My parents flew in from Saudi Arabia five days after I’d been rescued from St. Stephen’s, or after I’d slunk away with my tail between my legs with a pickup load of bad memories—I saw it both ways. Dan and I met them at baggage claim at Robert Mueller Municipal Airport, where it quickly became evident that they harbored a similar contradictory view of my situation. They handed me a bundle of fresh flowers wrapped in plastic, stared at me with a tender kind of horror, said that they loved me, and then slowly warmed up to berating me the whole way back to Georgetown.
Meetings with the school administrators took place over the next few days; my parents took a yellow legal pad, whether to actually take notes in order to study the problem on paper or to appear serious, grim, and potentially litigious, I don’t know. They had a lot to sort out. Neither side would have been telling them the whole truth, that I know for sure. I wasn’t about to lay it all out there, since I was still unsure of where I would be shuffled off to next or how my transgressions registered on the scale of Bad, Bad Shit according to my parents. I also have trouble believing the school officials painted an accurate portrait of their lackluster engagement with the small boarding population, or the fact that it would have taken an already thriving drug culture among the student population, day students and boarders alike, to ramp me up from sneaking the occasional cigarette in Saudi Arabia to smoking pot, boozing on airplanes, and dropping acid in the space of a few short months.
I did a lot of snarling and pouting during this period, a lot of lying on my back and listening to Nine Inch Nails albums on repeat and writing overwrought journal entries, and much of this was in reaction to the bitter irony that though it was ostensibly my drug use that had gotten me into this mess, I was now being told I needed more drugs to get me out. Another stop on the meeting circuit was with a series of psychiatrists, notably omitting the one the school recommended, who had already set his little tape recorder in front of me a few days after the interrogations, but before my uncle came to get me, and asked what about my childhood at home had made me turn to drugs. Finally, a handsome, white-haired neuropsychiatrist with an expansive Texas drawl was chosen to treat me for what was termed “major depression.” I took a page from my parents’ playbook and brought a yellow legal pad to the first few appointments and wrote my own sullen observations of him, which he gamely allowed.
Wellbutrin, Zoloft, Paxil, and finally Prozac were called up in turn to marshal my faulty neurotransmitters, all in wrenching tweaks of dosage that left me with nightmares, mood swings, bouts of full-body itchiness, and nervous tooth grinding that made my jaw and temples sore. The worst part was not being able to spot my own side effects first. I hated having to rely on other people’s impressions of me, or to have one of my seemingly logical rants on the trap of being female, the drudgery and enslavement of careers, or the general pointlessness of life met with a cocked head and bemused gaze and the observation, “This dosage seems maybe a little high.”
Within a couple of months of my parents’ mop-up emergency visit, my mother was back for good, hauling my brother in tow, who had been given just enough time to finish ninth grade back in Saudi Arabia before having it broken to him that he would not be headed off to boarding school himself. Doug had had a great ninth grade year in Saudi, had in fact blossomed into a social butterfly and was looking forward to the chance to play competitive private school soccer, but he took the change of plans in stride. The furniture was back. Our dog, cared for by family while we were gone and now enormously fat from table scraps, was back. We had family dinners again and there were lights on in other rooms of the house while I lay in mine, trying to figure out what it meant, or if it would all stay. My mother watched me and fed me and frowned at me and made me keep my bedroom door open. She clacked handfuls of vitamins on my breakfast plate next to the eggs and she dragged me around with her on errands, getting the house back in order. She insisted on conversation.