“AT THE END OF THE STARTING LINE” Chapter Two
(A Review Living Inside and Outside the Video Game Chrono Cross (2000))
“Where ripples become waves”
A foot nudged me awake around six PM.
“Hey. Dad is going with the Ferrones to the movies.”
Just as how some questions in my house were imperative commands, some statements could be interrogative questions. This was a statement asking “Did you want to go with your father to the movies?”
We rode down Richmond Highway in near-silence, my father and I, in retrospect every answer I gave no doubt bled with teen defensiveness.
“Do you know if they filmed any of the movie around your school?”
My only reply being a “No.”
“So is this about your school or another school?”
“Another one, T.C. Williams.”
“And are they your rivals? You know when I was at Hendric – “
I cut him off before an anecdote about intramural sports, “I don’t know. I don’t go to any games.”
We rolled to a red light between an ancient car wash and a place called “Taco Lucas.”
My eyes blinked as I wondered why anyone would name a taco shop Lucas.
The given name Lucas comes from the Latin root “lucere” meaning to shine. My father’s mother, Dale, had insisted I would take Latin as my language elective in high school, relegating me to semester after semester of Ecce Romani and the Cornelius family. Memorizing conjugation tables that to this day only pay dividends in Quebecois bureaucracy and Mexican signage.
Internally at the time however, I asked myself “Why Lucas? I’ve never met anyone named Luke much less Lucas.”
It would not be until the year of this writing that I would meet two people named Lucas.
We rolled into the Mt. Vernon Multiplex Cinemas, I knew from the offset that we’d arrive fifteen minutes early, but we wouldn’t be getting any snacks – my father doesn’t believe in stopping for snacks on road trips or at the movies.
Wandering around the lobby I saw several classmates nearby and tried to disappear in a sea of “maybe I know them” peoples.
In 2000, Buena Vista Pictures released Remember the Titans. It is a period sports movie starring Denzel Washington as the high school football coach Herman Boone as he struggles to integrate then T.C. Williams High School during the 1970s. In 2000 that high school was, inexplicably, still called T.C. Williams. Thomas Chambliss Williams was the superintendent of Alexandria City Public Schools from the 1930s until the 1960s and is best known as, among other things, an AVID segregationist.
The school would not be renamed until 2020 and even then, some 50 years hence there were cries to “let it be” and let the name remain. As an aside, when the re-naming was performed two of the most popular suggestions from the student body were “Anime High School” and “Meghan Markle High,” if only.
The lobby of the Mount Vernon Multiplex Cinemas wasn’t particularly warm, the twenty-five foot windows weren’t insulated – seeing a movie here in the dead of winter assured you would need to wear a jacket in the lobby. I was wearing a black fleece sweatshirt with a black t-shirt over top emblazoned with the NERV logo from Neon Genesis Evangelion and blue metallic black jeans. Which is to say, my pants were dimly reflective and I had a torso-sized logo on my chest, alongside the shock of blond hair, I could not have hid myself any worse. “AYO! SNICKERS!” someone cried in the throng. My father, tickets in hand, slapped me on the back and narrowed his eyes, scanning the crowd. “I think someone knows you over there,” he gestured over the crowd “want to go talk to them?”
Without responding I turned and hid myself examining the concession stand in dollar-less silence. I pointed my finger at various candies, mouthing dollar amounts in silent math quietly trying to manifest teleportation to literally anywhere but this moment on a Friday night.
I should have stayed asleep on the floor.
We went back home few hours later. My mother, sat on the overstuffed couch, asked my father about the movie while he gave generic answers. On opening the door I rushed to the kitchen and put a pot of water to boil. I had been skipping both breakfast and lunch at school to save my money for the Playstation 2. Which is to say, by the time the popcorn-less movie ended that Friday evening, it had been almost 24 hours since I had last eaten.
Blankly staring at the still pot, willing it to bubble and stir, I waited. In a parallel pan I cooked two eggs sunny side up. The pot came to, I dropped three packets of ramen into it, drained the water, added the seasoning, stirred, and slid the eggs over top.
Supper.
I ate this over the sink from the pot I boiled it the noodles in, rinsed the pan, pot, and rinsed off my bamboo chopsticks, before setting everything to dry.
No trace.
Walking out from the kitchen, my father was still debriefing my mother about Mr. Ferrone, a neighbor of ours with whom we shared a backyard and a coworker of my father, doing whatever secret work he did.
