I fought my way through elementary school and middle school. My nose has been broken, my pinky on my right hand has been snapped the wrong way, and my lip’s been ripped open a bunch of times. We’ve never had health insurance, not even welfare. My pop says he doesn’t want any government handouts. And no daughter of his is going to stand in line like an animal for free anything.
So my nose is crooked and my pinky hurts when it rains, which is a real pain in my ass. But people leave me alone. I’m sort of over beating kids up.
Sort of.
Victor
MY PARENTS DON’T BELIEVE IN PHYSICAL VIOLENCE. I’ve never been spanked or shaken or smacked. They think it’s for poor people. Or, as my dad calls them, animals.
They don’t believe in affection, either. I’ve always believed they would make excellent robots. When I was little I used to pretend they were robots. I imagined them landing their spaceship somewhere in the field just outside of town and then stumbling upon me. In my daydream, baby-me was always wrapped in blankets, tucked in a basket on the side of the road.
My mother would say, in perfect automaton, “Look what I found. I think it is some sort of Earth baby. What should we do?”
My dad would reply, in his even better staccato robot voice, “We should take it. We will raise it as our own. It will teach us how to be human.”
My alien fantasy doesn’t work, though, because I have my mother’s brown eyes and the rest of me definitely looks like my dad. Tall and skinny, brown hair. My dad is a plain, preppy-looking guy, and I’m a plain, preppy-looking guy thanks to him.
I have never seen my parents hug or kiss, or even shake hands, for that matter. They just exist on our 2.5 acres in our big, five-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath colonial, with its granite countertops and wall-papered walls. We live separate lives in this house, in separate rooms, doing separate things. Except they are always together, and I’m always alone. My parents like to sit in the family room and read—my father in the antique, overstuffed chair and my mother on the eleven-thousand-dollar sofa.
How do I know the sofa cost eleven thousand dollars? When I was twelve years old I tried being a reader. I thought it might make my parents realize I existed. You know, give us something to talk about together. I had gotten a book out from the school library the day before. The house was quiet and my parents were out shopping—the perfect opportunity to dive into the book and be mentally armed, ready to regale them with my brilliance at lunch.
I grabbed my book and a can of Coke from the fridge. I knew I was breaking my mother’s cardinal rule: Absolutely No Eating or Drinking in Any Other Rooms of This House, Except the Kitchen or Dining Room. She says that people are meant to eat at tables like civilized human beings, and that people who eat and drink while hunched over their coffee table are no better than rats in the sewers.
I sat down on the sofa, cracked opened my book and then my soda. After two sips I must have gotten lost in the story, because the can slipped from my hand. Coke dribbled out in a fizzy puddle. Of course the sofa was cream-colored, like the flesh of a pear, and Coke is brown . . . dark brown.
My mother arrived home just as I jumped up and tried to blot the puddle with my shirt hem, which just made the stain spread. My mom screamed.
Like I said, my parents don’t use physical violence; they don’t need to. They’ve mastered verbal violence.
With enough volume to make me drop the can again, splashing more Coke on the sofa, she yelled, “What are you doing, Victor? Why are you in here? With soda? Look what you’ve done, you . . . you monster! You monster. That sofa cost your father and I eleven thousand dollars. Eleven thousand dollars! Do you even know how much money that is? Get out! Get out! Get out!”
My mother was on the phone with upholstery cleaners in, like, two seconds, explaining how her monster of a son got soda all over her sofa, and did they know that it was an eleven-thousand-dollar sofa, and how fast could they get here, and how sweet they were for coming right away, and on and on and on. They got the stains out.
I don’t read anymore, unless I have to for school. I don’t go in the living room anymore either. I stay in my room and my parents stay in their living room. It all works out for us.
They don’t bug me except to ensure my grades are, as my dad calls them, “top notch.” He likes to say that a boy with my upbringing, my impeccable genes, my social status, should have top-notch grades. No excuses. Especially excuses that show weakness. Like sickness or a headache, or when your face gets shoved into a pile of tiny stones and you pee your pants in front of the whole second-grade playground. Or when that same asshole pushes your face into the bathroom tile and holds it there, calling you Victoria in front of four other guys, while you’re trying to take a pee at the urinal right before your math final.
Nope, they are just excuses for not getting top-notch grades, excuses that show weakness.
I am weak.
Bull
MY POP IS ON A TEAR WHEN I GET HOME FROM SCHOOL today. He has a pretty good load on, and his white T-shirt already has dribbles of gold down the front.
Did you know when beer dries on white T-shirts, it dries light gold?
I know.
By the looks of the trash can, he’s had almost a full case of Mountain Crest’s finest. But I can always tell by his hands. If they’re open, he’s not drunk. If they’re shut tight into fists, he’s drunk.
Both of his hands are clenched.
“You kill your granmaaah. My Bonnee. She nev hah heart prob before you . . . you . . . you were born!” he shouts in his slurred drunk-talk.
I duck to avoid getting pegged with a crushed beer can.
“Come on, Pop. Let’s get you to bed,” I say. If I can get him to pass out before he starts swinging, I’m usually pretty good.
“Don’t tell me what I . . . what I should do.”
