Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

BEFORE

TOM

Daisy is busy after school today, volunteering at an animal shelter. She's always volunteering for something. I, on the other hand, am still scrambling to fill that tutoring slot that I lost this semester, because it's the only way for me to get spending money. In any case, she's not around to let me walk her home, so I end up walking with Slug.

"So did you score with Daisy yesterday?" Slug asks me, as he kicks some dirt on the sidewalk with his size thirteen shoes.

"I can't talk about that."

He grins at me. "That means no."

"It means I can't talk about it ," I say, even though he's right. It does mean no.

"Maybe you and Daisy could double-date with me and Alison."

"Um, Alison doesn't like either of us."

Unfortunately, it's true. When I talked to Daisy at her locker after school, Alison hovered nearby, shooting me dirty looks. The only person she seems to hate more than me is Slug. But it's a close call.

I hope she doesn't trash talk me to Daisy. If she does…

"Come on, you gotta help me out, Tom," Slug says. "All the girls like you. It's not fair."

"That's not true."

"Bullshit. It is true, and you know it."

Okay, he's not entirely wrong. After I had my growth spurt, I started getting a lot of looks from girls. My mom is really pretty—she even did some modeling when she was young—and she always says I take after her in looks. But really, I couldn't care less about girls liking me. There's only one girl that I care about.

"I'll see what I can do," I lie. I can't get Slug a girlfriend. I would if I could, but I can't. He's actually a really good guy, but something about him makes girls nervous.

"Thanks, buddy." He pauses on the sidewalk, looking down at a particularly busy anthill. Anything insect related fascinates him. "Now that the winter is over, I bet the queens are laying eggs again."

Slug is a wealth of information about anthills. For example, did you know that the surface of an anthill is actually covered with small entrances that the ants open and close like doors? And did you know that anthills can reach heights of eight feet tall and be hundreds of years old?

If you destroy an anthill in front of Slug, you should just get out of town right now. In his eyes, that's an unforgivable offense. The one time he got suspended from school was when he gave Johnny Calhoun a black eye after he kicked apart an anthill. The whole time Slug was wailing on Johnny, he kept shouting, You're committing genocide!

And he wonders why he can't get a girlfriend.

"Do those ants look delicious to you?" I ask him. Despite his fury at Johnny when he kicked apart the anthill, which was needless destruction, Slug believes that eating insects is perfectly okay. Sort of the natural circle of life.

He laughs. "I don't know why everyone is so against consuming insects. They're animals, just like all the other meat products we eat. Is it really so much worse than eating a cow or a duck? Or a pig ?"

"Um, yes. It really is."

"One day I'm going to make you a cake entirely made from crickets. And it's going to be the best cake you ever ate."

"It'll probably be the last cake I ever eat."

He punches me in the shoulder, although not hard enough to hurt. "Hey, can I come over to work on math homework?"

What he really wants is for me to do the work and then he'll copy my answers. I've known him long enough to know the routine by now. And after he copies my answers, he'll stick around for dinner and eat every scrap of food in our kitchen.

"You know," I say, "if you keep copying my homework, you're never going to be able to pass the exams."

"So what? It's just math."

"You still need to pass."

"Nah, it's not important to my future career." He shrugs.

Slug only recently discovered that studying bugs is an actual job that people can have, so now his biggest career aspiration is to become an entomologist. But who knows how long that will last. Before that, he wanted to be a mailman. And before that , he wanted to be a cop after Chief Driscoll invited our class on a tour of the police station.

"Fine," I say, "you can come over."

He grins again. Even though he's only seventeen, his teeth are already yellow. It's probably from the cigarettes. "You're the best, Tom."

Yeah, yeah.

When we get to my house, I discover the door is already unlocked, which means my mom is home. Half the time, she leaves the door unlocked, because it's that kind of neighborhood, so it doesn't surprise me. But I am surprised to find my father standing in the hall, yanking on a jacket.

"Dad?" I say.

My father, like Daisy's father, towers over me. He is forty-five years old, but the spiderweb of purple veins on his nose and cheeks makes him look at least ten years older. I know how genetics work from biology class, but I could swear I didn't inherit any genes whatsoever from this man. He is tall and burly, while I am medium build and lean. Even if I grow another inch or two, I'm never going to look like him. We're nothing alike.

Nothing .

"What are you doing home so early?" he grumbles.

"School is over," I remind him.

There are alcohol fumes emanating from his skin. It's not even four in the afternoon and my dad is already sloshed. Great.

His face is pink from the blood close to his skin. Did you know there are about twelve pints of blood in the average male body? If you lose more than forty percent of that blood, you will die. For a man my father's size, that means he is about five pints of blood away from death.

"And you brought your loser friend—Cockroach," my father observes. "Fantastic."

