Cracked (2 page)

Bull has a habit of triggering my body functions. In second grade, he made me pee my pants on the playground. He sucker punched me, and I landed face-first in a pile of tiny rocks. Bull squatted down just so he could use my head to push himself back up, squishing the rocks further into my face. He had just enough time to tell everyone I’d peed my pants before the playground monitor wandered over to see what the commotion was.

“Victor pissed his pants! Victor pissed his pants!” Bull shouted over and over again.

I laid facedown for as long as I could. I knew I’d peed my pants. I felt the warm humiliation spread through my tan shorts. And I knew that as soon as I stood up, the difference in color would be a blinking arrow, alerting the entire playground that yes, Victor Konig
had
just pissed his pants.

I got up on my elbows and felt my cheeks. It was as if my face sucked up those rocks like they were nutrients or something. Many were embedded and had to be popped out by the school nurse. I looked like I had zits—twenty-three red, oozing zits.

My father wanted to know what I had done to provoke “that boy”—like Bull was actually human. My mother only cared about what the adults at the school thought of her eight-year-old son pissing his pants. She said it made her look bad and that grown-ups would think she wasn’t raising me correctly.

“Only weird boys pee their pants on the playground,” she said. And then she asked me if I was weird.

She actually asked me, “Victor, are you one of those weird boys? Are you? You can’t do that to Mommy. I’ve worked very hard to get where I am in this community, to live in this lovely neighborhood and in this beautiful home. I can’t have my only child embarrassing me. Do you understand, Victor? I can’t have you be one of those
weird
boys.”

I remember apologizing for embarrassing her.

Bull cut in front of me in the lunch line the next day. He shoved me and said, “Out of my way, pee boy.”

I remember apologizing to him, too.

I’M KIND OF EMBARRASSED TO ADMIT THIS, BUT
when I was little I thought my grandfather had an important name. I call him Pop, but he is Mr. George Mastrick. I used to think it sounded like a banker or businessman. But I’m sixteen now, and I know the only important things about my pop are his fists. They’re big and they hurt. But I’d never tell him that.

I even used to think my name, William Mastrick, made me sound like I mattered. My pop renamed me Bull when I was five—said he didn’t want me getting any crazy ideas that I was special. He said I wrecked everyone’s life when I came along, like a bull in a china shop. The name stuck.

I know I look like my pop did when he was younger. Not from any pictures or anything. We’re not the kind of family that has photo albums or memory books or any of that sentimental crap. There isn’t one photo of me till I hit kindergarten, and it’s the school’s photo anyway.

Ever since I can remember, whenever my mom has a load on, she smacks me in the side of the head and tells me how much I look like Pop.

“Dad, look, you two have the same blue eyes.” It comes out like this, though: “Dah, luh, yeww teww hah the say gree eye.”

My pop always tells her to shut up.

I never say a word.

We used to have the same brown hair, too. Whatever. I keep my hair buzzed, just so I won’t look like him. Even though he’s all gray now, we still look a lot alike, and I hate looking like him.

Pop has always hated me. At least I know where I stand. In a wacked-out way, I can appreciate that. I stay out of his way and he stays out of mine . . . unless he wants to beat the shit out of me. Then we spend some real quality time together.

I also have an uncle, Sammy, my mom’s brother, who dropped out of high school when he was sixteen to become a mechanic. Turns out he couldn’t hack that so he decided to
become a professional druggie and alkie instead. He’s pretty deep in the drug scene—spent some time in juvie for dealing weed, then big-boy jail.

When he’s not locked up, he lives in a well-known drug house two blocks over from me. Which is great when you’re walking home from school and your wasted uncle comes crawling out from under a neighbor’s bush, covered in his own puke, asking you for money. Makes you really popular with the other kids. He hasn’t been around our apartment in ages, though. I overheard his drunken dad, my grandfather—
Mr. George Mastrick, Pop—on the phone with the police a few weeks ago. He’s back in jail.

