Categories > TV > Teletubbies > The Desperate Type
“I’m not talking about this again, Larry!”
“I just want you to consider it!”
Friday night.
His parents were fighting.
Again.
What a surprising turn of events.
Connor thought that this time his dad might have been drunk. He’d come home late, like 11:30 late, and started in on his mom right away.
About his favorite subject: what the fuck was wrong with Connor.
He didn’t even remember anymore if they had always fought like this.
Part of him just wanted to go hide in Zoe’s room, ask her to blast music, ask her to dance it out with him, ask her to save him from all of the noise in his head telling him that his dad was right about him, about everything.
But he couldn’t seem to make his hand move to knock so he stood outside of her door for the longest time before sighing and walking back to his own.
“So you’re willing to pay for boot camp but not therapy?”
“Boot camp is about the only option we have!”
“Oh bullshit, Larry! You won’t let me try anything else first!”
“If you want to find a way to pay for it, Cyn, then be my fucking guest!”
“-don’t care if that program is supposed to straighten kids like him out! It’s barbaric and I refuse to send him there!”
“I don’t want to talk about whether or not he’s straight again, Cynthia, that is beside the fucking point-”
“I wasn’t even talking about that , Larry, Jesus-”
“You know I can hear you, right?!” Connor shouted from the top of the stairs.
But the yelling didn’t stop.
He walked back to his room, stalked back really, and slammed the door as hard as he could manage. Then opened it again and slammed it again. Just kept slamming it until the voices downstairs finally shut up.
He was breathing heavily by that point and just.
Collapsed onto his bed, feeling just utterly and completely drained.
Should have known better.
Within seconds his door was flying open again, his dad followed by his mother, his dad red faced and screaming, his mom in tears telling him to stop yelling like that, grabbing at his dad’s arms desperately as he gestured wildly, and before long Zoe’s voice joined the cacophony, screaming at all of them to just shut up already.
Connor stared, eyes unmoving. He caught a look at his face in the mirror in the brief second before his dad blocked his view - his face was blank. Expressionless. Just. Nothing.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
Connor looked.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” His dad was definitely drunk; Connor could smell whiskey on his breath.
Connor merely blinked.
He was pretty sure his dad was going to hit him.
He was pretty sure he wanted his dad to hit him.
“Huh? What do you have to say since you’re so desperate for attention?”
“Fuck you,” Connor said.
“Watch your mouth!”
“Watch yours,” Connor said, and his voice had nothing behind it. Just blank, dead, flat lined. “Don’t talk to mom like that.”
It all happened in slow motion. His dad slapped him, hard, hard enough that Connor’s head snapped back. Connor watched his mom’s face, on Zoe’s face. They both looked horrified.
Connor hardly felt it.
His dad seemed to come back to himself then, taking a step back, mouth open, looking just as scared as his mom and Zoe.
His dad took a long look at him and stormed out.
“Larry!” His mom was screaming, running after him, running down the stairs. Her voice
sounded raw, ragged. “Larry I swear to God if you get in that car-” Connor heard the front door slam, a car peel out of the driveway, and his mom screaming, “I WANT A FUCKING DIVORCE!”
Zoe stared at Connor, speechless.
His dad had hit him once before, after her threw something at Zoe when he was ten. It wasn’t like his dad really hit him often. It wasn’t like he didn’t totally deserve it. He’d been a brat on purpose, yelling and slamming his door and taunting his dad. He deserved it. He was fine. He didn’t feel it.
Zoe was crying. “Why are you like this?” She shouted it at him.
And Connor.
Sighed.
Shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You’re ruining my life. You’re ruining this family.”
Connor shrugged, trying to appear at least a little apologetic. He doubted that he managed it because Zoe took off, slamming her own door.
Connor spent the weekend sitting on the sofa, remote far out of reach, watching whatever his mom put on while she did housework. Sometimes he helped, with things like folding the laundry. Usually he didn’t, when his mom did things like sorting through clothes to donate to goodwill. When that happened Connor mostly just watched reruns of Law and Order: SVU . It was mind numbing, but his dad had taken all of Connor’s books back to the library, apparently deciding that was the best way to actually ground him. He had protested, yelled, shouted, swore, carried on and on about how his dad was the only person in the world who would be pissed off that his kid read so much.
But Larry still took all of the books back to the library.