I consider reminding him of Slug's actual nickname, but there's no point. I'm not sure a slug is any better than a cockroach anyway.

"I'll be home late," my father mutters under his breath. "Don't bother your mother, okay, kid?"

Before I have a chance to answer, he pushes past me. He marches out of the house, slamming the door behind him. I never liked my father, even when I was a little kid. Frankly, it's a relief when he takes off like that. Hopefully, he won't be home for dinner.

Or maybe he'll crash his Dodge and he'll never be home again.

As my father's car revs up in the garage, I lead Slug into the house. Naturally, he makes a beeline to the kitchen. Slug is always eating. Always . He weighs less than Daisy's backpack, and yet he's always stuffing his face.

My mother is in the kitchen, washing dishes in the sink. Her hair is loose, running halfway down her back. When she was younger, she used to have jet-black hair like mine, but now it's threaded with lots of gray strands. She doesn't bother to color them.

I don't know if it's my imagination, but my mother's body seems to stiffen when we walk into the room. She drops her head so that her gray hair becomes a wall around her face.

"Hey, Mrs. Brewer," Slug says.

My mother murmurs a hello without turning around. I stare at the back of her head, my heart thumping in my chest. I have a bad feeling I know what's going on here. It's happened before, after all.

"Mom?" I say.

It takes her a few seconds, but she finally turns around. The expression on her face is apologetic, even though she is the one with the split lip. I stare at her, my hands balling into fists until my knuckles turn white.

"Mom…"

"I opened the cabinet in my face." She gingerly touches the open wound on her lower lip, which definitely wasn't from some kind of accident . "It looks a lot worse than it is."

I glance at Slug, who has already got our refrigerator open and is scavenging for food. I don't know if he saw my mother's face, but he's decided to stay out of it.

"Tommy," she says softly. "Don't make a big thing of it. I'm fine—really."

It's been six months since the last time I saw my mother with bruises on her face. Six months since the last time I wanted to take my fist and smash it into my father's face. I thought things were better. He stopped drinking as much. I thought…

"I'm fine," she says firmly. She looks over at Slug, who has grabbed an entire wedge of cheese and some chips from the pantry. "You and Slug go on up to your room."

"Mom…"

"Tom, let it go ."

Her jaw is tight. Maybe she used to be a model when she was younger, but those days are long over. Like my father, she looks about ten years older than she really is. Although she is still pretty enough that Slug will sometimes look at her in a really inappropriate way.

I don't want to let this go, but what can I do?

Still, I can't stop thinking about my mother's battered face, even when Slug and I are up in my room. We're sitting together on my bed, and we're supposed to be doing math homework, but I can't focus. I just keep thinking about my father's fist smashing into my mother's mouth.

My father is so much bigger than I am. If I ever stood up to him, it wouldn't turn out very well for me. Especially if he were in one of his whiskey-fueled rages, when he looks like he could lift an entire car and spin it around over his head. If it were me against him, he would win.

Unless I had a way to even the fight…

"I can't believe he did it to her again," I blurt out.

Slug is sitting at the other end of my bed, crunching on a Dorito. "You okay, man?"

"No." I throw my number-two pencil across the room. It hits the wall, leaving behind a gray smudge. "I hate my father."

Slug grunts. "I know."

I called the police on him once. I got sick of his tantrums and thought maybe I could help my mother, even though she told me not to. I still remember the stunned expression on his ruddy face when the cop showed up at our front door. I was pleased by how scared he looked until my mother went and denied the whole thing. She defended him. She went along with his bullshit story about how she fell down the stairs. After that, there was nothing the police could do.

"I'd like to kill him," I blurt out.

Slug looks up from the spiral notebook on his lap. Slug and I have been friends for ten years, and I've never said anything like that to him before. I've never let on the sorts of wild thoughts that run through my head sometimes. I've been careful about it. Even though Slug is my best friend, I don't expect him to understand. I don't know why I said it now, except I can't stop thinking about it.

I expect his face to wrinkle in disgust, but weirdly, it doesn't. Instead, he says, "Well, why don't you?"

What?

I stare at him. "What did you say?"

He lifts a shoulder. "Nothing wrong with killing someone if he deserves it."

"Actually, there is."

"Not really."

"It's illegal. I would go to jail ."

"Only if you get caught."

Slug fingers a zit on his face which has turned bright white and is on the verge of popping. He's joking. I mean, it's not like this is a funny joke or anything, but he has a pretty twisted sense of humor. He's not seriously suggesting that I should really kill my father.

At least, I don't think he is.

For a moment, I allow myself to imagine it. I imagine those five pints of crimson liquid oozing out of my father's body until he finally crumbles on the floor, his eyes rolling up in his head. And for a split second, it feels so real that I almost think I'm going to be sick.