Take It or Leave It Chapter 1

My NaNoWriMo '09 project. Be warned: It hasn't been edited yet. At all. But I hope you enjoy, anyway! Comments greatly appreciated.

Prologue

 

 

 

September 11^th, 2001. The baby is in the subway station. It isn’t mine. Someone will find it. Someone will take it home.

There’s a plane overhead. Too low. Too close.

Crash! Right into the building.

There is no more subway station.

The baby was in there…

But I can’t worry about it. It isn’t even mine.

It’s just another reject.

Nothing I can do.

I just have to keep walking…

 

 

 

 

 

…Let’s rewind a bit, shall we?

 

 

 

 

 

History

 

 

 

When I was a child there was a boy who lived next door to me. Every day he would poke his head through our chain link fence and taunt me. He would call me all sorts of names. Sometimes, he would throw things at me. Stones or twigs. He once even shot his beebee right gun at me, just to see if I would scream. I don’t really know what that kid had against me. I mean" I never bothered him. I was just the kind of kid who got pushed around a lot. I always minded my own business. I never really got into fights. But, at school that made me a target.

“You’re ugly!” kids would say.

“Why are your eyes so small?”

“Why is your nose so big?”

It didn’t help that my father had given me a stupid name like Conrad, either.

“Isn’t that a boy’s name?” kids would ask.

“I don’t think it’s a name at all,” others would note.

“She probably made it up.”

They would tease me relentlessly. Not only about me eyes or my nose, but about everything. My clothes. My hair. My shoes. Anything.

The worst was the way that they teased me about my mother.

“Why don’t you have a mom, Conrad? Where’d she go?”

“I bet she left you because you’re so ugly!”

“She rejected you!”

“No one would want a kid like you, Conrad, you ugly little thing.”

“You little reject.”

Since the day those school kids first came up with it, that has been my name.

Reject.

Conrad the stupid, ugly, reject.

I used to try and talk to my dad about these things, I knew he would understand. I was just waiting for the day when he told me that he loved me, and that my mother was coming home. I mean… that day had to come sometime. Someday she would come back. Mother’s don’t just pick up and leave. Fathers do sometimes. But… not mothers. Mothers stick around.

Back in elementary school, my father used to tell me that my mother was away at work. “Up in the Big Apple,” he would explain, spreading his arms out as if to emphasize how big the Big Apple really was.

“What does she look like?” I would ask, my eyes dazed with happiness.

“Like you,” my father would say. “Only more beautiful.”

I don’t think he meant to insult me, and frankly, I didn’t even understand the insult until I was much older. I just think he was trying to tell me how pretty she was. My dad didn’t always see things right… sometimes he was a little deluded. He didn’t really know how to talk to people.

That was okay, though. He didn’t have a job or anything. He didn’t ever have to deal with them.

When I got a little older, he stopped putting on his act. As far as he was really concerned, my mother was nothing more than a good-for-nothing b***h who dropped me off on his doorstop with only a little note that said ‘Take it or leave it’.

I guess the kids at school were right. No one would want a kid like me.

When I was a bit younger I used spend a lot of time thinking about my parents. Both of them. If my mother was so horrible why did my father even keep me? He could have just dropped me somewhere. Anywhere. I didn’t have to be his responsibility and half the time he acted like I was a burden. So, really… what was the point?

Then there was my mother. What compelled her to leave me on my father’s doorstop that morning? I couldn’t possibly bring myself to believe that she was really all that horrible. I’d always had this thought somewhere in the back of my mind. She was coming for me. I knew it.

Someday she was going to show up at the door and apologize. Then she would take me away to the Big Apple. Where we would live in a nice, clean house with big rooms, and high ceilings. Suddenly everyone would think I was beautiful. And I would change my name to something normal like Ashley or Megan.

Some part of me was always desperate to escape life as Conrad. Conrad was just an ugly little girl with small eyes and a big nose. Conrad lived in a run down shack with a father who didn’t care about her.

Conrad was a reject.

But somewhere I knew my mother was waiting for me. She could take me away from all this, and it would all become some distant memory… Forever forgotten.

Of course… I wouldn’t want to go alone.

My mother would have to take Jeremy and Levi, too. I wouldn’t leave without them.

In my little fantasy world we were all together. My mom, Jeremy, Levi, and I, in our perfect little house.

Together.

Forever.

We could spend everyday together! We could be like normal siblings, all living under the same roof. And Levi and I would never fight. It would be perfect. Just… perfect.

These are the ideas that crossed the mind of Conrad the reject…

Author's Note

Please ignore all grammatical errors. I only had a month to write this novel, so I really was in a rush, and this project has yet to be edited. At all. Same with spelling, typos and punctuation. Please comment on what you thought, and yes, I do own copyright.
© Chloe Wiccith, 2010

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Just as a side note: This novel is an expanded version of my short story "Memoirs of a Reject".