He also hadn’t apologized for slapping Connor. So at least he was consistent.
Fucking Larry hadn’t taken away the books on Connor’s bookshelf, but he was laying around obviously instead of rereading an old favorite as a sort of protest. Making sure everyone could see how unfair he thought that was.
Because it was unfair.
The only thing, literally, the only thing he liked was reading.
Not being able to do that sort of made him have this sort of fuzzy headache. It was like his boredom had gotten so bad it had manifested physical symptoms. His brain felt like TV static, all white noise but not in a good way. In a very frustrating way. It was sort of like when you were hungry but nothing you could eat sounded good. He was bored, he needed something to do to keep his brain occupied, but nothing appealed to him. At all. A total lack of appetite.
Nothing helped. Sleeping hadn’t, walking around hadn’t, helping his mom hadn’t.
He didn’t let himself consider getting the pocket knife out of his closet because he knew he was so bored that he’d probably just bleed to death trying to solve that problem, and honestly if he didn’t manage to actually bleed to death he’d have to deal with his mom crying and that thought just made the static in his head louder, the boredom in his brain settling behind his eyes and in his stomach.
So he gave up any sort of trying and just watched the damn television.
Connor was in the middle of hour five of an SVU marathon, trying to get wrapped up in an Olivia storyline about going undercover for the FBI.
“You’ve just been watching TV all day?” Zoe said, walking into the room not long after his mom walked out to start dinner.
“Yep,” Connor said, popping the “p” sarcastically.
“I was going to go for a bike ride after dinner,” She said. “Want to come?”
“I’m grounded,” Connor said dully.
“I’ll ask mom.”
Connor didn’t move his head as Zoe flounced off. He was suspicious that Zoe was being nice. Just Wednesday night she had said she wished he would disappear forever, and now she wanted to hang out? She must have like secretly smashed his laptop or something. There was no reason she wanted to hang out.
He didn’t move from the couch until he was called for dinner.
Connor moved slowly toward the kitchen.
He wasn’t even sure what the hell he was doing anymore.
“I think you’re getting too tall for your bike,” Zoe observed as they pedaled toward the playground not far from their house.
Connor didn’t disagree. His knees almost touched the handlebars now.
He wasn’t bothering to ask why Zoe suddenly wanted to hang out. He had already decided that as a part of Shutting Up Forever he wasn’t going to bother asking why anybody did anything anymore. He’d just assume they were out to be assholes and go from there.
But the Asshole Rule didn’t apply to his sister.
She might hate him, but he couldn’t hate her. Which was probably stupid. And probably some crap that his dad had put into his head about being a boy and being older and how that meant he was supposed to take care of her or something.
But he couldn’t hate Zoe. Even when he was sure she deserved it.
They got to the park and Zoe dropped her bike, bolting for the swings. Connor followed, much slower, feeling like the whole ground was made of mud and his pockets were full of rocks.
She was already swinging by the time he sat on the next swing over. The ones at the park were the best because they went higher than the ones in the backyard. You could go so high you’d start to worry that you’d end up upside down.
Connor didn’t feel much like swinging.
Frankly, he didn’t feel much at all.
Which was honestly kind of a relief. After weeks and weeks and weeks of anger and hurt and scaring himself, he felt.
Empty.
It was nice, almost.
He was just so fucking exhausted. Too tired to even bother hating himself. He just. Didn’t care.
“Connor?”
“Huh?”
“Do you think mom and dad are really going to break up?” Zoe dragged her feet then, slowing her swing to a sudden stop.
He shrugged.
“I…” She stopped. “Would we ever see each other again if they did?”
Connor looked blankly at her. “What?”
“If I lived with dad and you lived with mom, would we ever see each other again?”
Connor shrugged. “Probably, I guess. Like at Christmas and stuff.” He didn’t really know what happened when parents broke up and the kids chose to live apart. “I don’t think it’s actually like The Parent Trap. Besides…. We’re not twins.”
“We used to be.”
Connor rolled his eyes. “We’re not actually twins, Zo. We never were. That was just Grandma making a joke about how close in age we are.” His grandma had always called them Irish Twins. Connor knew that his great-grandma and great-grandpa on his dad’s side were, like, from Ireland, but he didn’t know what that meant to be Irish twins until he googled it one day. Apparently it was kind of an offensive term for kids super close in age.