I put my spine against the sliding door-frame to the kitchen, extended my arms, and pressed. Dominos of cracks cascaded down my spine. I moseyed over to the family Compaq Presario desktop and turned it on.
I sat on the farm style pine chair and eyed the CRT monitor, gazing over scans of the watercolor like character art for Chrono Cross, while reading bulletin board system (BBS) posts about easter eggs in the game as nods to other pieces of media. Someone was collated all the references lovingly placed in the I clicked from the video game forums to Yahoo! Auctions Japan and clicked through listings for the game. I found a listing for a table clock with bid equivalent to 30$ USD. I quickly logged in and set a max bid of 35$. I clicked off to the desktop wallpaper made of those same watercolor portraits of Serge, Lynx, Kid, and Harle.
“Are you going to hang out with your friends tonight? Play playstation?” my father asked me as he walked past the computer to the kitchen.
“No,” my mom answered on my behalf. “All he does is go from the computer to videogames and back. It’s like he’s living his entire life inside boob-tubes.”
My father, turning back out from the kitchen, rested one hand on my shoulder as I clicked through BBS threads trying to avoid spoilers for the game while also finding out anything new.
“Your uncle and I spent most of high school running around, busy with part time jobs and boy scouts, maybe go see if your friends want to hang out.”
“No “ My mom doubled down, “He’s happy with his Nintendo and spending my money.” She said this with a glare that two decades on I still can’t discern whether it was ironic or genuine.
“Wellllll” my father stretched out saying to the entire room, “Tomorrow your mother and I are going out to dinner with some friends, can we trust you won’t ruin the place with strippers and beer?”
“Don’t ruin the place with strippers and beer” was a euphemism my mother, then later both of my parents, employed to gently ask “Can we trust you to be left alone at home without supervision?”
Throughout this entire exchange I mechanically clicked between threads on the web-forum, only once glancing towards my mother to catch her glare regarding “her money.”
“Yes.” I replied, “I’ll make sure someone else brings the kegs and pays for the lap dances.”
Twenty hours later, after waiving them out of the front door I peered out the street facing guest room window to see their Ford Explorer pull out of the drive-way, then off the street. I vaulted down the stairs, vaulted again from the landing into the living room, hurdled over the overstuffed loveseat, and barrelled out the backyard French doors to watch through gaps between houses to see them leave the neighborhood.
I scanned the common backyard to see if anyone noticed that gymnastics routine. Not a soul. I retraced my steps backwards and locked the doors before proceeding to my parents’ master bedroom. Rooting around nightstands, behind books on their bookshelf, and inside non-dust-laden containers under the bed, I raided the space for treasure. A strategy I honed from years of video games.
Nothing.
I moved to my mother’s makeup stand and tilted open drawers. At this point I knew to leave no trace, everything was opened slowly so as to avoid leaving anything on tilt – no sign I was ever here in the first place. In one drawer there were curlers and a hair dryer, I gently shifted them aside and heard the familiar sound of plastic on cellophane.
It had been five weeks and five days since the game had released, some friends were already in New Game+. Surely she had forgotten she pilfered this from me before, even if she hadn’t I had paid for this with my money. It was already mine; I wasn’t a thief in the night, I was taking back what was mine.
Melancholic, Celtic music thronged through the speakers of the 27 inch Sony Trinitron cathode ray tube television in the “Guest Room.” A full motion video of a walnut desktop with an oil lantern and leather bound journal warmly lit the room as a text crawl began. As a pan-flute gave way to drums and guitars, scenes of floating islands, bi-pedal panthers, hordes of dragons, turbulent seas frozen in time, and a house on fire flashed on screen before pulling out to the title CHRONO CROSS in a coral Bondi blue against a white background concluded the song. I felt a single empathic pulse of my left atrium.
I softly depressed the “Start” button on my PlayStation controller to be met with a triangle like tone of confirmation.
I arranged a save file on both of my two memory cards. I knew better than to leave any chance, I had a secret second memory card that couldn’t be use against me. There was the player one save cartridge, that one was in the console at all times. The second one however was secreted away with me, and stored away in a hardcopy book by D.T. Suzuki on Zen Buddhism.
I played until I noticed the headlights of my parents’ SUV pull into the drive way. On recognition I ditched the game at where I had last saved, popped the lid on the console and swapped it for a copy of Strider 2. With the door cracked my parents walked up stairs and walked past the guest room cracked door without asking how I was. Though, regardless I couldn’t risk being caught so soon in my adventure.
By the time I felt comfortable that my parents had fallen asleep it was after midnight. I swapped the games back.
