I had been to my father’s office a few times when I was younger, but never for more than a few hours, and every time I went, it totally sucked. Superquiet, with all these people in cubicles, and all these TV monitors turned on to the same channel, none of them with anything interesting on them. And my father in his office, on the phone—actually on his headset—pacing back and forth, yelling at people, pointing for me to sit down, get up, keep quiet, don’t touch that, or gesturing about something that I had to do and me having to pretend that I knew what he wanted when I had no clue.
So that Monday morning when he woke me, I had this bad feeling.
Jamie was already dressed, and I was apparently already late. She had her schoolbooks with her; I guess my dad expected me to bring mine, even though I had no actual homework to do. So I threw my Game Boy Advance and some Pokémon games into my backpack for extra coverage when it got superboring, which it was no doubt going to be.
Jamie had already eaten breakfast; I was too late. My father was already agitated about me not being ready and wouldn’t let me get anything to eat.
Then the long car ride, with him listening to some boring guy on the radio talk about the stock market and periodically yelling at me to keep it down, which meant lowering the Pokémon music on the Game Boy.
Then, as we got out of the car in the parking garage, he turned to look at me for the first time that day, noticing that I was in jeans and sneakers and giving me the usual look of disgrace, and all he said was “Try not to embarrass me today.”
And I stared back at him, not saying, but hearing in my head, the very words that I had repeated to myself so many times by then, which were “Fuck you, Jacob,” which made me feel good, because the one thing my father hated, more than anything else, was being called Jacob, having unofficially changed his name to Jack, and so he was Jack to everyone except his mother and his sister, Randi.
After introducing me and Jamie to the people he worked with, even though we had probably met them before, he quickly ushered us into his private office, with a look like he was going to kill us if we said anything wrong.
Then us sitting on the couch across from his desk, watching him talk on the phone until we were bored.
. . . and me nudging Jamie and Jamie nudging me back,
. . . then another nudge for each of us,
. . . then a push,
and then a full-on slap on the head, first me, then Jamie,
then . . .
“Enough, Steven,” Jacob said in a deeper voice than he used at home. “Do I really need to separate you two at this point?”
Now Jamie starts crying. So Jacob gets all fatherly to her and comes across the desk, sits between us with his back to me, and tells her that everything’s fine, not to cry, even touching her face. I’m behind her, and when I see she stops crying, I start making my dad faces, mimicking him, which makes her laugh, and now my dad turns to me, grabs me by the arm so tightly I can practically feel his fingers touching my actual bone, and he whispers in a very controlled voice, so that even Jamie can’t hear him:
“I will hurt you, if that’s what you want.”
“I didn’t do anything.” Me, defiant.
“You never do anything.”
“Lemme go.”
“Do you understand me, Steven?” he hissed, his grip tightening. “This is your last chance to behave. If you can’t control yourself, things will have to change. Am I clear?”
“Yeah, right.” I yanked my arm back the instant that he eased his grip.
“There are special schools for children who can’t control themselves. Boarding schools where we can send you, schools where they teach you how to behave properly.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said, not believing him at all.
He stood up and one-finger motioned for me to follow him. As he crossed around his desk, he motioned for me to sit in his chair. When I did, he reached down and opened one of the desk drawers, pulling out a huge folder, dropping it onto the top of the desk. “Open it.”
I sat in his chair, looking up at him, hate in my eyes, not touching his precious folder. Fuck you, Jacob, was all I heard in my brain.
“Open it.”
I flipped open the file folder and stared at a brochure for a school in Vermont, with pictures of kids older looking than me in military uniforms. There were handwritten notes scribbled across the front of the brochure. I recognized my father’s handwriting.
“That one takes kids your age” was all he said. “Not all of them do.”
I flipped to the next brochure. Another school, this one in Pennsylvania, also with my father’s notes on it. Then another, and another after that, all with boys my age standing stick straight at attention. Serious-looking kids.
I started to believe, and believe me, it was not a good feeling.
“You can’t make me go” is what I said defiantly.
“Of course I can,” he answered matter-of-factly. “If I decide that you are going, then trust me, you will go.” He snatched the folder away and placed it back in his drawer.
Jamie was suddenly on high alert; apparently she had been listening to everything from her seat on the couch.
“Daddy, you can’t send Steven away.” She was out of her seat and about to start crying again. “Youcan’tyoucan’t.”
Now his focus was on her again, not because she was in full cry, which she was, but because she was getting loud enough that other people in his office were likely to hear her. Immediately he transformed back into “caring dad,” whole different expression, going quickly over to her and putting out her flames. “Steven’s not going anywhere, princess. We’re just talking.”
His arm around her now, going full-on sitcom dad, a role I rarely saw him play. He sat down beside her. “Why don’t you do your homework?” he told her. “Steven and I are going to take a walk.”
“Where?” Now just sniffles, but still with suspicious eyes.
