I Don't Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star by Judy Greer Read Free Book Online Page B

looking more and more like Alyssa Milano every day. But most of all, I was going to be OK. I would have friends. I would be popular. Jeff Hunt would fall in love with me. It was all starting, and now I had proof because of that one little black curly hair. I think this ecstatic feeling is why I still have no idea why women shave/pluck/wax off all their pubic hair. It was a curly miracle to me, that night in the woods in Wisconsin, and I remember all it symbolized. Why would I get rid of it? It meant something—mostly that I wasn’t a total freak, but still, it meant something. I liked it. It made me feel like a woman, not like the girl I was so desperate to leave behind on my vacation, but the woman I would morph into as the summer ended, and, surely, by the first day of high school I would walk through the halls, my metamorphosis complete. The crowds of upperclassmen would part and make room for this mysterious new student who was literally bursting with confidence (when I say “bursting,” I mean my boobs would be about to pop my shirt open). I fell asleep with this fantasy dancing around in my head.
    The next thing I remember is maybe the scariest moment in my life so far. I was sound asleep, and there was pounding on the door and my mom was yelling for me to wake up. When I opened the door, she was standing there, talking very slowly and deliberately, so calm, in fact, that it was eerie. She said that I needed to run up to the lodge and call an ambulance as fast as I could, that my dad was really sick and I had to go, now, quickly, or he would die. My dad has diabetes—not the fat kind but the kind you get when you’re a kid and have forever. It was a major part of our lives and the source of most of my parents’ arguments, mostly because when my dad’s blood sugar got too low, he turned intoa total asshole. Not his fault, but it was pretty obvious when he was low, and you can’t really get that mad at him for it. But still, no one likes an asshole.
    I immediately took off running on the path to the lodge. It was so dark that I couldn’t see a thing, but I just kept running through the woods until I finally saw the lights from the main building ahead of me. Once I got there, I didn’t know what to do. Even though it was the middle of the night, I thought somehow there would be someone there, waiting to help me. There was no one. The front door was unlocked. I ran inside and started screaming at the top of my lungs, “HELP!! HELP! SOMEBODY HELP ME!!!” I screamed and cried and screamed louder, but nothing worked. No one came. Just then my mom ran into the lobby. She ran right behind the desk and grabbed the phone and called 911. Like she had been there a million times, like she worked there. How did she know to do that? How did she know exactly where to go and what to do? In that moment I felt worse than I had ever felt in my life. How stupid was I? Why didn’t I think of that? Of course the phone, of course 911. I’m the worst daughter, and if my dad died, it would be my fault. My mom told me to wait in front of the building for the ambulance and show them where our rooms were, she was going to go back to my dad. It seemed like the trees got bigger while I was standing there, the sky got darker, and there was no such thing as time anymore, just darkness and quiet. I made a million promises that night, to whatever was out there, that I would do anything if my dad was OK. I apologized to the universe for everything bad I had ever done and pleaded that my dad shouldn’t be punished because I was a terrible person. And then I noticed something in the dark moving toward me—a shadow, and it was getting larger and larger. It had to be a bear, I thought. I was in the middle of the woods, it was nighttime, I needed to be punished for not thinking to dial 911, and Ihad just admitted to the gods that it was probably my fault this was happening at all for having stolen Amy’s hamburger gum at her birthday party six