I played throughout the night through the quest as Serge meets Kid, they partner and visit Termina, raid Viper Manor, and we see Kid get poisoned.
It is here that I deployed the single piece of spoiler knowledge I had. I chose not to pursue the antidote for Kid, because that decision path was the one that had Glenn.
The game developers, for reasons beyond me to this very day, put one of the 45 optional characters — a plot integral one at that, behind this choice that becomes incidental the plot of the greater game within thirty minutes.
Over the course of three dozen hours of play Glenn grows from timid squire to brave knight. He purifies the specter of his older brother and extended kin. He restores corrupted legendary weapons on the strength of his virtues. Also, he dual wields swords, which is fundamentally cool.
I hadn’t registered the pre-dawn blue-ing of the skies or wood groan of a floor panel near the door before the air pressure shifted. The guest room door eased open and my father leaned in the door frame to find me, hours deep in the game.
“Morning tiger,” he said. “What’s this one?”
He squinted at the television as he gradually found the day. He squatted down to examine the jewel case.
I was frozen in my guilt, my character mid-navigation on the world map. Would this be a boss encounter or scripted event?
“So – Chrono CROSS, eh? Is this part of that game you, Chris, and Phillip played on the Nintendo?”
He was referring to the two week window when a grade school friend of mine lent me his copy of Chrono Trigger and over those fourteen days with two back-to-back sleepover weekends I mowed through the entire game on my Super Nintendo, complete with two New Game+ runs. This was back when we lived at Fort Meade, Maryland. Months before everyone moved away and I started Junior High alone.
“You know what game was great? Actraiser. Can’t understand why the sequel was so hard though” he let his voice trail off as he recalled Actraiser 2, which was enough of a different game from the original that it arguably should have been rebranded as something else entirely.
“Anyways tiger, I’m going to get some coffee, get some sleep soon okay?”
He knew I wasn’t up early, but rather was still up. He moseyed down the stairs with a slight grumble to find the kitchen.
From the world map I sped to the save screen, archived my status, repackaged everything and zeroed out the room. I retreated back to my room and collapsed on the cushion on my floor. The sky was paler now, aching yellows peaked out. I forced my eyes closed and retreated into sleep.
In my sleep I was still playing the game. There was no menu screen, it was polygonal characters moving about, that anxiety-inducing fight theme The Brink of Death, blurred almost watercolor painting backgrounds. I was in it.
A slipper nudged my foot around nine AM. The world was loud with hedge trimmers, leaf blowers, the din of people chatting outside. My father stood over my drooling face with whatever number this was of his coffee servings. He took a sip.
“Your mother made pancakes. Get up.” He moseyed out of the room and back downstairs. I pushed myself up off the floor, winced at the noise outside world, and stumbled down the hall to the stairs.
My father has a rule he iterated enough to my teenage self that it burned into my plastic memory. “If you sleep in past 9 AM, the day is lost.” He maintains that nothing of note will get done in the day if you allow this one chronological slight. Thus far, his observation has proven true for me — not despite my best efforts.
I reached the kitchen and found a stack of pancakes, some scrambled eggs, and turkey bacon in the microwave. I arranged a plate of room temp bites, poured myself a glass of orange juice, and walked to the dining table to dine while my parents watched Mythbusters on Discovery Channel. I ate my pancakes and washed them down in bright citrus with every bite.
A rapid six knock wrapped the door, my father moseyed from the overstuffed loveseat to find Brandon, Michael, and Robert at the door. I could see them peaking from around my father to find eyes with me “MvC2 yo! Proooooo SKATTURRRRR” Brandon howled out from behind everyone.
There may as well have been a me-shaped-hole punched through the wall.
Robert lived two houses down the street from me, he was the only one of us who had a Dreamcast at the time but his parents refused to have more than one guest at a time so we schlepped his console and controllers to Brandon’s house on Potomac loop. Brandon’s was a latch-key house, we would have our privacy well past dusk.
“Viper beam is so gay!” Michael barked out. “Stop using that shit” My brain-dead team for Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 (MvC2) was Cable, Mega-Man, and Strider Hiryu. I would build chip-damage with Strider, or Mega-Man, then zone my opponent out with Cable’s special moves. “God you play so gay.” Michael groaned as I took another set off him. The understood rules for our housing area was winner stays, loser rotates. Survival of the fittest.
