, even the stuff in ancient languages. I’d figured out Latin at six, Greek at seven and Aramaic by the time I was nine. By twelve I was working on Hindi and Hittite, having already mastered Coptic and hieroglyphs.
    On the JROTC thing. When I started high school, I tried every gambit to get into “normal” stuff. My mother was, in general, against all competitive sports—at least if it was a “go/no-go” situation. Football? Too violent. Baseball? Supports the concept of linear thinking. (Seriously.) She was fine with soccer which was also “go/no-go.” See the above about being able to justify anything that fit her world view. Soccer was European and thus good. So, I tried out for soccer. I’m naturally athletic, fast as hell and had been kicking a soccer ball around since I was a kid since soccer was “appropriate.” The coach moved me straight to varsity forward. Mom even came out for the first game. I scored both goals and she happily congratulated me for I think the first time in my life.
    I quit immediately. Damned if I was going to do anything my mother supported . There had to be something wrong with it. Which there is. Soccer is for pussies.
    But giving her the JROTC papers was mostly an exercise in seeing if I could really get her to stroke out. She, recognizing the gambit for what it was, tore the papers up in front of me, threw them in my face and then slapped me, not for the first time. She couldn’t hit nearly as hard as Thornton, who thank God was safely in Stanford by that time, so I just took it, per normal, and looked at her.
    “That all you got?” I asked. “You hit like a girl. And what about violence never settles anything?”
    Oh, I really loved when I started getting smart and knowledgeable enough to have that argument with