Going Off Script by Giuliana Rancic Page A

sense than paying rent and sleeping on a twin bed in a room shared with a girl I barely knew, so I moved back home.
    My parents adored Richard, his adored me, and it was all very lovey-dovey except for the part where Richard and I tried to kill each other on a regular basis. Our honeymoon period lasted about as long as one of Ben Cartwright’s marriages. Both of us tended to jump to conclusions, and both of us were insanely jealous. If I wanted to go out with my girlfriends, Richard would race over to my house and be sitting at the kitchen table with my parents, waiting up for me at two in the morning.
    “Where have you been?” he would demand. Mama and Babbo would wait expectantly for my answer. Veteran snoops who had spent years brazenly listening on the other line (without even
trying
to be quiet) whenever I was on the phone, they were thrilled now to be included in practically every episode of my relationship drama, courtesy of Richard, who doled out guest passes just to sway the popular vote in his favor. Sometimes I just wanted to kill him. Sometimes I attempted to.
    Richard lived in a fancy apartment above the garage of his parents’ mansion. One night, after another one of our epic fights, Richard, utterly exhausted, yelled at me to go home just before slamming his bedroom door in my face. No one slams a door in my face. Oh, I would go home all right. Right after I wedged this chair up under the doorknob so Richard couldn’t escape and then turned the heat up as high as it would go with the fan on full blast. He was probably already asleep, and could just roast away like a baked potato for all I cared right then. I sped off.
    Once home, I knew who was calling when the phone rang at one a.m., waking my parents.
    “Ma, I got it! Hang up!” I hollered upstairs. Mama was already on the line when I cut in.
    “No, no, Anna, don’t hang up!” Richard was imploring.
    “I don’t understand,” Mama was saying sleepily. “Here’s Eduardo.”
    “Richard, what’s-
a
the matter?” my father asked.
    “Eduardo,” Richard began, “your fucking daughter…”
    “Dad, hang up!”
    “…tried to kill me!”
    “Giuliana, she do-a what?”
    “SHE TRIED TO BOIL ME TO DEATH!”
    “What-
a
you boiling, Richard?” Babbo was perplexed. Was Richard making pasta?
    “Me! She was boiling me, Eduardo!”
    “Giuliana, she put-
a
you in water, Richard? How she do that?”
    “Dad! Don’t listen! He’s drunk! Hang up the phone!”
    “Why-a you get in the boiling water, Richard? I no understand.”
    “Your daughter is fucking crazy!”
    “Ha-ha! April fools, Dad! We are playing a joke. We can all hang up now!”
    “Oh. You so funny, Giuliana. I go back to sleep now. Good night, Richard!”
    A week after the heat incident, I don’t know who grabbed whose neck first, or why, but Richard and I had a choking standoff.
    “I’m going to kill you!” I gurgled, veins bulging, eyes popping.
    “I’m going to kill you!” Richard rasped back.
    “You let go first!”
    “No, you let go first!”
    We agreed to both let go on the count of three, and continued to consider ourselves the perfect couple.
    We were still together in my senior year at the University of Maryland when I was studying for final exams one November night. I’d been reading in bed for hours, then finally got up to brush my teeth around one o’clock. When I went to stand, though, my body refused to straighten. I fell back onto the bedon my side and tried to deep-breathe my way through the searing pain in my spine. The next day, I made an emergency appointment with Dr. John Kostuik, my orthopedist at Johns Hopkins. He ordered X-rays and an MRI and delivered the news I had been dreading since junior high.
    “You’re going to have to have the big surgery.”
    “What’s the alternative?” I asked hopefully. I thought of all the physical therapy exercises I’d been told to do over the years but had blown off. Maybe I could do a crash course now. I was