151 Days (39 page)

There was an attitude she could not believe, but I don’t think it was Sammy’s. “Kyle, I know you’re upset about Brad—”

“This isn’t about fucking Brad,” I snapped, cutting her off.

She paused for a moment, either thinking of her next words or trying to calm down. “You’re out of control. I think you need to talk to him.”

“I don’t need anything.” The tardy bell rang, interrupting the argument. “I didn’t before I met all of you, and I don’t now.”

It was quite possibly the stupidest thing I have ever said out loud.

She gave me a look of pure pity and shook her head. Without a word she turned around and walked away from me.

Everyone had walked away from me. Fine. I was alone before Brad fucked up my life. I could be alone again. I didn’t need anyone.

Right?

Right?

Yeah, I didn’t have any answers either.

The rest of that school week was the longest four days of my life. Each class seemed to drag out for hours of torture. I spent lunches alone in the library, avoiding any chance I might run into anyone I used to know, the whole time thinking they had abandoned me. As we headed into the weekend, I heard Josh Walker telling a couple of people that Brad wasn’t at school because he was taking a tour of A&M over the weekend.

Josh’s words stripped away the illusion that somehow things would end up for the better. I don’t know how, but I guess that in the back of my mind, no matter what, I’d believed that things were going to fix themselves. The reality was completely different. In a moment of pure horror, when I realized just how bad things were, Brad was out looking at his dream college and everything I had been dreading was coming true. This year was going to end, and I was never going to see Sammy or Jennifer or Brad—
Brad
, I murmured, too stricken to care how I sounded—again. This life, the whole existence I had cobbled together for the past eighteen years, was going to end, and I was expected to make a new one thousands of miles away—alone.

It was the most morose weekend of my life.

I couldn’t get away from my sadness. Everything I saw reminded me of what I was going to lose and never get back. My mom barely spoke to me. She was still pissed about the way I had talked to Tyler, so I more or less expected that. I didn’t leave my room except to eat and use the bathroom, and the next forty-eight hours were spent staring up at my ceiling, wondering when it all went so wrong.

Sunday night my mom said I had a call, and my heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest like something from
Aliens
. Leaping out of bed, I ran to the phone, knowing in my heart it was Brad. I needed to hear his voice. It felt like my soul was riding on saying I was sorry to him and making all this right.

“I knew you’d call,” I said, picking the phone up off the kitchen table.

Mrs. Axeworthy’s voice came from the other side. “Yes? Well then, you must know what I am going to ask.”

My mouth went dry as I realized it wasn’t Brad and things were not going to be fixed.

“I need you to tell me we aren’t going to see a repeat of last week tomorrow.” Her voice was stern and lacked all the empathy she’d had when we talked before. Looking back, I can’t blame her. She’d taken a huge gamble when she volunteered to mentor the club, and I had lost my shit. But that is looking back and literally down the barrel of a gun.

At the time I could understand none of that. “I am sure things will be different,” I assured her, since I knew Sammy wasn’t going to show her face, which meant no chance of Jeremy showing up either.

“I hope not. Because, Kyle, this is important, more important than me and you. It has the ability to change people’s lives, and we can’t risk that for personal problems.”

My mouth opened to argue that this wasn’t a personal problem, and that Jeremy was responsible for someone killing himself, but I refrained, knowing it would go nowhere. I just repeated that everything would be fine and hung up, knowing that “fine” was so far away it was pathetic. I looked at the phone and wondered if I should call Brad myself. Just give in and call him and make up and just stop all of this nonsense.

And then I saw the admission packet from Berkeley on the kitchen table and knew there was a reason I was doing this.

Not a good reason, but a reason nonetheless.

Which brings us to Monday. Today. Right now.

We opened the door. The two freshmen and a girl I had never seen before came in. I waited to see if anyone else would show up, closed the door, and began the meeting. I was halfway through my whole speech about everyone being welcome and that this was a safe room when the door burst open and Jeremy came barging in.

Immediately, I went into attack mode. I stood up in a rage and came around the table at him. I honestly think I was ready to hit him. It would have been the first time I had ever hit someone physically unprovoked before.

Jeremy pulled a nasty-looking handgun out of his jacket, pointed it at me, cocked the trigger, and then fired at me.
Call the police! There’s a madman around.

And in the end should someone die?

—
Moulin Rouge!

46 days left

J
EREMY

G
ROWING
UP
, everyone had a PlayStation.

It was the game system of the moment, and everyone I knew owned one. I had just started first grade, and it was all anyone could talk about. They talked about what games they owned, what score they got, and what level they had unlocked. Like any normal kid, I was instantly jealous of this toy and wanted one for myself. I begged and begged my father that I needed one and that I would die if I didn’t get one.

My dad is one of those guys who doesn’t take hyperbole well at all.

His father, my grandfather, was a bastard of a man who believed that kids were a cheap form of labor and that their preferences didn’t count for much. So my dad and his four brothers grew up working the land outside of Foster and hated it. I don’t know how much you know about farming today, but let me sum it up for you in a way you can understand.

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.