Read Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You: A Novel for Free Online Page B

adults not far ahead. A woman dressed like a flight attendant stood in their midst, apparently checking names off a list on her clipboard. The students had their name tags on and stood around like cattle waiting to be slaughtered. I walked past them and out the front door and stood on the sidewalk. A cabby asked me if I needed a cab and I said no. I knew I had to put on my name tag and turn around, go back inside, and join that miserable group. I said to myself, There are things in your life that you don’t want to do that you will have to do. You cannot always do and go what and where you please. That is not how life works. This is one of those times when you must do and go what and where you do not want to do or go. I was nervously fingering my name tag inside my jacket pocket, flipping the needlelike prong in and out of its catch. And then I stuck my finger hard against it, hard enough so that I knew it would draw blood, because I wanted to bleed. If I had to do this, I wanted to bleed doing this.
    When the perky lady had ticked off all the names on her list, we were ushered out of Union Station and into a waiting van. The lady turned out to be a (Republican) congressman’s wife named Susan Porter Wright; she was a volunteer for The American Classroom. She told us how much she looked forward to it every year, how wonderful it was to meet the brightest and most civic-minded students from across the nation. Despite the fact we were all wearing name tags, she had us go around and introduce ourselves. After that she ignored us, talking on her cell phone to a caterer about a luau-inspired birthday party for her husband at which she wanted to roast a pig in her backyard.
    I knew we were all staying in a hotel, and I had pictured one of the nice hotels near the Mall, so I was a bit panicked when we drove quickly through Washington and got on the highway in the direction of Arlington, Virginia. None of the other students seemed to notice that we were about to be transported across state lines, which I believe is a federal offense. They all seemed very well adjusted and friendly, chattering about where they came from and where they were going to college and how excited they were to be in Washington, D.C. (briefly, for we had already left it behind), for The American Classroom. One girl actually said, “This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my life,” but she was from North Dakota, so it made some sense. One girl asked me where I was from and I said New York, which I had already said during the very recent introductions, and the girl said Oh, where in New York, and I said New York City, and she said her mother was born on Staten Island, and I said cool. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
    We drove farther and farther away from Washington, D.C., and I was about to ask Mrs. Wright where we were going when we got off the highway and pulled into the parking lot of a TraveLodge. It was one of those hotels in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by about six different highways, that you pass by and wonder who would ever stay there and why. Places like that, which seem unconnected to life as we live it, really unnerve me. It reminded me of an unfortunate incident about a year ago (that actually, now that I come to think of it, prefigures the unfortunate incident I’m about to relate). I met my father in Los Angeles for a few days; he was there for business, and we stayed in a hotel from which you could see the Getty Museum, all white and pretty and reflecting sunshine on the top of a hill, and so the first afternoon while he took the rental car to a meeting downtown, I set out to walk to the Getty Museum. I thought this would be fairly easy since I could see it; it seemed merely a matter of going around the corner and up the hill. But it turns out you can’t walk to the Getty. At one point the sidewalk just ended for no apparent reason and I was forced to walk on the shoulder of the road, where obviously I was not