“But we used to pretend.”
“Yeah, when you weren’t so much shorter than me,” Connor said.
Zoe bit her lip.
“I don’t want to only see you at Christmas,” She said softly.
Connor rolled his eyes. “Not what you said yesterday.”
Zoe bit her lip harder. “I…”
“Why would you want to live with dad?”
She shrugged. “Mom hates me.”
“She does not.”
“She does. She never pays any attention to me and she’s always telling me to be nicer to you. Plus she told me that playing the guitar was for boys. She hates me.”
Connor blinked. “Dad hates me.”
Zoe didn’t protest that.
“I wish I knew why…” Connor said.
Zoe sighed. “I think he just wishes you were, like… normal or whatever.”
Connor shrugged. “I don’t know what that even means.”
“I’m sorry I yelled at you about Brian being mean to me,” Zoe said. “I know it wasn’t your fault.”
Connor stared at her. “Why are you being nice to me?”
Zoe sighed. “I don’t…” she pushed some dirt around with her shoe. “I don’t know. I just… feel bad.”
“Why?”
“Because you….” She stopped, shrugging. “I just do okay?”
“Fine.”
They rode their bikes back home before it got dark. Connor noticed his mom smiling when they came back, while his dad scowled.
If his parents split, did he want to try to convince Zoe to stay with Connor and his mom?
When Connor was little, like so little, he was very concerned about dying in strange accidents. Like quicksand or catching on fire or falling off of a ship or something. He didn’t worry about those things much anymore.
But then he remembered that those idiotic fears didn’t just stand on their own.
It wasn’t just what if he fell into quicksand, it was, what if he and Zoe both fell into quicksand and they only had seconds before being pulled under. Who would his parents save?
It was pretty fucked up that they both knew which parents would save which kid.
Like he knew, gun to their heads, which kid they prefered. Zoe knew it too. Connor didn’t know anything about being a parent but he imagined that you probably weren’t supposed to have an obvious favorite.
Then again, Connor wasn’t sure if he was actually his mom’s favorite or just the default option. She’d gotten stuck with him first and he was the problem child and so she stuck to him out of guilt or something.
He waited for that thought to drag him under, drown him in darkness and sadness and that kind of hollow pit in the stomach that comes along with painful truths.
Nothing.
Just.
He didn’t feel anything.
Not like when he was crazy last week and thought things were a movie.
This was different. This was like when your foot falls asleep and it’s so asleep that you don’t even feel pins and needles anymore. Like your lip at the dentist after a shot of novocaine. He knew what it should feel like, but he didn’t feel it.
He almost smiled as he and Zoe rode their bikes up the driveway.
He didn’t care.
It was sort of nice to not care.
Like, liberating.
Connor spent Sunday on the couch again. Zoe spent most of the day watching old episodes of Glee . Connor just sat there with her, through an entire season of thirty year olds pretending to be high school students singing strange covers of old songs.
Connor thought it might be a decent show to watch while smoking pot.
He wondered if he could ask Jake where to get some the next time he had an allowance. He wasn’t certain, but Connor thought he liked being high.
He wanted to try it again.
He knew this made him, like, a bad kid. Worse than usual. Like if his mom found out she would absolutely lose her mind.
But since Connor didn’t care… about stuff in general right now… he figured it was a good time to decide to be a stoner or whatever.
Monday morning.
First day back.
His dad was a dick at breakfast, making Connor go upstairs and change twice. The sort of thing you saw on TV where dads thought their daughters were wearing clothes that were too sexy or something. Only it was Connor, and Larry thought his clothes were.
He didn’t know.
Unacceptable.
Shitty.
He lost it over the jeans Connor was wearing, the black ones with the hole in the knee. The only piece of clothing he owned that he genuinely liked.
Larry was going on and on about how he didn’t want Connor going around dressed like that.
Connor thought that his dad honestly believed that the worst thing that someone could think about Connor was that he was poor or gay.
He didn’t know what it even meant to worry about being gay, really.
But his brain was so messed up that he probably was. Just add that right to the pile of things wrong with him.
He wished he could get transplanted into another family. He knew from books and movies and stuff that a lot of kids wished to discover that their parents weren’t really their parents when they were little, that they were actually a princess or prince and that one day their real family would appear to save them.
Connor had never felt that way.
