Blazed (3 page)

“Yeah.”

“So she can't listen to the music anymore?”

“Jaime,” he said. “You know your mother.”

“Right. I do. At least she's consistent,” I said.

He shook his head and grinned. “Your insight into other people's emotions. It's so impressive.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“You're one of the brightest and most talented kids I've ever taught, Jaime.”

“I don't believe you.”

“You don't have to.”

“I can't believe my father kicked it with James Murphy. Like how?”

“What do you know about your father?”

“Nothing.”

“Google him,” he said.

“No. I would never do that to my mother,” I told him. “Never.”

Back to breakfast now.

After I flip both omelets and turn the bacon, I get a new message in Google chat.

It's from this girl Cheyanne, who lives in Chicago and goes to DePaul University. She's a freshman majoring in journalism. She's been a huge fan of my video blogs and my writing on Tumblr and WordPress for almost a year.

Loved the new video, Jaime. So gorgeous. The mood, that nostalgia in each line, it was so suffocating. But so liberating, too.

Thank you,
I type back.

I'm going to work on getting you published in a cool lit mag.

That would be incredible.

I can't believe you're only fourteen.

It's just a number. I'm a fucking geezer if you're going by experiences.

LOL. Right. So what are you doing right now?

Cooking breakfast for me and my mom. I Googled my father, too.

You don't know him???

No.

What'd you find out?

That he's way successful. He lives in San Francisco, but I already knew that.

I love SF. I went out there last summer to see some family and fell for the city. What does he do?

He runs some big-time hedge fund, owns two art galleries. That's about it. He's got a stepdaughter, too. She's seventeen and looks like Ivanka Trump. It's scary how much they look alike.

Scary? Why?

Cos I always thought that if there was a God, he'd be one cruel bitch to only make that kind of beauty once.

OMG, dude. You're too much.

You love it.

Of course I do. And I gotta go. Later, duder.

Word. Have a great day.

I close out of Google and walk back to the stove to begin plating the food while LCD Soundsystem sings about losing their edge.

I'M ALREADY EATING WHEN MY
mother finally emerges from her slumber.

It's hard for me to look her in the eyes at first.

Even though she gave birth to me and has raised me and gives me a hundred dollars each week just to buy records and books with, she punched me.

Twice.

My goddamn eye is black and blue.

It feels like a fucking amp got dropped on my head from twenty feet.

My mother, she walks slowly through the kitchen. She's holding her right hand.

“Hey,” she says.

I can tell she doesn't remember anything, so it's gonna be easier to carry her through this.

“Are you hungry?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “My hand.” She lets it go and holds it up.

I'm five feet from her and I can see how swollen her knuckles are. They're big and bruised and so sore.

“I don't know what happened,” she says.

This is when she really notices my face. Whatever sort of life is in her just drains immediately. Tears begin running from her eyes.

“Jaime,” she gasps. “No. No.” She peels her eyes from my face to her hand. “No.”

I stand up and go, “You didn't do this to me, Mom.”

She looks horrified and sick.

This is the first time in my life that I've seen every single trace of beauty and class completely vanish from her face.

Her body starts shaking violently.

“Mom,” I say. “It's okay. I'm fine.”

“No,” she goes again. “Jaime . . . what is this? What happened?”

“I got into a fight.”

She covers her face with the hand that's not busted and says, “What did I do? I don't remember.”

“You didn't do anything. When I was picking you up from the bar, there was this man. He was attacking you. When I was trying to pull him off of you, he punched me. And that's when you punched him. That's why your hand is messed up.”

“What?” she shouts. “Where was this?”

“Outside the Checker Board. You called me and asked me to pick you up. I did and there was a fight.”

I try to wrap my arms around my mother now, but she turns away and leans on the kitchen counter. When her hand touches the surface, she screams out in pain and throws her arms around her waist. “I'm so sorry.”

“It's okay.”

“I'm a monster,” she says.

“Mom,” I say. “It's over. Everything is fine now.”

“No,” she sighs, shaking her head wildly. “No, it's not. None of this is fine.”

“But it's over, okay? It's over and there's nothing we can do about it. You should see a doctor about your hand.”

“I'm such a monster,” she says again.

“No, you're not. You're the furthest thing from a monster. Look at this gorgeous house, and look at all the nice things we have. You've done all of this for me,” I say. “Nobody else has this.”

“Bullshit. Goddamn it! This is no good.”

Reaching toward her now, I slide a hand over her arm. “It's over, Mom. I have to go to school now. We have to leave in five minutes.”

“Shit,” she says. “I can't drive you.”

“It's too late for me to take the bus.”

She squeezes her forehead and goes, “I'll call a cab.”

A good chunk of my anxiety falls away when she says this.

That car ride would've been so miserable.

And I go, “Okay. I'm gonna go grab my bags.”

“All right.”

After I'm done jamming my backpack full of notebooks and novels—
The Human War
by Noah Cicero;
I Steal Hearts and Knives
, a short story collection by James Morgan;
Black
Spring
by Henry Miller—and this Sony camcorder I carry most places with me, I crush an Oxy on my desk and just snort the whole pile.

There's no time for lines right now.

Then I grab my iPhone and earphones and hurry back downstairs.

My mother is standing at the front door.

“You look so handsome,” she tells me.

“I guess I look tougher now too,” I tell her back.

Her teeth grind, and she forces a smile.

“You're going to pick me up from school, though, right? I've got a piano lesson.”

She nods her head. “Yeah,” she whispers.

Then she looks back down at her hand.

She looks disgusted by it.

