Chapter 3

I was finally able to free myself from my mother’s interrogation by saying that I had to unpack all the boxes I’d brought home. Which I’d been hoping to put off, but it was easier to do that than be grilled further.

Unpacking didn’t take that long, and I broke down the boxes I’d gotten from the grocery store and tied them up for trash collection later. I wasn’t sure which of my friends were home from school yet, since I didn’t know their finals schedules, but I felt like I needed some down time anyway.

It wasn’t till close to the end of the academic term that I’d discovered the trick of inducing that state of hyper-focus which allowed me to commit the contents of an entire textbook to memory. Well, not word-for-word, of course, but the ideas and the details and how they were all connected. I got an understanding of what the book was trying to say, and was able to recall it for finals. It wasn’t eidetic -- what people like to call photographic -- memory, but it was close enough for me!

Prior to that, it had taken a lot of reading and re-reading to understand the texts, so I’d done almost no recreational reading at all during both semesters, and truthfully I’d missed doing that. So I rummaged around and found a book I’d been meaning to read and took it out to the backyard and read in one of the lounge chairs till I fell asleep.

I woke when my mother called me in for dinner. She had spent the better part of the day, I expect, cooking. She was a good cook, but didn’t always have time to do the more complex meals. But food for her was also kind of a reward mechanism, to remind us what we would be missing should we leave home. As I had done.

True, it was because I’d gone off to college, but to her it was still abandonment of a kind, and she wanted to remind me of that. So dinner was all my favorite foods. Way more than I was comfortable eating, but I made sure to try a little of each and to tell her how good it was. And as soon as I did, she felt she had made her point.

My sister joined us after having spent the afternoon with her girlfriends. She still had some weeks of school left, but she was already on summer vacation in her mind. For whatever reason, she didn’t enjoy certain school subjects as I had. Rather, it was a chore for her which she completed grudgingly. School was more of a social environment for her.

True, I didn’t like some of the classes I’d had to take, but at least I understood that I had to get through them. And a few of them I’d really enjoyed, especially the math classes. But Mindy was a people person, that’s what she liked.

Thus her questions about college, which she grilled me about over dinner, were about the social aspects, the parties, the clubs and bars we went to, who I hung out with, and the like. I hoped that she’d start to focus a bit more on learning, or life was going to teach her a very hard lesson when she finally finished school, whether it was high school or college if she could be talked into it.

Over Christmas vacation, I’d left her a few “suggestions” via linkcasting that I’d hoped would make her more receptive to learning, the first time I’d tried that on a member of my family. I’d have to poke into that a bit more in the next few days to see if they’d had any lasting effect.

So my answers emphasized how little time I’d had to socialize because the classes were so intense. She looked disappointed.

After the dishes were done, I took my book upstairs and read. Every so often, a voice in the back of my head would start to whisper that I should be making plans for what I was going to do with my summer.

I never heard this voice until I met Karen, who had learned early on how to utilize her time most effectively, even during vacation. I had apparently caught it from her, and now it was nattering about doing something useful with my time. I should find a job, it said, at minimum so I’d have some money to spend come the new school year.

It wasn’t entirely wrong, but I felt I’d earned some lazy days after all the work I’d put in over the last nine months. But it had set my unconscious to the task of listing possible uses of my time. I went back to my book.