Now I don’t want you to think that I live in a place where a drunk guy crawling out of a bush would be a shocking neighborhood event. I don’t live where ladies do lunch and gossip about the vomit-covered gentleman who fell asleep in Ms. Ashley’s rosebush. Hell no. I live in the dumps, a real shithole.

It’s just me, Pop, and my mom all jammed together in a two-bedroom, second-floor apartment in a crappy twin house. I shouldn’t say it’s just me, Pop, and my mom, because that would be lying. We have tons of other things living with us. A couple hundred roaches join us every night when we turn off the lights, and we have a pack of mice that live underneath our kitchen sink. When I go to grab a trash bag from that cabinet
I am always grossed out by the mouse turds. There are piles and piles under there.

You’d think my mother would sweep them up. Try to keep her kid safe from the germs. One time, when I was little, she tried to serve me a piece of bread with a mouse turd on it, stuck in the butter. I started crying because I knew what it was. She smacked me in the back of my head and screamed that I better freakin’ eat it or she’d shove it down my throat.

Yeah, she shoved the whole piece into my seven-year-old mouth and held my mouth shut until I chewed and swallowed it.

She’s a real great mom.

She loves reminding me that I was never supposed to have been born. That I stole her dreams. She never really had dreams. I inherited that from her, I guess.

Her stupid big dream was to be a yoga instructor. I don’t think that’s even a real job. She said I wrecked her “core strength” and she would never get any respect as a real yoga professional with a pouch for a stomach. The doctors had to cut me out of her, so she’s got a scar, too—which means no bikinis for her either. Yeah, also my fault.

I don’t even know why she continues to throw that in my face. I swear, she acts like
I
put the guy’s privates inside her that night under the Ocean City boardwalk. She hasn’t
been back to the beach since that summer, so who cares if she can’t wear a bikini anymore? She got fat, too. Not like enormous fat, but enough to give her an extra chin and a tire roll around her middle. After I came along, she stopped exercising because she had to work to support me and my diaper/formula addiction.

She pretty much blames me for just about every bad thing in her pathetic life. Like never graduating high school. Instead she got a job behind the desk at the local Salvation Army—Salvy to those who work there.

Salvy’s a huge warehouse where rich people drop off their used shit to make themselves feel like they’re contributing to society. You know, giving back. You can get crap furniture, crap kitchen stuff, crap house stuff, crap clothing, and crap shoes. That part always makes me sick. You have to be in the complete shithouse to want to buy someone else’s used shoes. I don’t care how rich the people are who drop off their used shoes, they still sweat and have funk between their toes. But my mom doesn’t care. Every single pair of shoes she owns was worn by someone else’s feet.

When I was little, she said I wore other kid’s shoes all the time. She said I didn’t care. I always tell her it’s because I was too freakin’ little to know the difference. She says I think I’m better than her. Then she wants to know, Who do I think I
am? Do I think I’m some kind of rich kid? Some kind of snot? Do I really think I’m better than her?

I always tell her no, I’ll buy my own freaking shoes because I’m just not stupid enough to put on someone else’s rotten shoes.

Then she hits me.

I usually just let her hit me. I don’t duck or cover or anything. I just let her hit me. It pisses her off so bad. When I was little, I used to cry and whimper like a baby. But I figured out fast that my pop likes to finish what my mom starts. To shut me up. And he hits a lot harder.

I know I could knock her out with one punch. I’ve imagined how it would go a million times. I’d smile. I’d lift my right arm, fist tight, then I’d connect with her stupid face. Down she’d go like a falling tree, cut at the base. But I never do it. The only thing mom taught me was to never hit girls. She said men who hit girls are weak, and I’m not weak. I’m the exact opposite. I can kick any kid’s ass, always could.

I got in my first fight at day care. I was four years old, and the other kid wouldn’t get off the swing. I didn’t even ask him, I just pushed him off, and then punched him in the gut to make sure he didn’t get back up. It worked. The swing was all mine.

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.

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.

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.