When she looks back up at me, she says, “You wouldn't lie to me about what happened, would you?”

“No,” I say. “Never. Why?”

She leans toward me and touches the side of my face that's all fucked up. “No reason.”

“Are you sure?”

She shakes her head. “No. I'm just hoping you wouldn't lie to me.”

“Mom . . . ,” I say.

She bites down on her bottom lip. “Yeah.”

“I'll be fine,” I tell her. “And so will you.”

“I hope so.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know,” she says, as the cab pulls into our driveway. “Just have a great day at school for me.”

“All right,” I say.

She hands me forty dollars and goes, “There's no way I would've attacked you, ya know.”

My face turns red. “Yeah,” I sigh. “There's no way.”

Her eyes tear up. “Good,” she whispers. “And don't worry about me. I'll be fine.”

Pause.

“I really will, Jaime.”

I ATTEND THE MOST PRESTIGIOUS
and expensive private school in Joliet, Illinois. It's also one of the most expensive and prestigious private schools in the entire state.

And I hate it.

I've been going to private schools my whole life. I don't have any friends here. Which is fine, actually, because none of the kids who go here have good taste in music or books or movies.

None of them listen to Beach House or Deerhunter or Grimes or the Fresh & Onlys.

None of them have ever even looked inside a Sartre book, let alone read a page. And they've never touched
House of Leaves
or even know about Joan Didion's
Play It As It Lays
.

The girls in my grade, it's like they're mad at me because I don't stare at them in class. I don't ever try and talk to them. I never give them any attention during the day.

Like, why would I?

Not a single one of them is even close to the girl I used to have. She listened to Purity Ring and the Growlers. Her favorite movie was
Black Swan
, and her favorite author was David Foster Wallace.

And then she turned out to be really evil.

So these girls I go to school with, I already know that none of them are real.

School uniforms are mandatory here.

Dudes: brown khakis, white button-up shirt, a solid black tie, and a navy-blue blazer.

Chicks: Gray skirts, black leggings, white button-up shirt, a solid black tie, and a navy-blue blazer.

The rule is enforced rigorously. On me, at least.

Just this year I've been given detention four times and a two-day in-school suspension for making “modifications” to my uniform.

I made my khakis into shorts.

I turned my blazer inside out and spray-painted the Wu-Tang logo on the back of it.

I took a knife to my shirt.

And I took white paint to my black tie to make it look like a bandanna and hung it out of my back pocket. That day I also wore the pair of brand-new, hot-pink Chuck Taylors I bought with the money my mother gave me for grading out higher than any of the 140 other piano players, ages twelve through twenty-two, at this statewide recital at DePaul University a week earlier.

So far this year, I've been suspended three times. For the uniform bullshit, and then for punching this junior asshole, Timothy Beck.

He was whipping this fat kid, Miles Worthy, with a wet
towel in the locker room. Miles was crying, but Timothy kept doing it.

It was so wrong and so evil and the teacher wasn't even doing anything to stop it.

Timothy Beck is the starting quarterback and the starting point guard.

So I just walked up to him, and he went, “What the fuck do you want, faggot?”

And I smirked and I said, “Your girlfriend's a fucking gnar pig and her haircut sucks.”

And then I punched him in the nose. As he stumbled backward, falling on his ass, I ripped the towel away from him and whipped him right in the nuts with it. He started crying, and I got in trouble.

The third time I got suspended was for correcting my English teacher about something he said about Steinbeck as fact. It wasn't true, and when I said so, he dismissed it and double downed his assertion. I couldn't let it go. I know for a fact that
Grapes of Wrath
was never translated and published in Japanese under the title
The Angry Raisins
.

What a fucking idiot.

It turned into an argument, and I called him a few names, and he kicked me out of class. But before I left, I looked at all my classmates and told them that for a hundred bucks, I'd write their three-page paper on “Of Mice and Men” that'd been assigned to us earlier in the period.

That suspension was for two days, and even though
I'd made this proposition in front of my teacher, four kids reached out to me to write their papers.

I jacked up the price to $150, and they all paid.

They all got As.

Me, I got a C+.

It was a joke.

I understood what my teacher was doing by giving me that grade, but he wasn't being honest with himself. He was being such a fake by giving me that phony grade.

And I can't stand fake or fucking phony.

This school year is over in a week, and I've got a 3.9 because of that grade instead of the 4.0 I've gotten every semester since sixth grade.

Whatever and shit.

I've still got the best overall grades of anyone in my class over the past three years.

MY BLACK EYE IS DRAWING
some serious attention. As if rolling up in a taxi, like, ten minutes late for school wasn't intriguing enough for these boring souls, a shiner befitting an amateur boxer is just too much for these kids.

They keep glancing at me during class. I hear them whisper to each other. Some of them point and most of them laugh. Even two of my teachers do the same as I'm grabbing books from my locker in between classes.

It's all so miserable and pointless. And it comes to a head in the locker room when this turd burglar, William Cross, starts talking shit about my face.

“Hey, faggot,” he says. “Did you fight your piano?”

I roll my eyes.

“Queer Miles,” he rips. “Did you fight your imaginary friend?”

I say nothing and run the video for that Future Islands song “Little Dreamer” through my head.

William throws a towel at me.

These people just can't stand to be ignored.

And he goes, “Did your crazy momma beat your face up, little boy? Did she get drunk and beat up her loser kid?”

He wanted my attention and now he gets it.

“What's your fucking problem, asshole?”

“I hate queers,” he says. “Especially queers who let their momma smack them around. Drunk bitch.”