by Scott, Emma
A couple of guys snickered.
Fuck everything, everywhere.
I’d forgotten that when I entered the contest, one of the stipulations was Sinclair could publish the winning essay wherever they wanted. When I submitted the damn thing, I didn’t think I had a prayer of winning. It hadn’t mattered.
Now it mattered.
“So your dad took off and left the sock behind?” the redhead said. “Sucks to be you.”
“That does suck, Sock Boy,” Jason said, plucking a green bean off my tray and chewing it. “You must feel like shit.”
“Sock Boy,” the redhead snickered. “Good one, Jason.”
“Really? Sock Boy?” I said. “That’s the best you can do?”
“I don’t know,” Jason said stiffly, tilting his chin up. “Maybe you’re not worth more than Sock Boy.”
Redhead picked at a zit on his chin. “You think you could do better?”
“I can think of a crap-ton better insults, just off the top of my head.”
“Prove it.”
“Sure. No problem.”
I cracked my knuckles, thinking fast. But the insults came easy; I’d twisted that knife in my own guts a thousand times since Dad left.
“What about…Your dad abandoned your family and all you got was a lousy sock?”
Snickers.
Jason crossed his arms. “Lame.”
I shrugged casually, while my mind revved like a racecar at the starting line. “Mmmkay. You’re lucky; on Take Your Son to Work Day, you get to stay home.”
The redhead kid snorted a laugh, earning a glare from Jason. I kept going, and my audience warmed to me quick. With each insult I hurled at myself, the other guys got more and more into it, covering their mouths, laughing and oohing, like a rap battle, where I was the attacker and victim, both.
“I hate to say you have a deadbeat dad, but if the sock fits…?”
“If you need a man-to-man talk, does your mom take out an ad on Craigslist?”
“Are you a Jehovah’s Witness now? They don’t celebrate Father’s Day either.”
The guys were in an uproar now, but Jason’s jaw clenched. I leaned over the table.
“Knock knock,” I said, glaring at him.
“Fuck off.”
“Knock knock.”
He sniffed, not meeting my eyes. “This is stupid.”
I cocked my head to the rest of the table. “Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?” they answered in unison.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but not your dad, that’s for goddamn sure.”
The peals of laughter seemed to strike Jason in the back as he hunched over and flinched as if the insults were directed at him, instead of me.
“You look confused, buddy,” I said. “You need me to explain that one?”
“You think you’re so fucking smart?” Jason said. “You just insulted yourself ten times over. But you know what?” He smiled darkly. He had the simple truth on his side, and he knew it. “It doesn’t matter how clever you think you are. You’re just Sock Boy, and that’s all you’ll ever be.”
His hand snaked out and he shoved my half-full tray of food into my lap, painting my pants and white dress shirt with spaghetti sauce and milk.
“Ooops!” Jason said, jumping out of his seat. “My bad.”
I shot to my feet, ignoring the cold milk in my crotch and hot spaghetti sauce on my stomach, and stared him down, nose to nose. My hands were balled so tightly into fists that my knuckles ached. Jason didn’t back down and the entire cafeteria went quiet, watching.
“Go ahead,” Jason seethed in a low whisper. “Take your shot. I got six witnesses who’ll say it was an accident. You’ll lose your precious scholarship. You wanna take that chance, Sock Boy?”
I sure as hell did. But hitting him would get me kicked out. Ratting on him was out of the question. That left letting it go like a goddamn chump.
“What’s going on, guys?” asked a friendly voice.
Out of my periphery, I saw a tall guy, dark hair, big. He looked older than the rest of us.
Lots of kids talked on the first day of school, informing incoming seventh graders of their place in the Sinclair caste system. Jefferson Drake, a football-playing senior at the Academy, was the most popular kid in school. King of Sinclair. His little brother, Connor, was the prince.
I guessed this was him.
Connor stood with his hands in his pockets, casual, as if he owned the school, instead of being just another twelve-year-old kid.
Jason smirked and turned away. “Nothing,” Jason said. “Sock Boy had a little accident.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Connor said, frowning at the mess on my uniform. “Why you gotta be an asshole, Kingsley?”
“I’m not. Just clumsy, I guess,” Jason said, but he backed off. “See you around, Sock Boy. Shame about your shirt.” He clucked his tongue. “You can always write another essay. Call it ‘Laundry Day’ and maybe the school will pay for a new uniform.”
“Maybe your mom will,” Connor said, grinning.
Jason laughed and the two bumped fists. “See you at practice, Drake.”
“I hope so. You need it.”
Jason flipped him two middle fingers and took his crowd away with him.
Fuck all of these guys, I thought.
I angrily brushed cold spaghetti noodles off my pants. The slacks were black and hid the stain, but my shirt looked like I’d been shot in the gut.
“Shit.”
“You got a spare?” Connor asked.
“Fuck off.”
He held up his hands. “Hey, just trying to help. I have extra, and my house isn’t far from here. If we left now, we can be back before bell.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“It’s either that or you go the rest of the day looking like an extra in a bad horror movie.”
