We Regret to Inform You

"Would you stop saying 'we'? Did it ever occur to you that maybe I was more than just an extension of you?"
"Of course you are," she said. "I never said—"
"You did say it," I said. "You`ve been living it. For the last eighteen years."
"Would you prefer that I didn`t care what happened to you?"
"Sometimes I think it would be better if you didn`t."
"Right, because it would be so wonderful to have a mother who didn`t care if you ended up dead in a ditch."
I pointed a finger at her. "And that`s the problem! Right there! There`s a billion possibilities between Ivy League and dead in a ditch. But you don`t see that, do you? It`s either one or the other. I`m ether the golden child or I`m worthless."

Think about it that way. At any point in your life, you are two people. There`s the Mischa you think you are, and then there`s the Mischa everyone else sees. The second one is the one who gets you into college, or not. That `s the one who applies for jobs, and mortgages, and gets written about in the paper. Call her the Mischa-bot, if you will. Your brand. Your avatar. You`ve worked for the last twelve years programming her with all the bits you want her to have. The right classes. The right extracurriculars. All that garbage you do as a means to an end.

I woke up in a sweat because I`d had the shower dream again. It was not my favorite, and I had it so often on test nights that I`d actually started expecting it, except I didn`t usually have it on normal nights. It goes like this: I`m in the shower, only somehow the drain stops working, and the whole thing starts filling up with water, faster and faster, until I`m treading water up by the ceiling, and then the water goes up over my head and I realize I`m drowning. The thing is, I don`t have to drown; I could just open the shower door, but my entire calculus class is standing in my bathroom watching, and some of them are, like, talking notes? So if I open it, I will wash out of the shower and wind up naked on my bathroom floor in front of everyone.
I never open the door. I always drown.