My Uncle Sammy must be out of prison again. I see that he was here today. The kitchen table is covered in various weed paraphernalia. My pop doesn’t do drugs. My mom doesn’t either. I frequently question why I don’t.
“What did Uncle Sammy want, Pop?” I ask, hoping to get him to unclench his fists and climb into bed.
No luck.
Just saying Uncle Sammy’s name is enough to make him snap. Pop flies out of his chair and is on me before I have time to cover my face.
“Don’t you ask me ’bout Sam! Don’t you ask me nothin’, you moron. You ruined my life,” he growls.
Each word is delivered with a matching punch. My pop is really good at making words hurt, bruise, and bleed. He eventually collapses in a heap. I leave him there, passed out, and stumble to the bathroom to check out the damage. Not too bad. Most of his punches landed on my body, but he did manage to split my left cheek. Which means questions from adults at school.
I yell at myself for not covering my head. I punch the bathroom sink with self-hatred.
I look at my reflection and give myself the business. “You’re so stupid! You’re a freakin’ idiot! You’re a fucking asshole idiot!”
I am supposed to be at work in twenty minutes. I find a Band-Aid in the medicine cabinet and get my story straight.
BMX crash. Tried to jump a curb. Kid got in my way. Did a face-plant.
Blood has dripped onto my T-shirt, so I rip through the closet looking for a clean one. It’s piled about waist-high with bags of shit, mostly from Salvy, but some of those bags have my clothes in them. My mom usually takes a trash bag full of clothes to the laundromat whenever she has enough change to get a load through the washer and the dryer. That’s about once every two or three weeks, sometimes longer—depends if there’s any leftover money after beer and cigarettes.
The woman has her priorities.
Still no clean laundry bag, and half the junk is now piled outside of the closet. I pull out a brown paper grocery bag that’s rolled shut.
Did you ever see a brown paper bag that’s been rolled and rerolled so many times, it gets all soft and actually stays rolled
shut? This bag stays rolled shut. Until I open it.
Inside there is a black gun. I don’t know anything about guns, other than the stuff I’ve seen on TV and in the movies. I don’t know what kind of gun it is. I just know it’s a gun, and it’s real. I can tell by how heavy it feels in my hand.
Pop grunts on the floor behind me.
I jump, drop the gun back into the paper bag, and close it.
He’s still passed out. I stuff the bags of clothes back into the closet. I have a problem: Where should I put the brown bag? I have no place of my own—no bedroom, no closet, no dresser. I have a sofa that smells like a urinal, and that’s it. I run my hand over my head and scope out my mom’s room. She’s got a dresser and a bed. That’s it for her room.
I turn around and look into Pop’s room. Twin bed, nightstand, and bags of my dead grandmother’s clothes. And that’s it for his room. The bag of clean laundry is in there, though. It’s sitting on his bed. He must’ve forgotten to put it back in the closet.
And he calls me a moron.
But I’m a moron with a gun now.
Victor
MY DOG DOESN’T THINK I’M WEAK.
She’s a dark brown teacup poodle that my mother got the year before I was never supposed to be born. My mom used to call me My Little Accident. I guess she thought it was a nice thing to say. Maybe not—maybe she knew how despicable it was to call her son that. Who knows? She’s a mystery to me most times.
Now she calls me My Accident. She gets such pleasure from telling me that I was never planned. She never wanted kids. Ever. She had too much to do with her life, she said. Like travel and shop and impress people. I didn’t even come along till she was forty-one. The way I figure it, she stopped whatever birth control she was on (which is something I really don’t like thinking about, but whatever) and she thought she couldn’t get pregnant. But apparently, from the great beyond, I had other plans. Why my soul insisted on being born to two loveless robots is something I’ve thought about a lot in my sixteen years. Yet here I am. Her Little Accident. Sweet, sweet motherly love.
My mother got the dog for her fortieth birthday, for herself. She said she deserved something fluffy to love. I guess since I never had fur, she figured she didn’t have to love me when I came along. She named the dog Jasmine, as in Jasmine tea. You know, because she’s a teacup poodle? I call her Jazzer to infuriate my mom. It works like a charm.
Jazzer really does fit in the palm of my hand; she’s that small. She loves me more than both of my parents combined, because she’s smart enough to understand what real love is. I really love her, and she knows it. I talk to her a lot, and she listens.
Some days she’s the only out-loud interaction I have. My parents are both gone when I get up, off to their important jobs where they do their important things. Jazzer always wakes me up and pays attention when I talk—not that I talk much, but when I have something to say, I say it to her, and she listens to me.
When I get home from school, she’s waiting for me in the window, sitting on the sill like a statue. We have this routine where I poke her and she comes alive and jumps into my hand. Then I put her on my shoulder and she stays there while I do my homework.
One time, when I was in fourth grade, I swore Jazzer whispered, “Love you” in my ear as I finished up my hero essay. I remember foolishly telling my mother, and she laughed at me, not with me . . . at me. She called me ridiculous and then asked if I was on drugs. I was ten years old. She’s perfected the art of making me feel like an idiot.
She’s not my hero. Neither is my dad.
