Cracked (3 page)

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.

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.

MY FREAKING HANDS SHAKE FOR, LIKE, FORTY-FIVE
minutes. They’re shaking like I’m doing it on purpose. I am an asshole.

But I made it to work on time—fresh Band-Aid, fresh T-shirt, fresh story. I’m unloading the last box from a lady’s Range Rover SUV when the driver’s side window slides down and her arm shoots out. She’s snapping.

I stand there, staring at this perfect hand with five perfect nails, all polished up, and a big honking diamond ring on her finger. She keeps snapping. It takes me a moment to break the spell of her glittering hand. I look at her face, which is perfect
too. Straight blond hair, big blue eyes—if she wasn’t old, she’d be pretty hot. I’m close enough to the car to hear her mumbling to herself.

“I can’t believe Tomas suggested I come here. There’s obviously something wrong with this boy.”

Then she snaps
and
waves her hand at the same time, and shouts to me, “Excuse me! Do you hear me? I’d like my tax receipt now. My husband said I would get a tax receipt.”

I can’t believe I thought she could’ve been hot. What
a cow.

I shake my head while looking right into her eyes and say, “You have to get out of the car and get one yourself.” I turn and walk away.

The woman obviously doesn’t get it. Her voice is louder this time. “Excuse me? Isn’t it your job to take care of the generous people who donate their goods?”