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

any emotional pyrotechnics from my mother seemed like a real victory, and I would reward myself with a nice, deep, chemically induced nap. A few hours later, I would wake up and microwave a frozen lasagna to eat in bed while watching horrible network sitcoms. It’s possible that I hated the characters on these TV shows even more than the girls in
The Baby-sitters Club
. Yet I watched my sitcoms religiously. Even if I was engrossed in a book, I would leave the television on in the background. I didn’t know how to face the night without it. What would happen to me alone in my room, alone with my thoughts?
    Many nights, if my mother was rehearsing her next performance as Medea, or the networks were in reruns, I would take another allergy pill after dinner and pass out in my school uniform. Why bother taking it off? I’d just have to put it on again in the morning. If only there were a button I could push to fast-forward me into the future, I used to think, then I’d be an old lady with everything already behind me. I had no idea what
everything
was or even looked like. I just knew that I wanted it to be over. Life felt trapped in slow motion, childhood was going to last forever, and I would always be bracing myself, squeezing my pencil so tightly my knuckles turned white,grinning and bearing, never knowing when or if it would ever be safe to relax.
    DESPITE ALL THIS, I started adolescence as a minor hero. In sixth grade I got boobs. They have since shrunk significantly, now sad puckered little things, like partially deflated balloons the day after a birthday party. A decade of yo-yo dieting will do that. But their debut was sudden, disproportionate, and newsworthy, as eighty percent of the girls at school were still flat-chested. The few girls who could fill a bra quickly formed a clique and recruited me to join. It was a very calculated, kind of ingenious, preteen maneuver: the deliberate consolidation of power. As far as I could tell, boobs were the only things we had in common; but for a brief period I walked with the alpha girls, floating high on the fumes of inclusion. Still an insatiable overachiever, I was always waving my hand hysterically in the air—
Please, please call on me! I know the answer! Pick me!
The girls in my clique tolerated this for a while. They already had a slutty girl, a rich girl, and a jock girl in their ranks, so a brainy one rounded out our portfolio.
    By eighth grade Mum got ambitious. She had her heart set on a college scholarship, though college was still four years away, and began prodding me to get serious about extracurriculars. “Good grades aren’t enough these days,” she said. “You’ll need to start doing volunteer work and play a team sport.”
    She signed me up to start babysitting little kids at a domestic-violence shelter. Class president proved to be an easy win and carried no real responsibilities. For a sport, I picked cheerleading, because, at the very least, it spared me the indignity of having to use a mouth guard. Our school was tiny, and every girl who tried out got a spot on the team. As we were all equally inept at back handsprings, the role of captain was chosen based on a one-page essay entitled “Why I Should Be Captain of the Cheerleaders.” On the second day of practice, the coaches passed out sheets of paper and told us that we had twenty minutes to write.
    I looked around at all the girls spread out on the gymnasiumfloor, with their sparkly notebooks and pens, and almost felt sorry for them. It wasn’t fair, really, how devastated they were about to be. I toyed with the idea of humbly withdrawing from the contest. Then I cracked my knuckles, licked my lips, and scribbled out the Gettysburg Address of cheerleading.
    That winter I was chosen for the role of the Virgin Mary in the annual Christmas pageant. Since this was the highest honor a girl at my school could achieve, the person who would play Mary became a topic of speculation at least a year in