by John Goode
There are people who work in the hot sun to grow the things you eat, and they don’t make shit in the way of money for it. They almost literally work themselves to death just to say they own a piece of land and through pure force of will created something to thrive on it, and then sell it for less than it had cost to plant. It is a losing battle against an enemy you can’t fight, and most farmers, the ones who know they are slowly dying, can be very angry people.
And now you know everything you need to about my grandfather.
My two older uncles left the farm almost at the same time. They both joined the Army and decided they’d rather get shot at than be forced to live in Foster, Texas, anymore. That left my dad and his two younger brothers to take up the slack for their missing kin. Since he was the oldest, it fell on my dad to do the lion’s share of the work. He ended up dropping out of high school when he was fifteen and never again stepped foot inside a place of learning.
When my grandfather fell over dead from a heart attack, my father had to step in and take over the farm’s financial business. What he found almost sent him to a grave as well. The farm was not just broke, it actually owed money to the bank. If the next day gold bars grew on the vines, there still wouldn’t be enough money to cover the debt that had been left. The farm was foreclosed on, my grandmother took my dad and my uncles to live with relatives over in Odessa, and my dad was now a nineteen-year-old, high school dropout with no marketable skills whatsoever.
When the Mathisons bought the land where my grandfather’s farm was, they offered my dad a job as a field worker. It was more money than he had been making working as a night stocker at the local HEB, and it allowed him to move out and away from the crowded house that had become his home. He leased a crappy little shack from the company and spent twelve hours a day under a sweltering Texas sun, working the land we’d once owned.
Personally, I think this was when he started drinking.
It’s impossible to tell, since my grandfather’s policy was if you worked like a man, you could drink like a man. Which basically meant that my dad had been getting shitfaced each night since he was thirteen. Even then, it wasn’t as bad as it got, and I’m pretty sure it was those long, quiet nights alone in that wooden box that drove him to seriously hit the bottle.
That was when he met my mom.
She had been born and raised in Foster as well, and unlike the herds of women that found and married their true love out of high school, my mother graduated single and alone. She had two sisters, both married and pregnant by twenty, and it was expected by this time she would be on the same track. What her parents and her sisters didn’t know was my mom had something that they were all lacking.
A brain.
Not enough of a brain to get her out of Foster, but enough of one to know the trap of a wasted life when she saw one. She worked at a secondhand store and was saving her money up to move away from Foster and never look back. Her one weakness was books. She loved to read. As much as she wanted to flee this flyspeck of a town, she wanted to be transported in her mind somewhere else more. I am convinced if she hadn’t bought so many books, she would have saved more than enough money to move at least a year earlier.
Which would have meant never meeting my dad.
Now I’ve heard the whole list of reason why love is a good thing. I was spoon-fed the same list of Disney movies you were growing up, but they had a completely different effect on me than they did for everyone else. Where everyone else saw a world of wonderment where bluebirds sang to you as you looked for your one true love, I saw a horrifyingly powerful spell that made smart people like my mom marry dumb people like my dad.
As long as I live, I will never understand what she saw in him. There is not a memory I have that does not have him as a bitter and broken old man who hated life. Before I even had words for it, I knew they should have never been together, and instead of some grand and wondrous fairy tale where beauty tamed the beast, this was real life, where the beast wore the beauty down until all that was left was a shell of the woman she once was.
I knew none of this when I asked for a PlayStation, of course. I just knew that everyone else had one and that I needed one.
My father taught me that day the difference between want and need in the most physical way possible. For example, I learned that while I may have wanted him to stop hitting me, I needed him to let go of my arm before he broke it. I may have wanted him to stop slapping my face and calling me a spoiled brat, but I needed him to stop kicking me once I fell down to stop him from cracking my ribs. The difference is slight, but let me tell you, it makes all the difference in the world.
The thought of getting a PlayStation was effectively squashed in my mind, and I resolved myself never to speak of it again. If my father was trying a Pavlovian experiment associating negative stimuli with the thought of a PlayStation, he had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. So that Christmas when I found a console-sized box under the tree, I wondered if this was just a test to see if I would jump at it.
It was my mother giving me a silent nod that gave me the courage to unwrap it.
Again I would like to cite that my expectations were influenced by those same crappy Disney movies that told me good things happened to those who deserved it. The same world where a prince wanders through a forest to kiss a sleeping maiden is the same world where mice make things for downtrodden damsels in need of an outfit change, so the thought that somehow a PlayStation was under the Christmas tree for me was not that crazy. When I pulled the wrapping paper free, though, the true irony of the situation was revealed.
The moment I laid eyes on the box, I knew what had happened.
My mother had no doubt pleaded that I be allowed at least one present I’d asked for on Christmas, and if it was a video game I wanted, then I should be allowed to have it. Of course, that was the beginning and end of my parents’ knowledge of video games. What everyone possessed and talked about was a PlayStation, made by Sony, and was the top-of-the-line system for the moment. What I had unwrapped was a used Sega Dreamcast, a system that was as useless as it was obsolete the moment it had been released.