One of my heroes is definitely this guy named Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss. I did a project on him in second grade. He’s called the Prince of Mathematics. For real. He was from Germany, and I’m German. Well, my dad’s German and my mom is half German. She tells everyone she’s pure German, though, because she’s embarrassed by her mother’s Irish heritage. She says the Irish left their own country because of weakness while the Germans were busy conquering the whole blessed world. She says that to her own mother. To her face.
My mother loves to tell people that our last name, Konig, means “king” in German. Like people care about our last name. She’d have made the perfect Nazi wife.
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss and I both corrected our father’s math calculations at the age of three. I used to love sneaking into my dad’s office upstairs. He never knew I would go in there. I was forbidden to “go near his work.” He made that very clear with his tone and word choice. But I loved climbing up to look at his architecture plans. They were always so neat, so perfect, so symmetrical, all spread out on his drafting board.
I remember finding that miscalculation in my father’s math. It jumped out at me like a pop-up clown from a box, waving its hands, shouting, “I’m wrong! I’m wrong!” I went over it and over it in my head and kept getting the same answer—a different answer from my father’s.
I was so lost in the math that I didn’t hear the shower turn off or the bathroom door open or my father’s feet pad down our handmade oriental hall rug. What I did hear was the sharpness and volume of his voice when he said, “Victor! Get down!”
He shouted with such ferocity that I lost my footing and fell off of his work stool and onto the hardwood floor. Hard.
My fall didn’t faze him. No Are you all right, son? or Did you hurt yourself, son? He continued right on with his tirade. “This is my work. My work, Victor! This is not a playroom! Look around; do you see any toys in here?”
I shook my three-year-old head and rubbed my own knees.
“Get up, you little . . . little . . . pest.” He spit out that part with pure disgust. “Get out of here. This is my office, Victor!”
I got up and walked to my room without saying a word. I knew when to keep my mouth shut. It’s amazing how smart young kids are and how fast they learn.
I never did tell my dad about his error, but I heard him complaining to my mother the next night at dinner. I actually remember my three-year-old chest silently puffing with pride that night at dinner. I was right, my math was right, and he was wrong. My dad had made a mistake, and I knew it before he did.
That’s when I knew I was good at math. Like, mind-blowingly good. And after my project, I knew I was good like Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematics. I used to call myself that in the quiet of my own head. It felt really comforting to imagine that I was the prince of something. It made me feel like I mattered, that I was important, that I was special.
I was a prince.
At first I thought being good at math would make my parents love me. At least they could brag about me, I thought. You would think people with such a superior attitude would’ve put their son in a fancy private school so they could brag about that, too. No luck there. My mother has this deep-seated belief that their hard-earned money should be spent on things involving them, and that public school is just fine for me. Besides, private or public school, all my math talent did was add more pressure. My parents love raising the bar for me, making my current achievements only good, never good enough.
Like today, after school, both of my parents are home early in anticipation of my SAT scores. Actually they were waiting for me when I walked in. The full 800 points I receive on the math section of the SAT isn’t good enough. Out of the almost 1.5 million kids who took the test with me, only 0.7 percent scored a perfect 800 on the math. I am one of the 0.7 percent. The prince. But because I earned a 650 on the Critical Reading and 610 on the Writing, I am told that I have embarrassed my parents.
My mother makes an early dinner. It was supposed to be a celebratory dinner.
“Victor, I wish you would’ve prepared us for your low scores on the Critical Reading and Writing portions of your test,” my mother says. She sits with her hands on her lap, back straight. She’s hardly touched her food. Oh, she is so concerned.
I tell her, “I got a perfect score on the math.”
She doesn’t care. “Victor, how could you
let those other scores happen . . . to us? It’s embarrassing.”
I have no answer for her. I stare at my broiled filet and wild mushroom risotto.
My father tries a stab at answering for me. “I think someone at this table has not put forth the necessary effort he needs to in reading and writing. I think someone at this table is lazy.”
Thanks, Dad.
“I don’t think he should come to Europe with us, Tomas. I really don’t feel he deserves to go. Victor needs to stay here and get his priorities straight. I think he needs to be punished,” my mom says.
“I agree, Aubrey. Well, then, that settles it.”
“Good. I’m too upset to finish dinner. I think I’ll take a drive, run an errand. I’m sick to my stomach over this.”
She’s hilarious. She’s sick to her stomach. Pathetic.
My mother’s the type of woman who just can’t deal with anyone’s feelings. Oh, she knows when and how to turn it on for the people she thinks matter (otherwise known as those with money), and she can yuck it up, squeeze forearms, and dab her eyes with the best of them. But it’s all fake. Because she barely knows what to do with her own feelings. It’s like she’s a seed that got stuck while opening—like the rain stopped falling and the sun stopped shining and she’s only open a crack.
My dad gets up from his end of the formal dining room table and walks down to be at my mother’s side. He leans in, kisses her cheek, and says, “Darling, it’ll be just you and me in Europe. Just like—” He stops himself.
I know what he was going to say.
The words sucker punch me one at a time.
Just.
Like.
Before.
Victor.
Was.
Born.
Victor Konig is down. It’s a knockout.
Bull
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