If You Were Wondering - Chapter One

Chapter 1

On the plane, I sat back and tried to relax. I’ve never liked planes. It always made me nervous to think that I was thirty-thousand feet in the air with a hundred other people in a flying sardine can.  I had no idea what I was thinking when I bought that ticket to Albany, but now I do. That ticket promised me more than a five-and-a-half hour flight; it promised a last opportunity to get the bad thoughts of home out of my head, to face my demons. And looking back, that’s all I ever really wanted.

 The speakers at the front of the plane crackled with the sound of the captain talking about safety precautions and what to do when the oxygen mask falls from the ceiling, but I didn’t hear it. When the plane took off, I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. Feeling fell away, and familiar images started playing in my head.

I saw the halls of Laurens Central School through the lenses of sunglasses. Everyone was looking at me funny because I wore them to school that day, because it would’ve been too embarrassing to tell anyone why they were actually on.

I watched as Amy Foster, my best friend since third grade, came up to me from across the hallway, smiling her beautiful smile like she did every morning, took off my sunglasses and walked the other way. I felt the people around me staring at my black eye, the one Hugh gave me the night before, and I didn’t like it. I turned around and yelled, “Amy!”

                She looked back, and I could feel the smile melt off her face as soon as she saw.

                “Can I have those back?” I asked.

                She rushed over and put them back on my face, apologizing a hundred times a second. Then she grabbed my hand and took me to the nurse. I kept my head down and closed my eyes, but I still felt everyone staring at me. The walk to the nurse’s office seemed to take forever.

                I saw the white walls of the nurse’s office, posters of the human anatomy lined across the room. It could have just been a stewardess with the drink cart going past my aisle, but for a moment, I thought I could feel the cool air blowing in the room through the vents in the ceiling.

                Amy took a look at my face, and the look in her eyes told me that she was thinking at a mile a minute.

                “What happened?” she asked.

                I hesitated, because I didn’t know how she’d take it. I thought that if I told her, she wouldn’t talk to me again, and I needed her desperately. Even after all these years, it still kills me to think how this would’ve worked out if Amy didn’t help me because she couldn’t take it when I told her. So I hesitated, and I choked up when I said those three words: “My mother’s husband.”

                Amy looked at me like I’d just killed her dog. Suddenly she pulled me in and hugged me, and I can still hear her whisper in my ear, “Michael, I’m so sorry.” I just cried, Amy just held me, and I didn’t want to be anywhere else. Where everyone could stare.

 

. . .

“Excuse me, sir?” The stewardess asked.

                I snapped out of it and looked up at her. She had the cart by her side.

                “Would you like something to drink?”

                “Uhh, ginger ale would be fine, thank you.”

                The stewardess flashed a polite smile and pushed the cart towards the back to get my drink.

 

. . .

            Let me tell you a little something about my mother’s husband.

                He’s not my real father, which I would call a blessing if I believed in anything like that. My real father moved away when I was twelve. He went out west, Nebraska or some other state like that. But you have to understand; I’m not bitter. Even when I was young, I could tell he was miserable. Miserable being stuck in a s****y, sardine-can town like Laurens. He had bigger things to do, and my mom understood that. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t mad as all hell when the divorce happened, that she didn’t tell my father, “You can never see your son again.” right before he left. It took time for my mom to really forgive him.

                But it didn’t take too much time for her to find another man. Hugh Sanders, the most disgusting, rude, nasty son-of-a-b***h to walk the earth, somehow found my mother and pulled all the right strings. Sure, he was nice at first. He even seemed to like me. But by the time they got married, when I was fourteen, his true colors started to slip through.

                He drank every night. He couldn’t keep a job for more than a month, and when he was out of work, he’d sit on his a*s all day, watching ESPN and lazily looking through the classifieds. The worst part about this guy " what really made him a b*****d " was that he was abusive. I’m not talking about a slap on the wrist every now and then. This guy made domestic violence look like cuddling.

                That’s what happened the night before: Hugh was drunk off his a*s again, yelling at my mother because the canned soup she made wasn’t of the highest quality. She tried to defend herself, but Hugh started beating her before she could say a word. I grabbed his arm, trying to stop him, which only worked in the sense that he turned his back on my mother for a minute. Then he started going at me.

                “You little b*****d!” he slurred. “You better start treating me with some goddamn respect!”

                That’d be enough to make anyone laugh, but before I had a chance, he back-handed me right across the face. I lost my balance and landed straight on the floor. My eye was closed shut, and I could feel it throbbing through my eyelid.

                “Never disrespect me like that, you understand, boy?” he growled.

                Staring him right in the eye, through gritted teeth I muttered, “Yes, sir.”

                Hugh grunted and walked back into his room. My mother was on the floor, trying her hardest not to cry. Her nose was bleeding, and she had a bruise across her cheek. My stomach twisted in knots when I saw that, and I started seeing red. I was so angry; angry at Hugh for being the biggest b*****d ever, angry at my mom for letting him do this to her, angry at my father for leaving.

                It was a blur, what happened next. I think I just went downstairs, put on my sneakers, and walked out. I didn’t know where I was going, but I didn’t care. As long as it was away from Hugh, that’s where I wanted to be.

                The only place I remember walking to was Amy’s house, which was at least ten miles away from mine. It was a lot darker when I got there than it was when I started walking, so it must’ve taken a lot of time. I just stared up at Amy’s house. Her light was on, maybe I should go in and talk to her?

No, that was a stupid idea. I didn’t feel like explaining how this happened. I just walked back to the body shop down the road and slept outside for the night.

                When I woke up that morning, Ethan Robinson, a kid in my class, was standing over me. His parents owned the body shop, and he was going to unlock it for them on his way to school. He looked at me like he was seeing a ghost.

                “Jesus, Mike, are you okay?” he asked.

                I took one look at him and said, “Do you have a pair of shades on you?”