I had a scant second to shove my disappointment down and give them both a look of radiant gratitude. They had no idea they’d saved for nothing, that their scrimping and saving had literally been for shit. To them, they had done the right thing and given their son something he wanted for Christmas, when in fact all they had done was cement my fate as an outcast forever.
No one wanted to come over and play with me. The games I had didn’t work on their systems. After a while they stopped even asking me if I had a PlayStation and just ignored me altogether.
By the time I was in third grade, I was officially a nobody.
That system became a symbol for my life. On the surface I was the same as the rest of the kids, but when you looked closer, nothing was alike. Sure, I was a human boy born and raised in Foster, Texas, but I was nothing like the rest of them at all. I didn’t go with anyone. I didn’t fit with anybody else. I was an anomaly in a town that thrived on community. Because I never had friends, I never played with them during recess, and because of that, I never had the physicality to go out for sports. During the summer, when kids were off playing football or baseball, I was sitting by my mom’s side reading her books and trying not to show outwardly that it affected me.
It affected me.
I began to convince myself that they were horrendous people, and that I didn’t want to play with them anyways. Stuck-up, superficial punks who only valued things like sports and looks while they completely ignored the things that really counted in life. I was a real person, and they were just cardboard cutouts of stereotypes. I wish I could say I was invisible and that they just ignored me, but I can’t because they didn’t. I stuck out like a nasty-looking weed on a perfectly groomed lawn, a volcano of a pimple on the otherwise perfect face of our town. I wasn’t so much picked on as I was downgraded to less than human.
Like the Mor
locks from The Time Machine, I was barely considered a person and treated as such. Random shoves in the hallway were expected, followed by long, donkey-like laughs from the douche bag who had done it. People slamming my locker shut as I tried to change books out between classes was also a popular pastime, once again followed by the resounding glee from onlookers. Sometimes it got worse. Sometimes they would slap the books out of my hands as I walked down the hall, a few times I had random pieces of food tossed at me during lunch, and once someone put a fresh pile of dog shit in my backpack.
I’m sure they thought that last one was especially clever.
Since I was considered the enemy, I began to act as one. Since I didn’t have the brawn to make someone cry, I used my words instead with devastating results. A war of wits with a jock is a lot like a modern day Marine unit attacking a Civil-War-era squadron; it is over pretty fast, and it could be days before anyone knows what actually happened. I tried to focus my attention on academic studies, since I knew it was the only arena I could actually compete in. And until junior high, I thought I was easily the smartest person in Foster.
That was when I met Kyle.
I say “met” when I mean I became aware of him. We had a social science class in seventh grade, and I had assumed it was going to be one of those topics I dominated in, showing up the rest of the small brains who actually had brains. It was a softball question about the Emancipation Proclamation asking how many slaves did it free? The Civil War was one of those things I had obsessed about over the summer, so I was more than ready for this kind of question.
“Over four million slaves were freed,” I answered, not even waiting to be called on.
The teacher paused, giving me a small smile and then asking the class, “Anyone disagree with him?”
I didn’t even bother to turn around. I mean, who would even dare? It wasn’t like anyone here actually knew….
“Kyle,” the teacher exclaimed brightly. “Okay then, what is your answer?”
I spun around to stare at the idiot who was about to publicly announce how little he knew in front of the entire class. Of course, it was one of the random, good-looking assholes, this one with shaggy hair, no doubt trying to pretend he was a skater or something. I smiled darkly at him, trying not to appear happy when he crashed and burned.
“None,” he said, sounding smug to my ears.
“None?” the teacher asked him back, sounding a bit surprised. “You sure you want to go with that?”
She was giving him an out! How predictable. The cute ones always got special treatment. I scoffed under my breath, knowing he had just had a public, epic fail.
“Well, technically you can say around twenty to fifty thousand were freed on the day it went into effect, but there is a pretty strong case that Lincoln didn’t have any authority over them at the time, so the official answer is none.”
Now I laughed out loud, waiting for the teacher to tell him how wrong he was.
“Who thinks Mr. Stilleno’s answer is right?” she asked the class.
Almost half the class raised their hand, which made me smile even more. Of course they were going to vote for one of their own; lemmings follow in a pack.
“Well, those with their hands up are right.”
I was about to give this idiot a well-deserved ha when her words penetrated. Instead I turned to her and demanded, “What? That’s wrong.”
The teacher gave me a patronizing look and said, “No, Jeremy, it isn’t. The proclamation was more a political move than an actual social one and in fact only freed slaves in the rebel states, where Lincoln had no power. Though I’d like to know where you got your other number from, Kyle.”
I sputtered out noises that weren’t quite words in protest as Kyle explained a nonsensical answer that made even less sense than before. “Over four million slaves were freed by Lincoln!” I exclaimed. “You can’t deny that.”
Before the teacher could answer, this Kyle person said, “Actually, the slaves weren’t freed legally until the Thirteenth Amendment was passed, and he did that by making the lame duck Congress do it. That wasn’t until after he was reelected.”
I just stared at him in shock.
“Very good, Kyle,” the teacher beamed at him. “You have a run for your money, Jeremy.”
