“Painting.” Carl gives my mom a look, then seems to hold his tongue as he yanks open the fridge, grabs the milk, and downs all that remains straight from the carton. I watch his neck dance as he gulps every bit of it. Then he tosses the emptied carton at the trashcan. It misses and tumbles onto the tile.
My mom doesn’t so much as flinch. She probably forgot she even suggested cereal to me at all. That’s alright. I can’t stomach a bowl this morning anyway. “Basketball obviously wasn’t your sport,” I note, staring at the carton Carl makes no effort in picking up.
He gives me a sharp look, then marches right up to me. A curly smile twists his face apart—a smile that my mother could easily take as friendly and well-meaning, despite the mockery in his eyes. “My sport of choice was football.” He punches that word. Football. “Full-contact sport. All muscle. All strength. All man.”
I squint at him. “Sounds pretty gay to me.”
“Sorry, my little man, but you can’t play that gay card with football here in Spruce,” he fires back, prepared already for my admittedly childish, antagonistic retort. “Coach Tanner Strong heads the team, and he’s gay as all get-out, and he’s all man, too. He just proves you can be gay and tough.”
My mother, who mistakenly (or deliberately) takes this for some kind of awkward male bonding, lets out a light and buttery giggle before abandoning her spot by the sink. “You two, I swear, if I had a nickel,” is all she says as she passes us by, taking her book and her mug of coffee with her.
The atmosphere in the kitchen chills in her departure. Carl’s friendly mask drops, and his eyes turn to ice. “You demean me like that in front of Marly again, I’ll make your life hell. I can make your life hell. Every day, every night. You want your life to be hell?”
We have had many disagreements over the years. And the one thing I’ve come to learn is that my stepdad is all bark and no bite. These very unveiled threats are a part of his regular vocabulary.
I lift my chin to him. “Her name’s Marlene. She hates it when you call her Marly.” I smirk. “Isn’t that a dog’s name, anyway?”
He squints challengingly at me. “You can throw me all the lip you want, little man, little scrawny man … but if you had tougher skin on that wireframe body of yours back in the seventh grade when you needed it, you would have graduated last year with all your friends instead of starting your senior year as an eighteen-year-old wonder. You know it. I know it. Your mom knows it.”
I hadn’t expected him to pull out that particular weapon. He’s been sharpening it all summer, that much I can tell from the way they slice straight out of his chapped, uneven, half-snarled lips.
And the cut stings, just how he meant it to.
Good thing I’m a pro at wearing a blank face. “At least I will be graduating high school,” I casually point out, “which is more than you can say for yourself. Is that a streak of grease on your cheek from the auto shop, or have you not showered yet this week?”
“There isn’t any damn grease on my face,” the man scoffs at my back as I depart the kitchen, but I know he’ll check his face in the refrigerator’s reflective surface anyway. And that thought is almost satisfying enough to mend the wound his little jab tried to open, as I make my way right out of the house.
Besides, seventh grade was ages ago. I was someone else. The bullies had their worst with me, and they won, and I crumbled like a sugar cookie. I failed four of my classes and had to repeat that year while all of my friends advanced to eighth grade without me. And now, they’ve all graduated, and I’m left to fend for myself all on my own this final year of school—as if I needed another reason for my stomach to turn this morning.
I have to keep telling myself that in the end, I get last laughs.
Those bullying boys grow up some day, and they become men like my stepdad—dissatisfied, jealous, and full of worthless steam. As dark as the notion may be, I have to take solace in the fact that I will not allow myself to turn out like them, no matter what they do to me. I have to be better, and I have to do better.
Just when I’ve got one foot out the front door ready to make an early departure for school, Winona appears at my legs, panting. I crouch down and give her a moment’s love and a scratch behind her big brownish ears, right where she likes it. “At least someone in this old house loves me,” I murmur to her, smiling. “Bark away the baddies from my shed out back while I’m gone, you hear?”