Connor’s friendly grin was seemingly a permanent fixture to his face.
“Why would you help me?”
He frowned. “Why wouldn’t I?” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Connor Drake, by the way.”
“Congratulations.”
Connor laughed and lowered his hand. “Come on. You need to change, right?”
I clenched my teeth. “I guess.”
“Let’s go.”
He started walking. I followed.
“You’re new, right? You weren’t here last year.”
“No shit. I’m Wes Turner, the charity case.”
Connor’s dark brows came together. “Charity case… Oh, that was you? The essay winner? That explains Kingsley’s nickname. Hey, don’t let him get to you. He’s not all bad. We’ve known each other since kindergarten.”
“Has he been a prick that long?”
Connor laughed. “Pretty much.” He lifted his chin at the security guard at the front door. “Hey, Norm. Just running home to get something for my friend, here.”
Norm the Security Guard opened the door for Connor Drake, like a doorman in a fancy hotel. “Be back before bell.”
“Will do.”
“How did you do that?” I asked, as we stepped out of the school and into the light of a September afternoon. “Lunch is closed.”
“My parents donate a lot of money,” Connor said with that mega-watt grin. “A lot of money.”
He walked us around the corner and down Dartmouth Street, which led toward a neighborhood of old, elegant row houses in tawny sandstone and black ironwork. Connor and I walked along red brick sidewalks and passed old-fashioned street lamps. The entire block looked like one giant castle.
“Hey, congrats on the scholarship, by the way,” Connor said. “I heard a lot of kids tried for that. Your essay was really good.”
My shoulders hunched. “You read it too?”
“My parents can’t get over it. Made me read it twice.”
Fuck me sideways.
“It was all right,” I muttered. I waited for Connor to give me shit about that goddamn sock. He didn
’t.
“It was better than all right,” Connor said. “You’re lucky; I can’t write to save my life. And wouldn’t you know it, I have Mr. Wrightman for English.”
“I have Wrightman too,” I ventured. “He’s tough?”
“The toughest,” Connor said. “He assigns a crap-ton of papers, long stories, short stories… Hell, I heard he even makes us write poems. Fucking poems.”
I stepped a little lighter. “Yeah, that sucks.”
“Tell me about it.” Connor glanced at me. “But you should do all right. Is that what you want to be when you grow up? A writer?”
The day before I might’ve said yes, but Sock Boy had shown me that I wasn’t ready to deal with the repercussions. Writing was something I’d keep to myself where it couldn’t hurt me again. I was worn out from being hurt. My dad taking off showed me with brutal clarity the cost of having feelings, of caring too much. I still wanted to write, but making a habit out of bleeding my heart out and having it thrown back in my face was not going to happen. Not ever again.
“I’m not sure yet.” I glanced up at him. “You?”
His grin widened. “I want to open a sports bar in downtown Boston. Like Cheers, you know? I want to stand in the middle of it all, with a game on every TV. I love baseball. Do you like baseball?”
Before I could answer, he went on.
“I could talk baseball all day. And hockey. I want to make a place where people can hang out, talk sports or watch a game, and just have a good time.”
I nodded. “Seems like you’d be good for that.”
Hell, Connor Drake, even aged twelve, seemed like he was put on this earth to open a sports bar. But his grin dimmed.
“Tell my parents that. They think I should go to an Ivy League college and do something ‘big and important.’ Doesn’t help that my brother, Jefferson, is all about big and important.”
I didn’t know what to say. The idea of doing something ‘big and important’ seemed impossible for a poor kid like me. If I could get into a good college, get a decent job to help my Ma out a little, I’d consider it a miracle.
“You’re from Southie, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“What’s that like?”
My hackles went up. “What’s what like? Living in a crappy apartment and needing charity to pay for a decent school?”
Connor wasn’t put off by my hard tone; a trait that would endure years into our friendship. The glue that would hold it together many, many times.
He shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe. Sometimes it seems like everything around here is so complicated…when it doesn’t have to be. I like simple, you know?”
I scowled. “Being poor is pretty damn simple. You need money for shit and you don’t have it. The end.”
“Yeah, that’s gotta suck,” he said, and somehow, I didn’t want to deck him one for sounding so blasé about what was a constant struggle in my universe.
Connor had a strange charisma; as if he were impossible to dislike. His superpower. I was the opposite; I made it really damn easy for people not to like me—I preferred it that way. And yet here I was, hanging with the most popular kid in my grade who’d told Norm the Security Guard that I was his friend. The disorientation grew stronger when Connor nodded his chin ahead.
“So, this is me.”
I stared, slack-jawed. A four-story Victorian row house in rustic beige with black window frames. The kind of house you’d see in Boston historical brochures. A staircase led from the brick sidewalk to black double doors with ornate stained glass at the top.
“This is your house?” I asked.
“One of them,” Connor said with a grin, again avoiding sounding like an arrogant douchebag.
