Read Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything for Free Online

time her rampage, sneaking glances at the clock on my desk. The only way to make it through.
    “Don't take your anger at Pop out on me,” I finally tell her, rolling my eyes at the ceiling. “It's obvious you're really upset about something else, not my stupid room.”
    “Don't give me psychobabble, young lady,” Ma snaps—and her face looks angrier than I've ever seen it. Honestly, it's scary. “If you want psychobabble,” she continues, “start analyzing your own bedroom.”
    “What?”
    “You heard me. An anal-retentive inability to let anything go—does that ring a bell with you, Gretchen? Living in mess so bad you can't find anything you ever need—shall we say, what? Deliberately self-sabotaging? Or shall we discuss your collections, which any juniorpsychoanalyst would label borderline obsessive? Or your constant lateness? Or your bad marks in literature? Hey, we could have a whole conversation about learned helplessness, if you want to start psychoanalyzing each other.”
    I've obviously crossed some line. She's never yelled at me this way before. Usually, it's “Clean up your stuff, why don't you do what I tell you?”
    “Leave me alone,” I spit back. “I'm a teenager. I'm supposed to be messy.”
    “
No one
is supposed to live like this,” Ma says, climbing over piles of stuff to make her way out of my room. “I don't know what we did wrong with you, I really don't.”
    And she bursts into tears, leaning her forehead against the doorframe.
    I stay sitting on the bed for a bit, scared to go pat her on the back because she just said all these horrible things to me and they're starting to sink in,
    and they seem kinda true, hellish as that is,
    and I don't want her to start saying any more of them because I honestly don't think I can take it—
    but eventually I scrounge a packet of tissues out from under my bed and offer them to her. She takes a handful and blows her nose, loudly.
    “I'm sorry, Gretchen,” she sniffs. “I shouldn't say those things to you. They're not true, they're not what Ithink, I—with your father gone this time, everything seems different. It's not like the other times he's been away on business. More like he's left for good.”
    “Yeah,” I say.
    “And I'm so overwhelmed with organizing the move and I have to hand a chapter of my dissertation in to my advisor, and it's late, and I…I guess what you said hit a nerve. About me being mad at Pop.”
    “It's okay,” I say as I walk to the kitchen to get her a drink of water.
    But it's not okay. She can't unsay the stuff she said.
    Am I self-sabotaging?
Or borderline obsessive?
What did she mean, learned helplessness?
    I fill up my backpack, including the self-portrait I drew for art class today, and put some Vaseline on my lips. I kiss Ma goodbye and give her this pair of funky green sunglasses I bought on the street for nine dollars, a present for her Caribbean vacation. “I have to get on the train.”
    She gets all weepy again and snuffles into my neck as she hugs me, and says she's sorry four more times about the yelling, because she won't see me again until she gets back in ten days. She leaves money on the dining table, and shows me a long note she's written detailing which neighbors have extra keys, her flightinformation, Marianne's cell phone and where Pop is in Hong Kong.
    And I leave.

o n the subway, I'm trying to read my social studies homework when this really old man—I mean, he's like ninety-five—stumbles as he's heading toward the seat next to me. He sits full-out in my lap, like a baby, and I can smell his cigar and old-person smell as I catch his arm and help steady him. “Pardon, pardon,” he says.
    “That's okay.” I smile.
    When he's stable again, I help him into the seat next to me. We nod at each other, and I feel funny going back to my homework after what happened. He puts a tiny, wizened hand on my arm. “You never expect what you'll be at the end of your days,” he