With or Without You: A Memoir by Domenica Ruta Page A

mother told Michael. “She won’t say it to you out loud because she’s shy, but she loves you.”
    I thought, If she says the word
love
one more time, I’m going to throw up.
    As Michael drained can after can of Budweiser, the big Checker cab swerved gently in and out of the lane. I watched my mother’s reflection in the window. She was smiling dreamily to herself and singing along to the radio.
    “Ashes to ashes, funk to funky. We know Major Tom’s a junkie.”
    At some point she turned around and asked me if I’d had fun in Vermont.
    “That hot-air-balloon festival looked cool. Did you get to go for a ride in one?”
    “No,” I said. A lie. It escaped from my mouth like a puff of smoke, something real, something visible, but only for a moment.
    I had gone up in a hot-air balloon. Uncle Vic had bought us a ride, and this is what I remember: Green mountains, silent and immense. The thin blue vein of a river twisting between them. Giant balloons of all colors floating dumbly across the sky. Above my head the intermittent blast of fire; below me tiny evergreens, tiny buildings, tiny people—everything far away and unreal. But beautiful, and so painful, and then something more than either of those things. Just below the surface of the world, a great mystery was thrumming with the dim insistence of a pulse. It was much bigger than this moment, bigger than my uncle, bigger than my whole life, and I was lucky to be alive for even five minutes and feel it.
    Except, I can’t possibly have held such a thought in my mind. The only thing I remember for sure was hovering above the earth, trying my hardest to forget.

Lonesome
    ———
    W HEN I WAS A KID, THE MOST POPULAR BOOKS FOR GIRLS WAS a series called
The Baby-sitters Club
. There are around two hundred novels in total, all about a girl named Stacey and her vast network of best friends who work with her in a weirdly noncompetitive babysitting collective. Stacey is pretty, athletic, and entrepreneurial, the kind of girl who is overjoyed to get her first menstrual period. Nothing in the known world can get Stacey down. Not when the rival gymnastics team threatens to win the trophy (they will trip over their hubris in the finals, obviously), not even her parents’ sensible, compassionate divorce. (“Now I have
two
bedrooms to decorate!” our heroine might squeal.)
    But Stacey is no immortal. Like the rest of us, she has an Achilles’ heel, and hers lurks inside every cupcake that comes her way. Little Stacey, you see, is deathly diabetic, a fact that she seems to forget at the climax of every
Baby-sitters
novel.
    I read half a dozen of these books even though I hated them. I was afraid that if I didn’t, I would miss out on some arcane girl knowledge that the kids at school could use against me. The plots are formulaic and predictable. There is always a moment when Stacey goes to a birthday party and eats herself into diabetic shock, followed by the inevitable rescue, a trip to the hospital, and an outpouring of love from family, friends, and one cute boy whose devotion to her is as sincere as it is chaste.
    By this point in the book, I truly hoped Stacey would die. I wanted to execute her personally. Set her hair on fire. Hold her face underwater until the bubbles stopped. I hated her. I hated everyone.
    I DIDN’T HAVE MANY friends growing up; then I hit puberty and things got even worse. Here begins my angry phase, the self-centered, quietly homicidal years, that special hiccup of time between my first bra and my first joint. Fortunately for my peers, I spent most of my free time during childhood and early adolescence sleeping. This is no exaggeration. In fourth grade I discovered that I could knock myself out with prescription antihistamines. I would come home from school, flick on the TV, breeze through my homework while watching
Donahue
, then pop a couple of pills during the opening credits of
The Oprah Winfrey Show
. Making it that far into the day without