At least not until he was ten or eleven and suddenly his dad was, like, mad at him for quitting little league and stuff. Suddenly it was like a switch flipped in his dad’s head and he realized that the things Connor did weren’t normal or whatever. Reading instead of roughhousing and doing sports suddenly became a sign that he was gay as the day is long. Gone were the days when his dad thought that reading so much made him smart. Now in Larry’s eyes, Connor was just. Bad. Wrong. Messed up. And he hadn’t done anything at all to change what he did.
Connor still sometimes felt like he had whiplash from that change.
If he felt much of anything at all.
First day back and he was wearing a pair of old jeans, without holes. But they were too short on him. Had he grown? His ankles weren’t really covered in the jeans. His mom made a comment about needing to take him out for new clothes, smoothing out the sleeves of his flannel shirt, because it was cold out again. She rubbed Connor’s shoulder to pick off a fuzz, saying he was outgrowing everything and when had that even happened? When could he have possibly found time to grow when his head was so full of garbage?
First day back, and Connor didn’t give a shit.
His parents were already slated to have a meeting with the principal on Wednesday to discuss something or other. Behavioral concerns. Connor wasn’t listening.
Because he didn’t care about things anymore, apparently.
He just.
Nothing got to him.
The black rain cloud that had been his life hadn’t dissipated, but instead it was like everything was consistently overcast and gray.
And nothing about that especially bothered him, honestly.
He read on the bus, because fuck it.
He didn’t care if the other kids made fun of him.
He didn’t care that Jared glared at him when he walked past his seat. Didn’t care that Brian and his hench-morons tried to call insults at him from the back of the bus. Connor just put headphones on and pulled out a book.
He was reading The Catcher in the Rye. He’d found it in a box of his mom’s old books that she was going through, saying that she planned to donate it. She let him take it despite his dad’s ban on reading.
And it was okay because he had to read something.
He had thought about picking this book up before, but never committed.
Maybe because he had read somewhere that a few crazy people had liked it and Connor maybe thought his life might be a little simpler if people just knew he was crazy.
Connor thought Holden was kind of whiny.
He was also getting pretty damn sick of the word “phony.”
And the thing with the prostitute was weird. Connor didn’t know a whole lot about sex or whatever, but it seems kind of idiotic to him that you’d pay a prostitute to just talk to you.
Then again, Connor thought, maybe if he didn’t keep getting his allowance taken away he could like pay someone to be his friend or something.
He kind of got how Holden felt about his sister, though. He could sort of relate to that. Sometimes Connor wished that Zoe had stayed younger. Like he could have kept growing but she had stayed ten years old forever. Kids in books and on TV and stuff always had little siblings who looked up to them which made things easier for them because at least one person still gave a shit about them.
But.
Zoe was only a year younger than Connor.
Not even. Like eleven months and two weeks younger.
They were the same age for two weeks every year. Which had seemed cool when Connor was like, six, but now it just kind of sucked. Now he felt like there was going to be a point when Zoe would pass him somehow. Like he would just quit, give up at thirteen and she’d carry on.
But Connor didn’t even know how to quit at this point.
He didn’t care.
Whatever.
Mr. Weston was not in his English class.
Connor thought that was odd. Of all of the teachers, Mr. Weston was the least likely to call in a sub a couple of weeks before the end of the year.
Instead there was an older woman whose lips looked permanently pursed with long gray hair. When Connor slid into his seat, head down, he was surprised to discover the sub walked right up to his desk.
“Are you Connor?”
He looked up. “Um. Yeah.”
The teacher crossed her arms. “I expect that there won’t be any more issues from you.”
Connor must have looked confused because she frowned.
“I don’t want any disruptions from you.”
He glared. But said nothing.
He wanted to ask where Mr. Weston was. He wanted to tell this teacher to fuck off and flip his desk.
But he didn’t care, so he just put his head down.
After class he heard Jared sneer something like, “Sorry your boyfriend got fired, Connor. Maybe he’ll send you letters from his jail cell!”
And Connor whipped around, throwing an arm across Jared’s chest and slamming him against the wall of lockers. “Talk to me again, and I’ll dislocate your jaw.”
Jared made a choking sound and Connor realized he actually his arm across the smaller boy’s neck.
He backed off fast, heading to the lunchroom, wishing that a teacher had been around to see. He could have used another week off of school.