Brandon sat down again. His love of Street Fighter was his bias in MvC2. He pulled Charlie, Zangief, and Cammy. I would troll a set off of him using the demoralizing trio of Captain Commando, Bonnie Hood, and in a sadistic move Servbot. This would be one of the last times we all ever played MvC2, though we didn’t know it yet. In a few weeks Michael would have a Playstation 2 and Tekken Tag Tournament would come to occupy all of our fighting game sessions for the future. Where MvC2 was a game whose language I could understand intuitively, Tekken Tag was more opaque. I could never quite understand what the game wanted of me – this is something that has been true for me and all of the Tekken series.
Friday, October 27th, 2000 we crowded on the floor at Michael’s house as Madden NFL 2001 beamed then-photo-real linebackers colliding into one another. This was his early-Christmas present. He had the new Madden and Tekken Tag. We lingered at his house for hours until the street lights came on, and even then we walked 2 miles one-way to the 7-Eleven. We would get snacks and more snacks for the walk back to Michael’s to continue playing. We all knew our report cards would be arriving soon. The news loomed over the entire evening like a cancer screening. One or some of us would not be hanging out once those envelopes arrived.
I returned home from school at roughly 3:45 PM on Monday October 30th, 2000. I made a lap through the laundry room into the kitchen, I was still pocketing all money I could to save for my own Playstation 2. I set a pot to boil for a two-pack of Nissin Top Ramen. I can barely recall which registered first, her stare or the finger tapping. I turned like a gazelle, slowly and with a bewildered stare. “I told you that you play video games too much.” On the dining table was an open envelope and a sheet of paper face down. My mother was thrumming her fingers on the jewel box of Chrono Cross.
“You stay up like a vampire, you give your father or me no respect, you eat all of our food, and this is what you think is acceptable?” One hand slowly thrummed the jewel box, the other punctuated her point pointing onto the report card. “You’re hanging out with your little crew for all hours doing who knows what and this is the thanks I get for letting you live in my house?”
I recall at the time I hadn’t yet blinked, much less moved from the ninety degree half turn I had when I met her gaze.
“I should toss this” she tapped a nail in triplicate on the jewel box “into the fire, just to prove a point.” I could hear the water coming to boil. I couldn’t let shame or fear be expressed, if I let something slip she would catch it and use that against me. I knew this because those were the mistakes I made earlier – when I was a child. An assignment overdue, a group project I asked to do by myself, if I skipped using pledge on the furniture — if I reacted that was a positive for her to dig deeper. The only solution was compartmentalizing – defensive play.
“Before this arrived I decided to clean your room today” it was here I knew my eyes bulged, I couldn’t control that. “mmmmhmmmm” she lingered “and I found some secrets, like your little book. So I took it and I put it in the fire.”
A dozen-dozen hours of Xenogears, Final Fantasy VIII, Star Ocean, Parasite Eve, Lunar: Silver Star Story, Brave Fencer Musashi, Wild Arms, and of course my surreptitious time in Chrono Cross all swept over me. She squinted her eyes and pursed her lips. “Those foul disgusting raps you wrote. It’s awful.”
The Konami Metal Gear Solid ALERT! sound pinged through my brain.
She wasn’t referring to D.T Suzuki.
“You want to be a rapper? Is that it? Like the gangsters you see on MTV? It’s disgusting how they talk. I won't allow it under my roof so I burned your little raps. I’ll do it again too.”
During lunch occasionally Robert, or John, or a random would strong arm me into freestyling at the drum-line table. I would mimic whatever New York rap I thought was good, I would joke about the stupidity of me rapping, I would bemusedly demean whoever battled-rapped me. I was either just good or just novel enough that I was given a moniker – Snickers. The notebook was just that, a marble composition book I got from the dollar store to write ideas and rhyme while staying within bar lines. It was profane, and sophomoric, and nothing worth exploring further save that it was a sacrificial lamb to sate my mother’s pursuit to out my teen privacy.
“So, do you already know how piss-poor you did or do you want to guess” she tapped the report card this time.
I reached back to the stove without looking and felt for the burner knob, I turned it from boil to simmer. “uhh – ” I delayed “why don’t you tell me how bad I did.”
She smirked. “All Bs. Except for one C+”
Geometry. It was my first class of the day three days a week and my teacher kept the class meat freezer cold. I could barely stay conscious in that room, much less retain formulae.
“Yeah.” I replied, internally I felt what I got was acceptable.
“Yeeaahhhh” she parroted back “I SHOULD take away all electronics, and your foul music, and leaving the house, and give you extra chores for this.”
“Yeah.” I returned, relegating myself to another round of living in the 1950s.
