Sounds Like Crazy Read Online Free Page B

recognized the specific way her mouth shaped right before the words came out.
    “I am always going to protect you.” Sarah squeezed my hand and my chest ached. Just once I wanted to be the one who protected her. It wasn’t fair that she seemed to walk through life as my bulletproof vest.
    I sighed, then said, “I expected Mom to take comfort in the fact that my mind was not wasting. This seemed to be her chief complaint,” I said. “I addressed it and still she’s not satisfied.”

    “We are now on the avenue called sarcastic,” said Sarah.“Maybe she is right. You do keep working as a waitress to spite her.”
    A few years earlier my mother had asked Sarah how someone with an expensive education could have no ambition other than to serve breakfast. It was an appropriate question for most parents, and had my mother been like most parents, we would have had a credible, albeit misleading answer prepared. My mother so rarely asked questions about me or my life that her query had caught Sarah off guard. Her answer came across as vague and neutral, and my mother immediately interpreted my behavior as a slight against her. I’d never admit it to Sarah, but I did derive a certain pleasure from imagining my mother trying to explain my career to her friends.
    Betty Jane stirred inside my head. I looked at the view out my bedroom window and whispered, “Not her.”
    “What? And why are you whispering?” Sarah raised her voice.
    I reached out my hand to cover her mouth while I pressed my forefinger to mine and shushed. “Betty Jane,” I said softly. “I don’t want to wake her.” If Betty Jane was a mean drunk, she’d definitely be meaner the day after, with a hangover.
    “I’m not going to whisper,” said Sarah.
    “Please, Sarah. You asked that she not appear. Please. You’re leaving tomorrow but I’ll still be here with her.”
    “Oh, all right.” Sarah made a face but her voice had dropped a few decibals. “What did you just say?” she whispered.
    “Nothing.”
    Waiting tables in a diner meant my means were meager, which was the main source of contention between me and Betty Jane. I wanted to work as a waitress until I retired to keep that one tiny corner of control. She was inclined to charm her way into earning every penny possible waiting tables. Explaining to
Sarah that my battle was with Betty Jane and not my mother would take us straight out of the valley of whispers and right up the mountain of screams.
    Sarah sat silent, no doubt struggling over whether to push me or let it lie. I bit my lower lip. Please let it lie. I bit harder and tasted blood. Sarah’s face became pained.
    “I can’t keep excusing your working as a waitress,” she said quietly.
    I mouthed the words thank you.
    “Holly, your inability to exercise any control over your life . . .” Sarah let the rest of the comment hang suspended. This tired discussion only resulted in my feeling more inadequate, and inadequacy was not exactly a means to motivate me. It was easy to hide under the blanket of anonymity a big city offered, but that just covered my social anxiety and failure to manage many areas of daily life. It didn’t get rid of them.
    “I’m doing the best I can,” I said sadly. “Asking me to lead your version of a normal life is like asking a quadriplegic to get up and walk. Of course he is desperate to stand up and run as fast as he can away from that chair. But he can’t, and neither can I.”
    Sarah frowned and shook her head.“Holly, nobody is asking—”
    I stopped her with the palm of my hand.“I know my inability to lead a normal life, with a normal job, a normal relationship, and normal friends after all these years seems excessive and unreasonable, but I’m not you and I never will be.”
    “You’re spending way too much money, Holly,” said Sarah. “We’re having a hard time explaining the extravagant charges to the Father.”
    I laughed softly. I had started calling my father “the Father”