“I just want you to consider it!”
Friday night.
His parents were fighting.
Again.
What a surprising turn of events.
Connor thought that this time his dad might have been drunk. He’d come home late, like 11:30 late, and started in on his mom right away.
About his favorite subject: what the fuck was wrong with Connor.
He didn’t even remember anymore if they had always fought like this.
Part of him just wanted to go hide in Zoe’s room, ask her to blast music, ask her to dance it out with him, ask her to save him from all of the noise in his head telling him that his dad was right about him, about everything.
But he couldn’t seem to make his hand move to knock so he stood outside of her door for the longest time before sighing and walking back to his own.
“So you’re willing to pay for boot camp but not therapy?”
“Boot camp is about the only option we have!”
“Oh bullshit, Larry! You won’t let me try anything else first!”
“If you want to find a way to pay for it, Cyn, then be my fucking guest!”
“-don’t care if that program is supposed to straighten kids like him out! It’s barbaric and I refuse to send him there!”
“I don’t want to talk about whether or not he’s straight again, Cynthia, that is beside the fucking point-”
“I wasn’t even talking about that , Larry, Jesus-”
“You know I can hear you, right?!” Connor shouted from the top of the stairs.
But the yelling didn’t stop.
He walked back to his room, stalked back really, and slammed the door as hard as he could manage. Then opened it again and slammed it again. Just kept slamming it until the voices downstairs finally shut up.
He was breathing heavily by that point and just.
Collapsed onto his bed, feeling just utterly and completely drained.
Should have known better.
Within seconds his door was flying open again, his dad followed by his mother, his dad red faced and screaming, his mom in tears telling him to stop yelling like that, grabbing at his dad’s arms desperately as he gestured wildly, and before long Zoe’s voice joined the cacophony, screaming at all of them to just shut up already.
Connor stared, eyes unmoving. He caught a look at his face in the mirror in the brief second before his dad blocked his view - his face was blank. Expressionless. Just. Nothing.
“Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
Connor looked.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” His dad was definitely drunk; Connor could smell whiskey on his breath.
Connor merely blinked.
He was pretty sure his dad was going to hit him.
He was pretty sure he wanted his dad to hit him.
“Huh? What do you have to say since you’re so desperate for attention?”
“Fuck you,” Connor said.
“Watch your mouth!”
“Watch yours,” Connor said, and his voice had nothing behind it. Just blank, dead, flat lined. “Don’t talk to mom like that.”
It all happened in slow motion. His dad slapped him, hard, hard enough that Connor’s head snapped back. Connor watched his mom’s face, on Zoe’s face. They both looked horrified.
Connor hardly felt it.
His dad seemed to come back to himself then, taking a step back, mouth open, looking just as scared as his mom and Zoe.
His dad took a long look at him and stormed out.
“Larry!” His mom was screaming, running after him, running down the stairs. Her voice
sounded raw, ragged. “Larry I swear to God if you get in that car-” Connor heard the front door slam, a car peel out of the driveway, and his mom screaming, “I WANT A FUCKING DIVORCE!”
Zoe stared at Connor, speechless.
His dad had hit him once before, after her threw something at Zoe when he was ten. It wasn’t like his dad really hit him often. It wasn’t like he didn’t totally deserve it. He’d been a brat on purpose, yelling and slamming his door and taunting his dad. He deserved it. He was fine. He didn’t feel it.
Zoe was crying. “Why are you like this?” She shouted it at him.
And Connor.
Sighed.
Shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You’re ruining my life. You’re ruining this family.”
Connor shrugged, trying to appear at least a little apologetic. He doubted that he managed it because Zoe took off, slamming her own door.
Connor spent the weekend sitting on the sofa, remote far out of reach, watching whatever his mom put on while she did housework. Sometimes he helped, with things like folding the laundry. Usually he didn’t, when his mom did things like sorting through clothes to donate to goodwill. When that happened Connor mostly just watched reruns of Law and Order: SVU . It was mind numbing, but his dad had taken all of Connor’s books back to the library, apparently deciding that was the best way to actually ground him. He had protested, yelled, shouted, swore, carried on and on about how his dad was the only person in the world who would be pissed off that his kid read so much.
But Larry still took all of the books back to the library.
He also hadn’t apologized for slapping Connor. So at least he was consistent.
