Free The Crazy School by Cornelia Read

molestation.”
    “Sookie, give this shit a rest, okay?”
    “I don’t bring it up lightly.”
    “You brought it up because of my posture, for chrissake. What next, you’ll analyze the color of my aura?”
    “You meet all the criteria,” she said. “Discomfort with inti-macy, aversion to physical contact—”
    “Wait, I’m promiscuous and I can’t stand physical contact?”
    Sookie glared. “You dislike being touched whenever someone offers you a gesture of comfort during our sessions.”
    6 8
    CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 68
    28/5/08 2:44:18 PM
    “Want me to sit in Mindy’s lap and lick her forehead?”
    She ignored that. “Then there’s your insomnia, the perfectionism, the distrust of authority fi gures—”
    “Figures such as yourself ?”
    “Not limited to me,” she said. “Your attitude hasn’t gone unnoticed by the administration.”
    “So the hallmark of an un molested childhood is blind faith in authority? I hate to break it to you, Sookie, but that’s not mental health, that’s Stalinism.”
    “Once again, I see I’ve struck a nerve.”
    “Struck a nerve? You’re trying to convince me I’m non compos mentis because I have the gall to insist that my life experience differs from your cheesy movie-of-the-week presumptions about it.”
    “You’d characterize childhood sexual abuse as cheesy?”
    “Don’t be an idiot.”
    “So now I’m Stalin and an idiot?”
    “Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t deny having major gnarly fi ssures in my psyche, okay?” I said. “But you’re trying to shoehorn me into some completely bogus DSM-III template, here,” I said.
    She looked so taken aback. I put my hand on her knee, and said, “I’m sure you mean really well with all of this, and if it were true, you’d be doing a bang-up job and everything, you know? It’s just that Lolita has left the building.”
    She stared into her lap, eyes all glittery with gathering moisture.
    “Look,” I continued, trying to coax a smile out of her, “would it cheer you up if I swam out to the middle of a pond and sank, as proof of my good intentions?”
    Her head snapped up. “Why are you so hostile, Madeline?
    6 9
    CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 69
    28/5/08 2:44:18 PM
    What’s behind your pathological need to belittle everyone you come in contact with?”
    I yanked my hand back.
    “This is a healing, supportive community and all you can do is snipe at us,” she went on. “Maybe I’m off base, concluding you were molested, but I just want to fi gure out what kind of trauma could have produced someone so hell-bent on slapping away the hand of anyone offering the slightest kindness.”
    I crossed my arms. “This is kindness?”
    She nodded. “Absolutely.”
    “And you’ve never questioned anything done here in the name of therapy?”
    She fl inched away from me, dropping her eyes again.
    I leaned toward her. “Explain how dorm parents making a kid kneel on a stone fl oor until three a.m. is kindness, Sookie.”
    “I’m sure Dr. Santangelo would never countenance such a—”
    “Dr. Santangelo spent half this morning’s faculty meeting screaming at Tim because Tim had objected to it. The man was spewing all this corrosive shit about how the kids should shove poor Tim’s head through a blackboard because he’d had the gall to speak up.”
    “That’s not—”
    “Not what, Sookie?” I asked. “Not ‘healing and supportive’?”
    She blanched.
    “You’re forgetting what I tried to discuss yesterday,” I said.
    “How I’m terrifi ed that I’m not doing my best to help these kids. That wasn’t worthy of your consideration, was it?”
    “Madeline, you have to know that I’d never—”
    “I watched a kid practically bleed to death when he punched his hand through a window yesterday. I watched his girlfriend 7 0
    CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 70
    28/5/08 2:44:18 PM
    eat a hunk of his fl esh off the glass after they took him away in the ambulance.”
    Sookie winced.
    “And all Santangelo can do