“But, maybe I should give you this, as incentive to work on that C+” she pushed the jewel box with a single finger across the dining table.
I took a few steps forward and pulled the box towards me with a tentative hand. I lifted it back up and ran a thumb on the cover.
“What do we say” she chased.
“Thank you.” I complied. But I wasn’t thankful. It was mine.
It was always mine. This was akin to a thief wanting the reward for stolen their fenced goods. I turned back to the stove and turned it off. I paused over the stove top. I wasn’t hungry anymore.
It would not be until the year of this writing that I would reflect on what a bizarre encounter that was.
I sat myself on the rug of the “Guest Room” and slid the jewel box out of the cellophane for the final time. I opened the case and eased the game disc into the console and turned it on.
The sun set at 5:10 PM on October 30th, 2000.
I know this because I was told by my father. He came upstairs to fetch me for dinner: lemon pepper pork roast and roasted potatoes. He said the sun had set an hour ago and that I needed to come downstairs to eat. Then the game caught his eye, at this point in my multiple pre-plays I had banked enough time and plot in game to have a considerable headway.
I was exploring the “Temporal Vortex,” which is a brief area of the game that looks like Vincent Van Gogh drew an M.C. Escher lithograph with colored pencils. It is visually stunning to see and a nightmare to navigate. Though, since my father didn’t have to do any of the navigation the beauty of the world design could wash over him. He leaned his back to the door frame, crossed his arms, furrowed his brow, and uttered “Huh – will you look at that” while he took a long pause to take everything in. Eventually he’d ask “What-what game is this one tiger?”
Similarly entranced by the game I would robotically answer “Same game. Chrono Cross.” To which he interjected“ — but it didn’t look like this before” and I would provide “We are in a realm beyond death right now, it shouldn’t look like before.”
Maybe something about my curtness shook him, or the prospect of worlds beyond the living, or maybe he was hungry, but the hypnosis of the game snapped. He was back in reality. He took a long pause again “Can you get to a place to pause it in the next ten?” he asked. “Done.” And just as quickly that I replied, he was downstairs to his supper.
In about ten minutes I went downstairs, I ate a few slices of lemon pepper pork tenderloin, and several roasted potatoes. When I was done eating I rinsed my dishes and left them to dry. No trace. When I came back upstairs, one of my parents had turned off the Playstation.
Anything not saved will be lost.
I retreated from the guest room and returned to my room. I sat at my desk I sat at the desk and set about my homework.
At about nine-fifty AM on Friday, November 3rd, 2000 third period started, on my academic schedule this was a required physical education (PE) class. That day we had a substitute teacher. Before resigning himself to the coaches office in the gymnasium he set the scoreboard timer and said “You’ve got a little less than four quarters — “ around this time he let out a long belch. “What you’re going to do is jog or run or whatever for 13 minutes and then in the last two you’ll walk. That’s it. That’s the — “ and he belched again to punctuate his sentence.
He retreated into the coaches’ office and closed the Venetian blinds stained from at least twenty years of second hand smoke. The scoreboard clicked on. Instantly there were two groups. Those who would chase and those who would be chased. I was not the former.
Initially, there was no order. Later, there would still be no order. People were scattering and collisions were rampant. I would later learn in years of running to slow my mind and let the adrenaline wash through me like the tide, to be lost in the motion while instinct guides my path. At the time as a 15-year-old boy, it was all manic.
The thing about running from something, rather than towards something else, is you can never keep running forever.
It would not be until the year of this writing that I would realize how long I deferred that lesson.
The chasers eventually caught the chasee.
Herded between a brick wall and compressed bleachers I was stomped for what felt like an instant and an eternity. I wasn’t singled out in this. By the end of the hour every chasee kid got this treatment once or twice or more.
When people romanticize the early two-thousands I think back on this. On the homophobia, misogyny — the open bigotry at the time. Five hundred years ago, the divine right of monarchs were unquestioned. Fifty years ago marriage as a racial affair was unquestioned. Fifteen years ago marriage as a cis-gendered affair was unquestioned. Imagine what we know today that will be questioned tomorrow.
By the end of the hour I limped out of the men's locker room. My undershirt had a dirt brown sole print of a Nike Huarache on my sternum. I would ache through the remainder of the day with the solace that it was a two-hour early release.
During lunch, every kid who was stomped got hoots and hollers walking into the lunch room. I could hear it from a distance as I walked down the hall. I peeled off and kimchi-squatted outside, hoping the fresh air would relieve the headache I was nursing. “Don’t be such a bitch about it” one of the chasers said. “You talk all big when you freestyle, but can’t take a hit?” he added, “that’s bitch behavior.”
