“Psychiatrists and Mountain Dew” by Scott McClanahan, page 2

         By the time we went over to my Mom and Dad’s the swelling had gone down, but you could still tell the cheek was swollen. As soon as I got out of the car I kept going over the story I was going to tell them if anyone noticed, about how it was dark and how I tripped over a laundry basket and almost killed myself.
         Shitten ass laundry baskets.
         But once inside nobody noticed, or at least they weren’t saying anything if they noticed. When I got back out to the car I told Sarah that I’d never hit myself in the face again—no matter how much I was hurting inside. I told her I’d never do it again. I promised her. I promised her it was the end. I promised her I was going to show her that things were different now.
         So over the next couple of days I tried keeping my promise. One day I was in a crowd of people and I felt myself needing to do it, and instead of letting it rip, I just whispered, “Don’t do it Scott. Whatever you do—don’t do it.”
         Then a couple of days later I was feeling all stressed out, so I kept repeating. “You’re fine. You don’t need to do it.”
         It was working.
         I got the chance to see if it was really working just a couple of days later when I was sitting on the couch and Sarah came home and asked if I had mowed the grass. For a couple of days I’d been telling her that I was going to mow it, but here it was Friday and I just didn’t feel like it. And for some reason when she said this I snapped. I stood up and told her, “No I didn’t mow the grass and if you’re so concerned about it, why don’t you mow it?”
         Just to be a pain in the ass and knowing it would piss me off, she said, “I’ll go out there and mow it. I don’t mind.”
         This made me more pissed and I told her, “I don’t want you to mow the grass because I don’t want to spend the evening in the goddamn emergency room.”
         She told me she was going to do it anyway.
         This pissed me off even more, and I told her she wasn’t going to mow the grass because I was going to throw the lawnmower over the hill. That would show her.
         “Sarah, I’m going to throw the fucking lawnmower over the hill.”
         I went outside to the throw the lawnmower over the hill. This all made sense at the time. When I tried opening the door I couldn’t get the door open, and my face hit the door. I walked outside and went behind the house to get the lawnmower, but then I looked up and Sarah was laughing at me from a window. So I came back inside and threw this bottle of Mountain Dew I was drinking on the ground.
         I told Sarah, “You make me want to hit myself in the face, but I’m not hitting myself in the face, and this shows I’m doing better.”
         I was the winner. I was better now. There was Mountain Dew everywhere.
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