Free Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel Page A

happen? I would never know.
    I must have understood that my material circumstances were such that I alone could keep myself from falling. I mean, if I were a rich kid with stable, self-sufficient parents whom I thought I could trust to attend to themselves and to me, and I were heading for a tailspin, I might feel free to let myself free-fall, knowing that someone else would provide a bottom upon which I might eventually bottom out. But what if you are the only resting point you know of? What if you are absolute zero? What if only you can catch yourself?
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    Mr. Grubman, the very strange science teacher who wears a beret and black turtlenecks every day like a beatnik, keeps me after class because he says my behavior is disruptive. I can’t imagine what he means: I’m not one of those kids who sets all the frogs free before we can dissect them, and anyway what we’re mostly doing in class is squeezing sour milk through cheesecloth as a way to help us understand the phenomena of everyday life. He’s just the latest in a long series of science teachers, maybe the fourth this year, so it’s hard for me to take him seriously. He’s probably not the one who will be giving me a grade in the end because he too will surely be replaced, and any way grades don’t matter to me anymore because there’s no future.
    At any rate, Mr. Grubman doesn’t seem to want to talk to me about much. He says, You seem like maybe you’re too intense for this world, and I wonder where he’s getting that from. He barely knows me. It sounds like he’s suggesting I kill myself.
    He keeps me in the science lab for hours. I miss a bunch of classes, and even eat my lunch, cottage cheese with pineapples in a thermos as usual, in his classroom. After a while I have no idea what he wants from me, I am only glad that I don’t have to sit through math and English or play kickball during gym because he is keeping me here as a punishment. He asks me lots of questions that I don’t know the answers to. He asks, So are you one of those girls who likes fast guys with fast cars?
    I don’t say what I am really thinking, which is that I’m only twelve so I don’t know and in New York no one drives anyway. Instead, I just say, Yes, yes I do.
    It seems like the right answer.
    Boys are one interest of mine that never really goes away, though to little avail. None of the guys I go to school with notice me. I’m not even on their lists of alternatives after all the girls with names like Jennifer and Alison and Nicole don’t work out. It’s not that I’m unattractive—I think that maybe I’m even pretty, but my look appeals to an entirely different demographic group. I have cultivated a certain shaggy paleness, I have that boozy and bruise-eyed Chrissie Hynde look, so I end up attracting older guys who are used to women who aren’t bright and cheery. Or else I pick up these rocker types, like the guy in the heavy metal band who works at a store called the World Import at the Bergen Mall, where I sometimes go when I cut school. Or the man who gave me his business card during a riot at a Clash concert who takes me to lunch every so often. Or the twenty-three-year-old son of the owner of Camp Tagola, who is actually in law school and is very straight and decent, but still is attracted enough to me that it becomes kind of a scandal around camp and the head counselor tells us both that we have to stop taking walks together or sitting side by side while we watch
Stalag
17. But nothing much ever happens with any of these men. It’s all just so much lunch, so many walks and talks, because I’m too young and they’re too old so they feel stupid. I find myself praying, wishing, hoping that God could just give me whatever it is that makes girls attractive to boys my age.
    And then one day I meet my friend’s older brother, a Springsteen fan who’s a senior in high school. We