Read Going Off Script for Free Online Page B

appeared out of nowhere behind me, lights flashing and siren whooping. I rolled down my window.
    “License and registration,” the officer said.
    “Oh, shoot, I forgot my license,” I said. “Can I just give you my name and birthdate?” I rattled off Monica’s information, and he went back to his car to check it out. I had a quick flash of myself posing for a mug shot in striped jailbird pajamas, and my whole school finding out—they’d probably use it in the yearbook—but it wouldn’t really matter because my parents would kill me, anyway, and I wouldn’t have to face my classmates again. Just as the cop walked back up to my window, another car suddenly shot past us, tires squealing. “Holy shit!” the cop swore. “It’s your lucky day,” he told me before running back to his patrol car to give chase. I somehow found my way home, and Mama and Babbo never missed me or the Mercedes.
    I had something of a Roadrunner versus Wile E. Coyote relationship with the police. I got pulled over again when I went joyriding in my friend Liz’s family station wagon (with Liz riding shotgun, of course). I slammed the gas and fled as the policeman was getting out of his squad car. He gave chase, but I lost him in the leafy neighborhoods of Bethesda by wheeling into a driveway and pulling into a random garage whose doorwas open. I turned the lights out, and Liz and I crouched down in the seat for twenty minutes to be sure the coast was clear. Knowing I had shaken the police gave me the best adrenaline rush ever. I was such a little gangster, I even made it a habit to take the license plates off whatever car I was borrowing without permission (or a license).
    On yet another occasion, Liz, my friend Alison, and I heard about a party we wanted to go to late one night during a sleepover freshman year. Securing that particular ride had put my formidable acting experience to the test, since it was Alison’s grandmother’s car we were borrowing, the keys were on her grandmother’s nightstand, and her grandmother was asleep in the bed next to them. Alison had been a less than enthusiastic accomplice (
“Are you crazy? We can’t steal Nana’s car!”
), but I was persuasive (
“Sure, we can! Watch this!”
). Liz and I tiptoed into the room. Nana was not the heavy sleeper my own Nonna had been—she definitely would have noticed a Play-Doh penis plopping onto her pillow—and she stirred as we inched our way inside her bedroom.
    “Alison, honey, is that you?” she murmured.
    “Yes, Nana, go back to sleep,” I whispered sweetly. “I just need a tissue. I have a runny nose.”
    “Okay, honey. The Kleenex are on the nightstand.” Zoom, off we went. And back we came a few hours later, with no one the wiser.
    I had an uncanny ability to pretend nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened, and I could fool even the people who knew me best.
    It was a survival skill that was about to be put to the test.

chapter three
    “N ext. Uh, huh, uh huh. Okay. Next.” The school nurse was calling us forward one by one in gym class to check our posture. I waited nervously. I had always avoided doing self-checks in the mirror or asking my parents to see if my spine was straight, terrified that what had happened to my sister might happen to me. I silently prayed for the school nurse to nod in approval and write down on her clipboard that Giuliana DePandi was normal. When it was my turn, I stepped up, waited for her to look me over, then moved aside for the next kid in line.
    “Julie, hold on a sec. Bend over,” the nurse said, pulling me back and running her hand over my spine. “You need to go to the doctor. You have a curve.”
    I was thirteen. The same age Monica had been when she had had to have her surgery. I kept picturing myself wearing her oldbrace, or on an operating table. My mind replayed that day in Monica’s hospital room when she had been in such agony she had wanted to kill herself. I feared the pain more than anything.