Free Notes on a Near-Life Experience by Olivia Birdsall

am too shocked to say more.
    “Take care, sweetie. And would you mind telling your brother and sister, in case I don't get a chance to? And your mother—” He catches himself before he can finish. “Have a good day at school.”
    And he drives off.
    It's strange the way sometimes your life feels like a sitcom or a movie. Like you are watching it but not really living it. Like it's too bizarre or too clichéd to be real. My parents are separated, probably getting a divorce, so my older brother sometimes acts like he's my father, or like he's a mysterious superhero or criminal, and my little sister thinks nothing out of the ordinary is going on—maybe she's just pretending, too, who knows. It seems like a case study from a self-help book, or an episode of the Dr. Phil show—clichéd. My father driving me to school in a bathrobe, like bathwear has suddenly come into fashion or something, that's bizarre.
    I breathe deeply and walk into my history class, expecting some kind of reprimand for being late, but my teacher is too absorbed in what he's saying to comment. He just nods at my seat and keeps talking.
    “Many of our founding fathers had venereal diseases, the most common being syphilis. They weren't the paragons of morality and virtue your books would have you believe they were, at least not in the sense the book implies. They were powerful men of vision, but they were human nonetheless….” Mr. Bingler lectures nonstop for the rest of the period, attempting to dispel all the myths surrounding Colonial American history and various “truths” and myths about half of the presidents since then. I try not to listen. I try not to think about the flaws we discover in people we thought we could count on. It's so much easier to keep things flat and simple, to live in a myth or a fairy tale. Your body can only digestso much new “truth” and information in a day. Being driven to school by a lunatic in a bathrobe who claims to be my father and learning that fat old Ben Franklin, who I've thought of since third grade as the guy with the kite and the key who discovered electricity, was some kind of lady-killer with an STD are already more than I can stomach. I feel like I am going to cry or faint or go completely crazy—start talking to myself or forgetting to put on key articles of clothing before I leave the house. When the laws of the universe all stop working but the world keeps spinning, how do you keep your balance? How do you stop yourself from falling, from flying into oblivion?
    At lunch, I look for Allen, but I don't see him anywhere. His pea green VW bus, which is usually conspicuous in a parking lot full of SUVs and three-year-old BMWs, is nowhere to be seen.

I REMEMBER WHAT HALEY SAID ABOUT THE FREAK BATHROOMS , the ones none of our friends ever use. Maybe I'm one of the freaks now; maybe I've been one all along. I decide to use one of them, the one in the math building—don't get me wrong, I'm curious about industrial technology, but I've got to pace myself. When I walk through the door, it's like walking into one of those old movies from the eighties about high school, the ones that show girls with too much makeup on smoking in the bathroom while they try to hide their hickeys with cheap cover-up and talk about abortions. Well, it's almost like that. It smells like smoke and there're trashy girls. I rush into an empty stall. While I sit there—too nervous to pee, for some reason—I listen to them talk.
    “I had to call into work for her this morning becauseshe was too wasted to get out of bed. I told them it was food
    poisoning.”
    “They believe you?”
    “Who knows. They acted like they did. They have to. Who else are they gonna find to work that crap job?”
    I sit in the stall, not quite understanding what I'm doing there, trying to breathe, when I find myself in tears. Not just crying quietly, but sobbing, unable to catch my breath, making loud gulping sounds. I haven't cried like this since I