Burning Down the House by Jane Mendelsohn Read Free Book Online Page B

Through the tubes and machinery she told me to take care of you and I promised that I would. Forever.
    Steve leaned forward even more. I fought for you. That nanny wanted you. Then that imbecile sister of mine in the Midwest can you imagine? Friends gossiped, said Patrizia didn’t love you. My God we kicked the shit out of them giving you everything. And those barbarians who ran your school, they did not always understand the difficulties you had and how you needed to be treated with special understanding. What a bunch of savages some of those kids were—remember that viral video three years ago—I had to pay a lot to get that taken down from the Internet. Did you know that? You are exceptional and eccentric and I have always protected you. Steve shook his head. He seemed reluctant to say what evidently he felt he was required to say to her. A moral obligation.
    I didn’t know that, said Poppy. Thank you. But I still don’t want to go to college.
    —
    Steve leaned back. He inhaled and exhaled deeply.
    He appeared to be changing his mind yet again, but he was simply changing his tactics.
    —
    What we are confronted with in today’s world are cruel degenerate people with no sensitivity or psychological awareness. Savages with no feelings. Maybe it’s always been this way, but it’s worse now. They are in charge. We are talking about people who are so numb to their fellow human beings that they think they know better how everybody should live. And do you know what happens to people who know what’s best for everybody? They destroy the world. That’s what they do. They dismember and disembowel the individual and boil her flesh and entrails down in a stew with everybody else.
    It is bad enough in the universities but it is far more dangerous in the so-called real world. In the real world people will sell the idea of security but what they are really doing is stealing the most important thing you have: your freedom. This is true. I may be a crony capitalist myself but that is only because there is nothing left to be, do you see what I’m saying? The government, the elites, the billionaires, the trillionaires: what they don’t already own they are in the process of taking, under the guise of being caring and helpful, magnanimous and just. I don’t want to send you out to the front lines at the tender age of seventeen. How could I do that to the memory of your mother?
    He paused. And then:
    I don’t think there’s any question that higher education is a scam to indenture the middle class with the inflated price of tuition and an inside track for the children of the plutocracy to acquire ever more privilege or spread the gospel of globalization or both. But this is what we are left with. This is reality.
    He was watching Poppy. She looked uncomfortable.
    My princess, said Steve. I want you to be safe and I think the safest place right now for you to be is in school. I am being honest with you, sharing the ways of the world. I am not sugar-coating this with platitudes about the liberal arts or the life of the mind or the skills necessary for being a global citizen or what a long rave of pleasure and extended adolescence you will be missing out on if you do not attend college. I am speaking to you as an adult.
    He leaned even farther forward and put his hands on his knees. And I promise I will let you work for me when you have finished school. We will conquer the world. There will be an office waiting for you with a big desk and two assistants. Teams working under you. You will ride up seventy stories on a construction site wearing a hardhat and high heels. But you’re still young. There is time. Am I wrong? Can’t this wait? Do you have to run before you can walk?
    —
    Steve’s voice had become mellow and intense at the same time. He inclined his head to one side and looked at Poppy with a sovereign benevolence, another swerve in strategy. Poppy pursed her lips and they twisted to the side and curled as if a