The Senior Project

Chapter Seven | Tension

CHAPTER SEVEN~
TENSION

Tension crackled in the room as I faced my angry mother.

"You shouldn't be wasting your time fooling around with a guy!" she snapped as she paced the length of the room.

"Mom! The whole project is getting to know someone and creating a presentation about them!" I fired back from my spot on the couch, my frustration spilling over.

As promised, early this morning, my mother had wrangled me out of bed to have the talk she'd been wanting to have. Only, as it often occurred, the talk turned into a shouting match.

"Well then do that! It should only take a day or two! You told me, you'd finish quickly! Celia, you have to focus on your studies! This is playing around, tomfoolery; an absolute joke! I have work waiting for you so you don't fall behind on your curriculum!"

"It takes more than just a day or two to truly get to know someone and I hope you realize this will count as huge part of my marks!" I protested angrily, hoping she'd soften at the academic oriented remark.

This time, it angered her further.

"Math is academics, English is academics! Not this! Just ask the kid a few questions, make a poster and be done! You don't have to spend days and days out of the house playing around! You don't have the time to do this!"

"Listen, I will do this project as I see fit and you can't do anything about it!" I retorted. I pushed down any guilt because I was at the end of everything. "I'm not some machine who can work as much as you'd like me to. I need breaks before I mentally exhaust myself."

"And I give you breaks! If you work at the pace I plan, you'd get several hours each day!" she shouted.

"But I don't get these breaks of yours because the pace you set is impossible. Mom, why do I need to work when I get extremely high grades already? You tell me it's to keep me prepared, to learn everything in advance which, I get." My voice mellowed to a whisper, "But I don't need to do this anymore. I can't do this without exhausting myself. I'm tired. So tired."

I was frustrated beyond measure. This explosion was bound to happen eventually and now, it finally had. I didn't even know how I managed to spend the past few days without my mother coming down on me.

My mother didn't understand. She continued raging on with her usual words of encouragement, "You're hopeless Celia! Why can't you understand that your little frivolous projects won't get you anywhere in life?"

And there it was. The eternally annoying question.

My anger flared. Did none of my previous rant get into her thick head? "Get with the times mom," I snarled, "Math and science won't get me everywhere in life and I happen to want to go into the filming industry. This project is more likely to get me where I want to go!"

"Hey!" My dad appeared from upstairs to try to play mediator. Normally it would work, I would back down, but today, we were too far gone.

"Celia! You won't be able to get a stable job there, you'll be living on the streets, begging for money."

I snapped, "NO! You're wrong. I can get there because I've got the motivation needed to achieve my goals." I knew, if nothing else, I could achieve my goals with the sole desire to prove my mother wrong.

"Stop it right now," My dad's pissed-beyond-belief voice shut me up. "Celia, go take a walk, cool down. Go to Soraya's house, I don't know. Just go cool off while I talk with your mother," he ordered sternly.