The class laughed at her words, which made me sink lower into my chair. The idiot behind me kicked my seat, whispering, “Dude, you can’t even be a good nerd!”
That was when I became obsessed with Kyle Stilleno.
I could say that was when Kyle Stilleno moved onto my radar and I began paying attention to him, but I don’t see much reason to lie now. At first he seemed to be everything I wanted to be, and it infuriated me. He was cute, seemed to be in shape, he moved through the world without anyone bothering him at all. I never once saw someone pick on him, berate him, or even laugh in his general direction. School seemed to come easy to him. He always had an answer on the tip of his tongue, and if he had ever gotten a question wrong, I wasn’t there to see it. As junior high progressed, I realized he wasn’t everything I wanted to be; he was something far worse.
He was everything I wasn’t.
Instead of being this superman that I was trying to become, he was a totem of everything in the world I wasn’t. I would never be liked, I would never be considered cute, I would never be accepted, I would never be him, and it began to make me a little crazy. I was running an academic race against a guy who didn’t even know he was in a competition. His graduating GPA from junior high was perfect—not near perfect but absolutely perfect—where mine wasn’t. I had lost points in gym class because of not participating, which is an overall useless class anyways, and I lost half a grade in science for bad attitude, which again, had nothing to do with my brain. Mr. Diego had said I was combative and antisocial when working in groups, and even though I had aced every test given to me, he was not going to reward my behavior.
Mr. Diego was the first person I put on my list to make pay later.
That summer I begged my parents to let me go to Granada. I knew that Kyle was headed to Foster, and the last thing I wanted was another four years watching him mentally lap me in each class. I needed a place to thrive, a place where I could invent myself again, become someone else. I laid out my reasons carefully and clinically to both of them, showing the logic in my decision in each and every point by point.
That was when they told me my mom was dying.
Of course, they didn’t put it to me that way. They explained she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and that they were going to treat it as aggressively as possible. They told me not to worry and that things would be okay. My mom would give me a sickly smile and say that everything works out the way it is supposed to and that I had to have faith in that. That was June. By August she was dead. My father reeked of booze as they handed him her ashes, he shook his head, and they gave them to me instead. As we drove home, he told me he never wanted to see the urn again. It was the last time we talked about my mother.
Because I was cursed, of course, I ended up having to go to Foster High instead of Granada, and my Sisyphean torture of following Kyle Stilleno began all over again.
It was freshman year when I began stealing my dad’s smokes. Though I wasn’t fond of the habit, taking the time between classes to light up in the alley was the closest thing I could find to a hiding place from the galloping herd of zombies who made up my peers. It was there, between third and fourth period, struggling to not cough as I inhaled, that I met Sammy.
She was the only other freshman in the alley, and it was obvious no one was talking to her either since every other smoker was older than us. She gave me a small smile, and I nodded back, and that was how it started. Every day I would go out to smoke, she would be there, and we’d nod and smile at each other. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but when all you’ve known is open disdain, a smile and a nod is like winning the social lottery.
It took us a week before we talked to each other
, and even then it was just her asking me if I had an extra smoke she could bum. From there we worked up to names, how we both hated the school, and by extension the town. She told me that she had decided to join the drama club to escape the endless press of small-minded people and that I should look into it.
It was the closest thing I ever had to a friend asking me to join something.
It turned out that the drama club was Foster High’s secret island of misfit toys. It was a hodgepodge collection of losers and nerds who were seeking asylum from the jock culture that ruled our school. We were all high school pariahs who possessed little to no social skills, which made fitting in even harder than it normally was. I fit in almost instantly, and within a month or so was practically running the place, which was also something new for me. The drama geeks became the center of my universe for two reasons. One, because having people listen to me was intoxicating, and two, Kyle had nothing to do with drama club.
I began to worry less and less about my academic standing and more and more about being in control of drama club. I passed freshman year easily but not with the GPA I had become accustomed to in junior high. I didn’t care because that summer I had a group of friends to hang out with, and that made all the difference in the world. None of us was old enough to drive, so we spent the majority of our time at each other’s houses watching bootleg anime and hating on everyone who wasn’t us. I learned all the lines to Rocky Horror, discussed Buffy in great detail, and tried my best not to dwell on the fact my mother was dead.
My dad finally relented and let me turn our basement into a bedroom, which pretty much meant that the only time I had to see him was when I ate or went to the bathroom. That summer everything changed for me. I embraced the fact I was a freak and would never fit in to normal society. I had a pack now, a group of like-minded individuals who felt the same way I did, and that made me strong.
Which made going back to school that much easier.
I stopped caring about who was popular or what people were saying to each other. My days were measured in how much time I could hide in the drama department and away from everyone I hated. Though I never once stood up on stage and said a line of dialogue, every production Foster High put on was mine. The thought of standing in front of a crowd and acting made me want to throw up. I was much more relaxed behind the scenes calling the shots. I watched jock after jock stand up on stage and make a fool out of himself with each play, each time making sure that if something went wrong with the production, it looked like it was their fault.
