Crazy Enough by Storm Large Page B

never finished there. I went there from third to fifth grade. I heard we couldn’t afford the tuition because of the terrible hospital bills that decimated my dad’s savings. I also heard rumblings that my brothers and I started displaying behavior problems and were asked to leave.
    I hated it there. Every day was the worst day ever. Fay was where I learned that if you were rich, or pretty, you had quite an advantage over other humans. If you were both, well, then, you could be as big a cunt as you could be and it would be just ducky with the whole world. I wasn’t rich or pretty. I had behavior problems. Fay was where my werewolf phase started.
    However, Annie was a ray of sunshine that would peek through the black, preppy clouds at that school. I only had her as a teacher once in three years, but I would see her now and then in the hall or in the dining room and I would literally gasp like a kid lost in a huge foreign mall finally seeing her family. I would hug her, trying to soakin as much of her big cinnamon and nutmeg scented, roundy round momness as I could. That would carry me through the day.
    One day, as spring seemed to be on its way, it was warm enough, in my estimation, to wear a dress. I pulled on my dress, slipped into my brother’s rain boots, had a bowl of Cheerios and hoofed it off to Fay. My dad was already long into his first class or meeting or checking light bulbs in his office, (any old thing to keep him away from the house) by my first bite of sugar heaped oat-y goodness. Otherwise, he might have not let me leave.
    The beautiful, rich Izod princes and princesses laughed at me openly for my big mouth, crazy dreams, and fashion limitations, but on this day the amusement was apparent before I even put my book bag down. Word must have gotten to Annie, or maybe it was dumb luck, but she swooped in, gave a look that silenced the cackling bastards and took me to her house down the road.
    â€œA little cold for a summer dress, Stormy. Put these on.” As she laid out some of Daphne’s clothes for me, hot tears started pouring down my face. I thought the dress had maybe been too short, but I wanted it to be spring, so I wore it. Standing in my best friend’s Laura Ashley bedroom as I put on some of her corduroys, I realized my faux pas. The dress, which had been fine last summer, was a little seasonally inappropriate. More important, I had grown so dramatically since the summer, that it was now, technically, a seasonally inappropriate shirt that barely covered my ass.
    Annie passed no judgment, nor scolded me, and, most important, did not tell my father. He heard it years later as an amusing, and now harmless, look-back-and-laugh story. I went back to school with her and nobody said a word to me about it afterward. She was magnificent.
    Daphne loved my mother and called her Mom as well. Besidesthe shicken mush episode, when we were seven, she had been privy to some other kinds of crazy from my mom. But Daphne felt sorry for her, and would reprimand me, now and then, for being hard about it.
    When we were twelve, Daphne came over to see if I was home, and found Mom all alone in the kitchen, crying, smoking cigarette after cigarette. “What’s wrong, Mom?” Daphne asked as she gave her a hug, waiting for her to compose herself.
    Mom blew her nose, wiped her face, lit another Kool Mild, and, as if she were an actress in a TV movie about her own life, looked at my little friend and said, “I have bone cancer.” She then proceeded to tell Daphne that she didn’t know how to tell us because, she explained, we all hated her. She was afraid nobody would care, “They’re already so mad at me; please don’t tell anyone!”
    What Daphne didn’t know was that Mom had not been diagnosed with anything of the sort; it was just wishful thinking on her part. Mom simply longed to get bone cancer. If she could’ve caught it somehow, or contracted it by sheer