“To get him something to eat. He never had breakfast. Did you think I forgot?” He wiped Jamie’s tears away, making sure she was back in full control. “Do you want anything? A bagel? A muffin?” Her eyes lit up at the mention of a muffin. She was always a sucker for a good muffin.
I looked at the office door. While he was distracted, I was busying myself with possibilities. In my Crash Bandicoot mind I judged the distance from the chair behind his desk, and I realized that I could hop over the desk, step right between the chairs, fake right, go left, bolt out of his office, around the mazes of cubicles, and through the glass doors to the elevators or stairs.
He turned, looked at me.
Quick. Think!
Elevators or stairs? Stairs or elevators? Stairs. He would never follow. Down the thirty-two flights, into the lobby, into the street, into a cab, give the driver all the money in my pocket, like seventeen dollars, and say “Drive,” until the seventeen was all ticked out on the meter and then figure out where to go from there.
Which I might as well do, I thought. Because in the instant I opened that folder in my father’s desk, I knew, I totally knew, that there was no place like home anymore. So fuck you, Jacob, for making me feel that way.
It seemed as if he was reading my mind, because he immediately got up from Jamie’s side, turned to me, and instinctively blocked the door, reminding me more than a little of Burn the day he tried to set me on fire.
“Still hungry?” he says (not asks) with a nod, his face totally back to being “angry dad” again; “sitcom dad” is most definitely gone.
I follow him out, not looking at Jamie. Whatever was going to happen, I did not want it to happen in front of my little sister.
Then we’re out in the hallway.
“Marcie, order up a couple of muffins and bagels, butter and cream cheese on the side,” he barks at his secretary as we walk down the hall, his arm planted heavily around my shoulder, evidently to keep me from going anywhere. “And a large cappuccino.”
He steers me into the conference roo
m and closes the door. I can see out the window at the buildings across the street from his office. I can see people moving around in that office, congregating in a bunch of cubicles like bees and I wonder how they can stand it being cooped up all day in these cages. I hear a siren going off on the street below, and I wonder whether someone was hit by a car and how far a hospital is from where we are.
“You actually have your friend David to thank,” he tells me.
I wasn’t going to look at him, but now I have to. I’m thinking, what does Burn have to do with my father being such an asshole?
And then he explains how my mom’s been in touch with Burn’s mom and how Mrs. Burnett explained to my mom that the administrators at my school suggested that Burn might be better suited for a different kind of learning environment. They were, my father told me, concerned that David’s aggressive behavior would escalate like it did when he attended McAllister and apparently like it did when he was in another school in Chicago. So, basically, what I am figuring out is that Burn got kicked out of our middle school and will now be going to a special school.
And, my father continued, the problem was that Burn kept having adverse reactions to the medications he was on, which the school knew, which was why they were watching him so carefully, and which was why they chose to act so quickly. According to my father, those medications were apparently keeping him from sleeping and making him increasingly aggressive and manic, so now he was in a better place, both emotionally and physically, in this boarding school in Massachusetts.
Which, Jacob explains, got him thinking about how difficult it has been for me in school, with different medicines not working on me, and wouldn’t I be better off in a place where there would be one-on-one learning, where no one would judge me for not getting A’s, and wouldn’t I be able to do better if I were in a special program where I could actually excel at something for a change? And then he drops this line, which I totally didn’t see coming, like he was the good guy in all this:
“I’m trying to save your life, Steven, and now is the time to do it.”
And I realize that all the while that my father is talking to me, he has returned to his “sitcom dad” concerned expression, like all he cares about is me doing good, and maybe in his mind, he actually believes it. And all I’m thinking about is, this guy really thinks I’m fucking retarded. Really . . . how could anyone do well with a father who thinks you’re a fucking retard and wants to put you in a school with real retards?
And besides, he tells me, now the sitcom dad face totally gone again, I need to learn how to control my anger and my frustration when I don’t get my way, and he lists the number of things around the house that are broken, some of which were my fault, OK, but some of which I had nothing to do with but I got blamed for anyways.
And I’m still thinking, fuck you Jacob, fuck you Jacob, fuck you Jacob, while he’s going on about my lack of maturity and while most of the schools don’t recommend midyear entrants, the one in Vermont, the one in the first brochure, actually encourages them.
And Marcie comes in with a tray: muffins, bagels with butter and cream cheese, two bottles of Nesquik, and a Starbucks cup.
And my blood is now boiling, which he probably knew was going to happen when he closed the conference room door, so he is as surprised to see her as I am.
Seeing how our eyes are locked together, Marcie just puts the tray down and bolts, eager to leave us by ourselves.
And I’m about to burst and hit him with the tray of food, the Starbucks, the bagels, everything, and it takes practically all I’ve got, trying with all my might to control the anger, when he says, “However, I’ve agreed with your mom to give you one more chance to shape up.”
About now, my hands are literally shaking with the force of wanting to see him screaming from a lapful of hot Starbucks and the equal force of having to control myself or lose my last chance to stay home, at least for now.