I stood up and walked away.
By the end of the day, the two or three kids who were stomped got hoots and hollers walking onto a bus. I could hear it from a distance from every bus. I found mine and sat myself in the middle row, hoping the open windows would relieve the headache I still nursed. I put on my Sony CD Walkman D-E201. I turned on the mega-bass function and took my Sony MDR-V6 headphones from my backpack. Mos Def (now Yasiin Bey)’s Black on Both Side began with him praying the Basmala — بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ bi-smillāh ir-raḥmān ir-raḥīm (In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful) in a whisper. It wouldn’t be for another four years that I understood the significance of this prayer. I tapped the skip track nub eleven times until Climb started playing.
Kids are cruel, but teens are crueler.
I came home and my mom had a friend of hers over for coffee-talk. I silently went upstairs to the guest room and shut the door. I played Chrono Crono until eleven AM on Saturday. I navigated the Dead Sea and Chronopolis sequence. By the end I encountered the cast of characters from Chrono Trigger in a cut-scene. Recontextualizing the protagonists of Chrono Trigger, with whom I spent dozens of hours five years prior, as pre-teens sobered me as a nascent teen. The game was all too much. It felt a conversation of the developers now with the past while I spoke with my younger self. I loved it.
At about nine-fifty AM on Monday, November 6th, 2000 third period started, on my academic schedule this was my required PE class. That day we had a suite of school security guards and counsellors waiting for us in the gymnasium. They lectured all forty-something of us about what they heard happened. They explained that they wanted to talk to us — that they would be talking with all of us. They explained how “incidents” like this were not tolerated in Fairfax County, how whoever did it would be found out. Even then I recognized the sort of public relations distancing language that’s typical of scandal-prone politicians. After all I should recognize it, in a suburb of Washington D.C. the local news is national news.
On Tuesday November 7th, 2000, during fourth period Latin Two a counselor pulled me from class. She wasn’t my academic advisor. I was sat in an office with her and a school security guard, he was 6’7 if he was 5’11. All the students called him Lurch.
They told me they wanted to know my story. They told me not to worry about what anyone else said. They told me no one else would hear what I said. I knew from a young age there are few sins more unforgivable than being a narc. I told them nothing — all we ever have are our scruples.
When I got home from school on Tuesday November 7th, 2000, my mother was waiting for me in the living room. She was holding the home phone in one hand and smoking a cigarette in another. Her eyes found mine as I walked through the door. She waited a moment before beginning.
“Who did it.”
“Who did what?” I replied. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Who hurt you and why didn’t you tell me. I would’ve — “ she said
“Who said I was hurt.” I interrupted.
I was hurt. My ego but also my ribs. It had hurt to breathe all weekend. I knew from a young age to take it, that complaining won’t lighten the load — all we ever have are our scruples.
“Why don’t you tell me anything anymore?” she asked.
“I don’t have anything to say” which was true, I was learning that anything I gave away at home could be used against me later.
“You need to tell me when people hurt you” she pleaded.
“Who said I was hurt” I replied. At home, some questions were interrogative. Others were imperative commands. This was not the former.
“You will tell me when people hurt you” she intoned.
“I have homework to do, I think I have a vocab test on Thursday and I missed most of class” I volleyed back.
This was a lie. I knew I had a vocabulary test on Thursday. Though, I had memorized the entire chapter weeks ago in my pre-dawn hours. One of the words was lucere — to shine.
She pursed her lips and took a drag of her cigarette. “So, you aren’t going to give me anything here?”
I hadn’t moved or shifted my weight since meeting her gaze. I reached back without looking and felt for the door knob and pulled the front door closed.
“There is nothing to give mom.” I replied.
“Is this the way it’s going to be then?” When she said this her eyes glared, nostrils flared, and she shifted just so as to register this as ominous.
“I don’t see how it is any different than how it has been.”
“Where is my son?”
“Right here.”
“Fine. Until you tell me no TV, no computer, no Nintendo, no music, no going out” she paused to think.
“ — and I know you’ve been saving for something, not eating at school, bring me all my money I give you. You don’t get to have it anymore.”
I still had dreams. There I could allocate elements and consumables. I could listen to the lush soundtrack. I could see the watercolor painting backgrounds. I could be in it.
“Do you hear me” she commanded.
“Yeah.” I replied.
