Chapter 5: Skool daze.

Once, Satsuki arrived in her car to pick me up from school. It was completely unexpected —I used to take the school bus. She had never picked me up from school and it was going to be the last time she would.

She was all smiley and cheerful, excited as when great news are to be delivered. She almost hugged me there. Almost. Even at that age, I didn't feel much need to connect with Satsuki. Yet I found her excitement contagious: mostly because I had a hunch that her news were related to my dad. Maybe he was back!

Silly me. No, she just had the brilliant idea to go on with her plan to homeschool me, starting that day. Fuck all the tests and whatever I had left in the school year. It was elementary. That same idea that my dad had opposed to —she hadn't forgotten it. Ted's opposition had only delayed its execution for several months. I wondered why —given her absolute control over him.

I didn't understand her decision, her motives. But at my age there was nothing I could think to do about it. I didn't even know that opposing her was an option. With Ted gone, it seemed that she was in total control of my fate. Maybe she had been content with manipulating Ted until he disappeared. In the meantime, I had been in the backburner. Then, she had to find someone else to fill that void of exerting absolute control over someone. Of course, that had to be me. I quickly inherited the role of the puppet to wiggle around.

In retrospect, maybe I had an option: to escape. Yes. Escaping doesn't sound a bad option after all.

Out of the infinite branches of the tree of causality, I see now what an unexplored branch —to leave home at the age of eight— would have brought. Even with all the terrible risks it implies, with all its potential for a tragic ending, it might have been better.

Maybe. Who knows. As absurd as it sounds, maybe not escaping earlier had been my first meaningful mistake.

Yet, in a way, I escaped. By concentrating in whatever subject I had to study, I found a weird kind of evasion. It sounds particularly lame to rebel by perusing a Math book when I was supposed to be studying English. Nonetheless, it served for me to feel like —at least— I had a minimal amount of freedom. Needless to say that, had Satsuki realized that I was studying other subject, she would have reprimanded me.