And then there is a painfully loud screech outside, so I rush to the window and look down below. There must have been some kind of accident in the street; everyone is honking their horns and that’s all I can hear.
I have noticed that one of my ADHD symptoms is this total aversion to loud unexpected noises. They throw me off my game, get into my insides, and freaking unnerve me. I have gotten used to this over the years and manage to counteract that feeling most of the time, but loud sounds still disturb me. I just don’t like them. I mean, I’m OK with totally loud music or fireworks or movie explosions, it’s the surprise factor that shakes me to my core.
Apparently it wasn’t just me, though, not this time, because the people in the next building are all staring out the window and for a split second I think they are staring at me, but then there was this truck accident that they were actually looking at, down in the street beneath us.
“Do you understand me, Steven?”
I had, incredibly, forgotten about Jacob Crashinsky.
I tell him yes, thinking many things at the same time:
Not only did the sound of the accident drain the anger from me, just like loud, unexpected noises tended to do . . .
In some superhero sort of a way, I might have either caused the accident through telekinetic energy, with my uncontrolled anger exploding into the universe and causing the cars to collide . . .
Or otherwise the magic was working for me again, as it had on many other occasions.
OK, even if you don’t believe in magic, consider that if not for the accident, it was highly likely that I would have hit Jacob in the face with hot Starbucks, sending him into a scalding fury of horror-movie proportions, which would have most definitely led to me being sent straightaway to that school in Vermont or some other school where I probably would have stayed, which, now that I think of it, might have resulted in something different going down on 4/21, like maybe people getting killed.
So yeah, magic.
I also figure out pretty quickly that the man standing across from me, calling himself my father, the guy who is supposed to make me feel secure and protected, was determined to send me away, and that he was not doing it now only because of my mom, as she wouldn’t want to break up the family, no matter what. But as strong-willed as she was, she was unfortunately no match for him.
So given my inability to control myself, and given his impeccable track record of getting whatever he wanted, I also knew at that moment that I had a very limited time before something else happened that would give him an excuse to get me out of his house. For good.
I was going to need a plan. Not just an idea, or a concept, but a full-blown, foolproof plan that would put me in control and allow me to stay put in my house and not have to go off to some faraway school where they wear hats and stand at attention all day.
Which of course takes us to Thanksgiving.
Chapter Seven
How Thanksgiving Got Ruined, Part II: How Burn Literally Saved My Life
OK, this chapter was originally called “How Thanksgiving Got Ruined,” being as I didn’t originally plan to write about how my father was planning to ship me off to boarding school. But then I started thinking about everything that happened on Thanksgiving Day that year, and I realized that it would make no sense if you didn’t already know how high the stakes were for me.
Keep in mind:
One thing wrong. Just one. Anything at all. And I was out of the house, out of the family, out of middle school, off the basketball team, far from my hometown, gone from my friends, shipped off to some foreign state where I would become one of those kids in a crew cut saluting the flag whose photograph would be in the next brochure that some other kid in some other state would find on his dresser one afternoon after school as a warning for him to shape up.
You get the picture?
If so, then you can imagine the stress I was under. Not only on the drive home from my father’s office, but then back at home. Everything was just-another-day-normal for everyone else in my family, but for me: one false move and I wa
s gone.
And here’s the thing: I had no idea what it could be, because there was no way I could predict what could trigger my father’s decision—reason being, virtually every day I got yelled at for virtually everything that I did. Clothes on the floor. Plate left out. Empty cup in the family room. Not cleaning up. Leaving the TV on. Not taking out the garbage. Bike on the lawn. Fighting with Jamie. Even talking to Lindsey.
And to make matters worse, it was entirely possible that I might have done something in the past week or month that Jacob would find out about now, and if so it would count as a “now” thing, even though the thing that I did wrong I did way before getting the warning.
What I realized when we got home was this, simply put:
My house was a fucking minefield.
I had no choice. I had to escape. So I called Pete and worked it out to sleep over at his house. Then the next day, I stayed at Kenny’s, and the day after that, at Evan’s. My mom called me every day to find out when I was coming home, like nothing was wrong.
How could she not know?
And during the entire time that I stayed out, I thought constantly about my father’s threat, and I thought about her, my own mom, not coming to my rescue, and I was starting not to like her, not that I hated her like I hated Jacob, but the question that had to be asked was: How come my own mom didn’t have my back?
And lying in bed, not actually a bed, but an air mattress in Kenny’s room, I had to wonder whether my father could have been right. Would I be better off in a school where they could teach me the way that my mind wanted to learn? Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. After all, I had no problems going away to camp for the summer; maybe this would be more like that than a military school.
But what if they were thinking of sending me to the school that Burn was sent away to? Would they do that? An immediate panic set in, and the rest of the night was lost to it.
And when night became morning and Kenny was still snoring away, I thought: Would anyone from my family actually even miss me?
Crash and Burn Page 9