Fucking Larry hadn’t taken away the books on Connor’s bookshelf, but he was laying around obviously instead of rereading an old favorite as a sort of protest. Making sure everyone could see how unfair he thought that was.
Because it was unfair.
The only thing, literally, the only thing he liked was reading.
Not being able to do that sort of made him have this sort of fuzzy headache. It was like his boredom had gotten so bad it had manifested physical symptoms. His brain felt like TV static, all white noise but not in a good way. In a very frustrating way. It was sort of like when you were hungry but nothing you could eat sounded good. He was bored, he needed something to do to keep his brain occupied, but nothing appealed to him. At all. A total lack of appetite.
Nothing helped. Sleeping hadn’t, walking around hadn’t, helping his mom hadn’t.
He didn’t let himself consider getting the pocket knife out of his closet because he knew he was so bored that he’d probably just bleed to death trying to solve that problem, and honestly if he didn’t manage to actually bleed to death he’d have to deal with his mom crying and that thought just made the static in his head louder, the boredom in his brain settling behind his eyes and in his stomach.
So he gave up any sort of trying and just watched the damn television.
Connor was in the middle of hour five of an SVU marathon, trying to get wrapped up in an Olivia storyline about going undercover for the FBI.
“You’ve just been watching TV all day?” Zoe said, walking into the room not long after his mom walked out to start dinner.
“Yep,” Connor said, popping the “p” sarcastically.
“I was going to go for a bike ride after dinner,” She said. “Want to come?”
“I’m grounded,” Connor said dully.
“I’ll ask mom.”
Connor didn’t move his head as Zoe flounced off. He was suspicious that Zoe was being nice. Just Wednesday night she had said she wished he would disappear forever, and now she wanted to hang out? She must have like secretly smashed his laptop or something. There was no reason she wanted to hang out.
He didn’t move from the couch until he was called for dinner.
Connor moved slowly toward the kitchen.
He wasn’t even sure what the hell he was doing anymore.
“I think you’re getting too tall for your bike,” Zoe observed as they pedaled toward the playground not far from their house.
Connor didn’t disagree. His knees almost touched the handlebars now.
He wasn’t bothering to ask why Zoe suddenly wanted to hang out. He had already decided that as a part of Shutting Up Forever he wasn’t going to bother asking why anybody did anything anymore. He’d just assume they were out to be assholes and go from there.
But the Asshole Rule didn’t apply to his sister.
She might hate him, but he couldn’t hate her. Which was probably stupid. And probably some crap that his dad had put into his head about being a boy and being older and how that meant he was supposed to take care of her or something.
But he couldn’t hate Zoe. Even when he was sure she deserved it.
They got to the park and Zoe dropped her bike, bolting for the swings. Connor followed, much slower, feeling like the whole ground was made of mud and his pockets were full of rocks.
She was already swinging by the time he sat on the next swing over. The ones at the park were the best because they went higher than the ones in the backyard. You could go so high you’d start to worry that you’d end up upside down.
Connor didn’t feel much like swinging.
Frankly, he didn’t feel much at all.
Which was honestly kind of a relief. After weeks and weeks and weeks of anger and hurt and scaring himself, he felt.
Empty.
It was nice, almost.
He was just so fucking exhausted. Too tired to even bother hating himself. He just. Didn’t care.
“Connor?”
“Huh?”
“Do you think mom and dad are really going to break up?” Zoe dragged her feet then, slowing her swing to a sudden stop.
He shrugged.
“I…” She stopped. “Would we ever see each other again if they did?”
Connor looked blankly at her. “What?”
“If I lived with dad and you lived with mom, would we ever see each other again?”
Connor shrugged. “Probably, I guess. Like at Christmas and stuff.” He didn’t really know what happened when parents broke up and the kids chose to live apart. “I don’t think it’s actually like The Parent Trap. Besides…. We’re not twins.”
“We used to be.”
Connor rolled his eyes. “We’re not actually twins, Zo. We never were. That was just Grandma making a joke about how close in age we are.” His grandma had always called them Irish Twins. Connor knew that his great-grandma and great-grandpa on his dad’s side were, like, from Ireland, but he didn’t know what that meant to be Irish twins until he googled it one day. Apparently it was kind of an offensive term for kids super close in age.
“But we used to pretend.”
