Who wants to go to college? I do not care how many giant glowing crucifixes are crowding up the local skyline, or how stupid the bars are, or how few Thai restaurants are within 25 miles of my house. I am living the high life right here in Hicksville, USA, because my mother has finally left for Arizona, leaving me with custody of the car, the house, my brother, and a big pile of Tennis magazines from 1982. ("How good is the women’s tennis tour?" Tennis asks. "Is it one of the all-time public relations con jobs? Are female pros simply overpaid?" There is also a picture of Jimmy Connors in a dress.) After five weeks of enforced infantilization, I am finally free to live however I want, without having to worry about Mom nagging me to do the dishes or kicking me out of the living room so she can watch her stupid TV shows about the Bible or barging into my bedroom while I am practicing my Jackie Gleason impression. It is not, admittedly, an especially good impression, but eye-rolling and snickering are not going to make it any better, thank you, and neither is taking away the remote control when I am trying to watch Smokey and the Bandit on the Spanish channel.

I do not know what I am talking about either, but it does not matter, because I do not have to answer to anybody. I am the Queen of the House! In the morning I take my brother to school. After lunch I usually wander down to the park and spin myself sick on the tire swing. Then I crawl back home and spend the next few hours lying on the kitchen floor, pretending that I am the President of the United States. "Bring me my telemephone machine!" I bellow. "Untangle my necktie! Poll my coffee! Introduce me to the world’s oldest living human, and make it snappy!" I lost a contact lens last weekend, and I am pretty sure that it has rolled up inside my eyelid and is somehow chafing my brain. Yesterday I got out my parents’ records and had a Blue Öyster Cult Dance Party in the living room, because I am the ranking adult around here, and if I want to spend my afternoons jumping up and down to "Don’t Fear the Reaper" until I get dizzy and fall backwards onto the coffee table, I do not know what you can do to stop me. I do not seem to listen to reason. In the evening I pick my brother up from soccer practice, and then we get ice cream and look for pawn shops. I have come to the end of a long and taxing journey and now I am going to spend every day living like a demented retiree who does not know how to work the washing machine or the vacuum cleaner or prepare any meal that does not pop out of a toaster.

My mother has only been gone for two days, but already dishes are piling up in the sink and nobody has any clean clothes and unless I am very much mistaken pieces of the house are starting to fall off. The bottom half of the drainpipe seems to be sitting in the driveway, for some reason, and when I staggered out to the kitchen this morning I found the smoke detector cover sitting upside-down in the middle of the floor. Also, the back porch keeps creaking in the middle of the night, even though it is made of concrete, and sometimes just as twilight falls I think that I hear a ghostly voice calling my name from the back of the house. My brother claims that it was his voice, and that he was yelling at me to come help him get his shoe out of the tree, and now that I think about it I seem to recall throwing it up there and running back into the house and locking all the doors. Well. Another mystery solved! I am glad I am Columbo.