Shattered Glass and a 200 IQ

After the chest burning, after learning I am loved by my too-often naked monster, I start trying to solve the technical problems of faking a suicide attempt.

But I am notoriously poor at working with my hands. I score in the 25th percentile on the portion of an aptitude test that covers spatial and mechanical reasoning. The practical aspects of how to manage a noose, how to let a chair fall without actually killing myself, and then how to make it all seem like a near-miss, while giving the performance of my life when found by my father, proves overly complicated.

I'm ashamed for never having the guts to go through with it. It might have worked, bringing me back to my mother a couple of years earlier than it happens.

At least my discovery of His love emboldens me to be more forthright about wanting to leave. It's so hard to get any time away from Adam, the naked father, even on just a daily basis. He keeps my brothers out of school because he thinks it will be bad for them. Attempts by our step-mother Laura at home schooling are haphazard at best. I not only like to read, but rebel-with-a-cause to the end, I always insist on going to school. I demand it. No matter how much he tries to sweet-talk me out of it. How else could I get the hell out of the house?

Once we move out of Blanco and to a ranch some seventeen miles away, I have to get up very early to catch the bus for school, to go on a two-hour ride that snakes through miles of country roads. I often go out an hour or so early, even before sunrise, to the highway, Ranch Road 165, in front of the gate and the cattle guard that leads to the road on our property, and I wait for the bus, happy to be alone, singing, dreaming of how famous I will be one day.

Maybe Adam thinks we don't need school because his brilliance will rub off on us through osmosis. He tells me he is the smartest person I will ever know in my life. I want to laugh, knowing I shouldn't, but not knowing why. Family lore has it that his childhood IQ score is over 200.

Adam enjoys telling a story about what happens when his parents, Buddie and Zadie, send him to military school hoping to gain control of the little fiend in their midst. One day when he and his fellow military students are in formation outside, my dad becomes obsessed with the idea that he has to quench his thirst immediately with orange juice. He does not raise his hand or ask permission, he just breaks rank and begins making his way back to the building. His commander, or whatever such people are called at military academies, orders him to stop. Adam doesn't respond, just keeps going. The commander then orders several of the older students with some sort of defined older student responsibilities to go after Adam. My father outruns them, refusing to stop. As the chase becomes more in earnest he just runs faster, making his way to the building, tearing down the hall, and sprinting across the mess hall to the kitchen. It is locked. He breaks the glass with his fists, lets himself in, and right there, bleeding all over the floor, pours himself his glass of orange juice.

We all laugh a lot when he tells this story, like trained monkeys. We knew we are supposed to find his sort of "Billy Jack" iconoclasm worthy of respect. I think of it now and I want to peel off all my skin and throw myself into a vat of boiling oil.