“Yeah, when you weren’t so much shorter than me,” Connor said.
Zoe bit her lip.
“I don’t want to only see you at Christmas,” She said softly.
Connor rolled his eyes. “Not what you said yesterday.”
Zoe bit her lip harder. “I…”
“Why would you want to live with dad?”
She shrugged. “Mom hates me.”
“She does not.”
“She does. She never pays any attention to me and she’s always telling me to be nicer to you. Plus she told me that playing the guitar was for boys. She hates me.”
Connor blinked. “Dad hates me.”
Zoe didn’t protest that.
“I wish I knew why…” Connor said.
Zoe sighed. “I think he just wishes you were, like… normal or whatever.”
Connor shrugged. “I don’t know what that even means.”
“I’m sorry I yelled at you about Brian being mean to me,” Zoe said. “I know it wasn’t your fault.”
Connor stared at her. “Why are you being nice to me?”
Zoe sighed. “I don’t…” she pushed some dirt around with her shoe. “I don’t know. I just… feel bad.”
“Why?”
“Because you….” She stopped, shrugging. “I just do okay?”
“Fine.”
They rode their bikes back home before it got dark. Connor noticed his mom smiling when they came back, while his dad scowled.
If his parents split, did he want to try to convince Zoe to stay with Connor and his mom?
When Connor was little, like so little, he was very concerned about dying in strange accidents. Like quicksand or catching on fire or falling off of a ship or something. He didn’t worry about those things much anymore.
But then he remembered that those idiotic fears didn’t just stand on their own.
It wasn’t just what if he fell into quicksand, it was, what if he and Zoe both fell into quicksand and they only had seconds before being pulled under. Who would his parents save?
It was pretty fucked up that they both knew which parents would save which kid.
Like he knew, gun to their heads, which kid they prefered. Zoe knew it too. Connor didn’t know anything about being a parent but he imagined that you probably weren’t supposed to have an obvious favorite.
Then again, Connor wasn’t sure if he was actually his mom’s favorite or just the default option. She’d gotten stuck with him first and he was the problem child and so she stuck to him out of guilt or something.
He waited for that thought to drag him under, drown him in darkness and sadness and that kind of hollow pit in the stomach that comes along with painful truths.
Nothing.
Just.
He didn’t feel anything.
Not like when he was crazy last week and thought things were a movie.
This was different. This was like when your foot falls asleep and it’s so asleep that you don’t even feel pins and needles anymore. Like your lip at the dentist after a shot of novocaine. He knew what it should feel like, but he didn’t feel it.
He almost smiled as he and Zoe rode their bikes up the driveway.
He didn’t care.
It was sort of nice to not care.
Like, liberating.
Connor spent Sunday on the couch again. Zoe spent most of the day watching old episodes of Glee . Connor just sat there with her, through an entire season of thirty year olds pretending to be high school students singing strange covers of old songs.
Connor thought it might be a decent show to watch while smoking pot.
He wondered if he could ask Jake where to get some the next time he had an allowance. He wasn’t certain, but Connor thought he liked being high.
He wanted to try it again.
He knew this made him, like, a bad kid. Worse than usual. Like if his mom found out she would absolutely lose her mind.
But since Connor didn’t care… about stuff in general right now… he figured it was a good time to decide to be a stoner or whatever.
Monday morning.
First day back.
His dad was a dick at breakfast, making Connor go upstairs and change twice. The sort of thing you saw on TV where dads thought their daughters were wearing clothes that were too sexy or something. Only it was Connor, and Larry thought his clothes were.
He didn’t know.
Unacceptable.
Shitty.
He lost it over the jeans Connor was wearing, the black ones with the hole in the knee. The only piece of clothing he owned that he genuinely liked.
Larry was going on and on about how he didn’t want Connor going around dressed like that.
Connor thought that his dad honestly believed that the worst thing that someone could think about Connor was that he was poor or gay.
He didn’t know what it even meant to worry about being gay, really.
But his brain was so messed up that he probably was. Just add that right to the pile of things wrong with him.
He wished he could get transplanted into another family. He knew from books and movies and stuff that a lot of kids wished to discover that their parents weren’t really their parents when they were little, that they were actually a princess or prince and that one day their real family would appear to save them.
Connor had never felt that way.
