Me Being Me Is Exactly as Insane as You Being You by Todd Hasak-Lowy

Something Really Lame and Inconsiderate to Him, Such as, for Example, Ditching Him and Going to Ann Arbor by Himself
    1.  Your father

2 Possible Sources of Courage That Allow Darren Not Only to Persuade His Mom Not to Drop Everything Right Now and Get on the Next Plane to Detroit, but Also to Say, and Pretty Firmly at That, “I Want to Visit Nate Alone; I Don’t Want You or Dad to Come, Okay?”
    1.  Her tone is kind of all over the place during the conversation. Anger, disappointment, bewilderment, but then some guilt, too. Which sort of makes sense since, had the family not broken apart, it seems much less likely that things would have gotten to the point that Darren would be skipping school and taking a bus by himself to Ann Arbor. And so who’s to blame for the family breaking apart and things getting to this point? Not Darren, that’s for damn sure. He didn’t ask for his mom to go to California twice a month, or for his parents to split up, or for his dad to be gay. Okay, so maybe that last one makes it his dad’s fault, but it wasn’t like his mom exactly stepped in to make that any easier to hear. And Darren didn’t even ask Maggie to suddenly kiss him yesterday, not that his mom or dad can be blamed for that, either.
    2.  The bus started picking up speed as it finally left Chicago behind. And then, a couple of miles later, just around the time his mom started talking about flying out there, it went over that bridge that, when you’re traveling on it in the other direction, comes right after the sign that says WELCOME TO CHICAGO with the name of the current mayor below it. It’s a pretty ugly bridge, just a lot of steel girders, not one of those cool suspension bridges, but for some reason this part of the highway itself arches way up in the air at a pretty steep angle, which nearly makes up for the lameness of the bridge itself, because it almost turns the bridge into a ramp, like you should be able to blast off into the air when you get to its highest point, which feels like it’s got to be two or three hundred feet up in the air. And so the speed, and the bridge/ramp, and the going up, plus Darren sitting right near the front of the upper deck of the bus, feeling a little bit, or deciding to try to feel a little bit, like the bus is an extension of him, even if it’s a smelly bus filled with losers—this made him feel like he might be able to do all sorts of things he couldn’t normally do.

5 Stages of an Exercise in Imagining His Future, Which Darren Undertakes After Talking with His Mom, but Before Calling His Dad like He Promised
    1.  He’ll take a gap year after high school and go on some program far, far away, in like Bolivia or Kenya or even Mongolia, where you dig ditches for some village that is getting running water for the first time. The food will be totally awful and he’ll be pretty lonely most of the time, but Darren will lose a bunch of weight and get super tan and somehow learn to handle just about anything, so that when he comes back to go to college he’ll almost be brand-new and not such a total wuss all the time.
    2.  By then his mom will have officially moved to California and arranged for him to have residency there too, something that will allow him to get into Berkeley or UCLA, schools he probably wouldn’t be able to get into otherwise.
    3.  He’ll join or even help form a band that will get pretty big around campus, so big that they’ll tour one summer up and down the West Coast and open up a couple times for some indie group that everyone’s crazy about. Maybe they’ll even get a record contract or tour in Europe the next summer.
    4.  It’ll take a while, but he’ll eventually find a major that’s totally perfect for him, psychology or art history or architecture, who knows, and there will be this one professor that gets super into him without making a big deal