To: condorboy
Date: Thursday, February 2—9:39 PM
Subject: football
Dear Connor,
The director of my school called my parents yesterday and told them I’m almost failing all of my classes. Needless to say, my parents are not happy. Nothing new. I think there is a limit to the amount of anger and disappointment a person can feel, and if you try to add any more, it just spills out and splatters everywhere. My parents have reached this level, so their reaction to this news barely registered. They just added it to the long list of disappointments that they’ll have to get around to feeling eventually.
I’m trying to develop a new technique for dealing with myself. The technique is called “Ignore Isabel.” For instance, yesterday afternoon, I started thinking about how maybe some of the crap adults say is actually true, like maybe how well you do in high school really does affect how well you do in college, which does affect the kind of job you get, which does affect how happy you end up being. And maybe the academic disaster that my senior year is turning out to be will create an even bigger disaster in college, and maybe I can’t cut it at Reed after all, and maybe I’ll have to drop out and I’ll never get a degree, and I’ll never get a job, and then I’ll have to live with my parents for the rest of my life like my sister almost did, except I won’t find a nice wife like Karen to save me. The luckiest I’ll get is a disgusting old sugar daddy with weird sexual fetishes who I’ll have to marry because I could never support myself and it’d be the only way to get out of my parents’ house and no one else would want me—but then I decided FUCK THAT, I’m going to force myself to think about something else, so I called my sister. You heard that right, I actually called her on the phone, but she wasn’t there, and then I thought about calling you, but that scared me and I chickened out. I can’t explain why the phone scares me so much. It just feels unsafe, the way someone can hear you but they can’t see you, so it’s like they’re in control of how they want to interpret your words because you’re not there to make sure they’re hearing you right, and they can be doing all sorts of weird things and you won’t even know about it because you can’t see them, and you can’t go back and edit everything like you can in email.
So I was standing there in the middle of my room with these bad thoughts waiting there under the surface. I could feel them heating up and getting ready to take over, and I was thinking about how I’m just so sick of it, so sick of myself and my own company, sick enough to think my dad’s company would be a better alternative, that WATCHING FOOTBALL would be a better alternative. That shows you how desperate I am. So I spent the next hour sitting on the floor in front of the couch listening to my dad clap and yell at the little men running around on the screen, and I played about a thousand games of solitaire, and there was something oddly comforting about it, about just wasting my time in the company of someone who doesn’t feel the need to talk all the time. When I first showed up, Dad said something like, “To what do I owe this honor?” to which I replied something like, “The rest of the house is infested with poisonous vipers,” and then he just allowed me to sit there in silence with him. My dad’s not so bad. He’s kind of a loser, but he’s a nice loser.
You asked me to let you help me. Distract me, Connor. Distract me with all your might.
Now I have something serious to ask you. It’s something I’ve always wondered: Where do guys get skinny jeans?
Love,
Isabel