At least not until he was ten or eleven and suddenly his dad was, like, mad at him for quitting little league and stuff. Suddenly it was like a switch flipped in his dad’s head and he realized that the things Connor did weren’t normal or whatever. Reading instead of roughhousing and doing sports suddenly became a sign that he was gay as the day is long. Gone were the days when his dad thought that reading so much made him smart. Now in Larry’s eyes, Connor was just. Bad. Wrong. Messed up. And he hadn’t done anything at all to change what he did.
Connor still sometimes felt like he had whiplash from that change.
If he felt much of anything at all.
First day back and he was wearing a pair of old jeans, without holes. But they were too short on him. Had he grown? His ankles weren’t really covered in the jeans. His mom made a comment about needing to take him out for new clothes, smoothing out the sleeves of his flannel shirt, because it was cold out again. She rubbed Connor’s shoulder to pick off a fuzz, saying he was outgrowing everything and when had that even happened? When could he have possibly found time to grow when his head was so full of garbage?
First day back, and Connor didn’t give a shit.
His parents were already slated to have a meeting with the principal on Wednesday to discuss something or other. Behavioral concerns. Connor wasn’t listening.
Because he didn’t care about things anymore, apparently.
He just.
Nothing got to him.
The black rain cloud that had been his life hadn’t dissipated, but instead it was like everything was consistently overcast and gray.
And nothing about that especially bothered him, honestly.
He read on the bus, because fuck it.
He didn’t care if the other kids made fun of him.
He didn’t care that Jared glared at him when he walked past his seat. Didn’t care that Brian and his hench-morons tried to call insults at him from the back of the bus. Connor just put headphones on and pulled out a book.
He was reading The Catcher in the Rye. He’d found it in a box of his mom’s old books that she was going through, saying that she planned to donate it. She let him take it despite his dad’s ban on reading.
And it was okay because he had to read something.
He had thought about picking this book up before, but never committed.
Maybe because he had read somewhere that a few crazy people had liked it and Connor maybe thought his life might be a little simpler if people just knew he was crazy.
Connor thought Holden was kind of whiny.
He was also getting pretty damn sick of the word “phony.”
And the thing with the prostitute was weird. Connor didn’t know a whole lot about sex or whatever, but it seems kind of idiotic to him that you’d pay a prostitute to just talk to you.
Then again, Connor thought, maybe if he didn’t keep getting his allowance taken away he could like pay someone to be his friend or something.
He kind of got how Holden felt about his sister, though. He could sort of relate to that. Sometimes Connor wished that Zoe had stayed younger. Like he could have kept growing but she had stayed ten years old forever. Kids in books and on TV and stuff always had little siblings who looked up to them which made things easier for them because at least one person still gave a shit about them.
But.
Zoe was only a year younger than Connor.
Not even. Like eleven months and two weeks younger.
They were the same age for two weeks every year. Which had seemed cool when Connor was like, six, but now it just kind of sucked. Now he felt like there was going to be a point when Zoe would pass him somehow. Like he would just quit, give up at thirteen and she’d carry on.
But Connor didn’t even know how to quit at this point.
He didn’t care.
Whatever.
Mr. Weston was not in his English class.
Connor thought that was odd. Of all of the teachers, Mr. Weston was the least likely to call in a sub a couple of weeks before the end of the year.
Instead there was an older woman whose lips looked permanently pursed with long gray hair. When Connor slid into his seat, head down, he was surprised to discover the sub walked right up to his desk.
“Are you Connor?”
He looked up. “Um. Yeah.”
The teacher crossed her arms. “I expect that there won’t be any more issues from you.”
Connor must have looked confused because she frowned.
“I don’t want any disruptions from you.”
He glared. But said nothing.
He wanted to ask where Mr. Weston was. He wanted to tell this teacher to fuck off and flip his desk.
But he didn’t care, so he just put his head down.
After class he heard Jared sneer something like, “Sorry your boyfriend got fired, Connor. Maybe he’ll send you letters from his jail cell!”
And Connor whipped around, throwing an arm across Jared’s chest and slamming him against the wall of lockers. “Talk to me again, and I’ll dislocate your jaw.”
Jared made a choking sound and Connor realized he actually his arm across the smaller boy’s neck.
He backed off fast, heading to the lunchroom, wishing that a teacher had been around to see. He could have used another week off of school.
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