I stared up at his house, drinking it in because my brain couldn’t comprehend that people could actually live in houses that belonged in brochures. Connor wasn’t just rich, he was billionaire-rich. I wondered if his parents were famous. He looked famous himself—like the guy they’d cast in a movie about a popular star baseball player, who takes the poor kid under his wing. The kind of guy who was too happy to be a bully or prick, and who coasted through life on a never-ending wave of his parents’ money.
Turned out, I was right about all of it, and the poor kid Connor Drake took under his wing was me.
The Drakes’ cleaning lady washed my uniform and gave me one of Connor’s old shirts. After school, we went back and played his Xbox that was hooked up to his state-of-the-art sound system while sitting in dual black leather beanbag chairs.
Connor asked me to stay for dinner, and I met his parents, Victoria and Alan Drake.
Mr. Drake owned a hundred different companies under the Drake name, and Mrs. Drake was a state senator. Boston royalty, or as close to it, as you could get.
The Drakes fed me the kind of elaborate dinner I’d only seen in movies about rich people. In their immense dining room, under a heavy crystal chandelier, I felt some of the pressure they put on Connor: to work hard and get better grades, to go to college, instead of opening a sports bar like he wanted. They wanted a friendship between their son and me—the scrappy street kid who’d show Connor how far hard work and smarts could get you. They wouldn’t shut up about my essay; how impressed they were, how I’d turned a bad situation into something positive.
I thought Connor would hate me after his parents talked me up so much, but for some crazy-ass reason, he liked me. Our friendship was instant, as if we’d known each other in a past life and were just picking up where we left off. And despite his parents’ pressure, he was happy. I’d never met anyone who was happy. The tight coil of tension that twisted my gut since my dad left, eased a little when I was around him. I wasn’t jumping for joy every minute, but sometimes I stopped worrying, and that was enough.
Connor saved me from a Sinclair-lifetime of dodging fights and being called Sock Boy. His buddies left me alone, and by the time we started at the Academy, they were my friends too, if only by the sheer power of his effortless charm.
The Drakes treated me like a son and even extended their generosity to my mother and sisters over the years. My family’s loud talk and Southie accents never sounded more pronounced than they did bouncing off the Drakes’ dining room walls, but the Drakes treated them with kindness and respect. To my mortified humiliation, they paid the bills Ma shamelessly admitted she couldn’t pay. They gave generous gifts at birthdays and holidays, never asking for a thing in return.
Still, I felt an unspoken pressure to take care of Connor, to make sure he ‘made something’ of his life aside from running a sports bar. I never tried to talk him out of his sports bar dream, but I kept him afloat at Sinclair by helping him with the essays and papers in Wrightman’s class.
By the end of the first year, I was writing them for him. Connor wasn’t dumb, but he didn’t like to think too hard or dig too deep. Contentment was his default mode. He lived to laugh and have fun and when I wrote his papers, I tried to channel his happiness over the rough, fraying wires of my own anger and pain.
I always remembered to misspell a word or two.
Throughout high school, I broke every Sinclair record for track and field. Running got me a two-year NCAA scholarship to Amherst University in western Massachusetts.
A liberal arts college wasn’t what the Drakes had in mind for Connor, but he hadn’t shown an interest in any college until I got into Amherst. Connor—who could have gone anywhere in the country thanks to his parents’ checkbook—wanted to stick with me, and that touched me more than I could ever say.
I promised his parents to help him out and make sure he did his work, knowing I’d be writing his college papers too.
The Drakes paid the rent on a sweet, off-campus apartment for us, which allowed me to stretch my scholarship over three years instead of two. They would’ve paid my entire tuition if I let them, but the free rent was hard enough on my stubborn pride. I was determined to make it on my own—to show my asshole dad I didn’t need his help.
But every kindness the Drakes bestowed was a weight on my shoulders. A growing debt.
And where I came from, debts must always be repaid.
Autumn
He cheated on you.
The same thought greeted me first thing in the morning, riding on the current of my clock’s blaring alarm and slugging me in the heart. I snaked out my hand to shut off the alarm. The painful whispers weren’t so easily silenced.
You gave him your heart and he threw it in the garbage.
“Stop it,” I whispered to the dark room.
The clock read four in the morning. I was trained for early rising. Growing up on the Caldwell Farm in Nebraska, ‘sleeping in’ meant staying in bed until eight, and only on your birthday. Three months ago, I would’ve popped out of bed, humming a tune and ready to tackle the day. But that was before I walked into my boyfriend Mark’s bedroom and found him naked and voracious with another woman.
Mark stole my ability to fall asleep at night, and get out of bed in the morning. These days, when the alarm went off, I only wanted to sink back into bed and sleep for a hundred years. Or curl up under the covers with my worn-out copy of Emily Dickinson poems and cry. Cry until the vision of Mark and that girl was washed out of my eyes forever.
“It’s the first day of classes,” I muttered to the ceiling. “He’s not allowed to ruin this for me.”
I blinked the sleep out of my eyes, then sat up and stretched, shaking off the tiredness. The heartache clung harder and wouldn’t let go.
I showered, then put on a pretty sundress in cream with small pink flowers all over it, and a matching cardigan. The dress was a designer label I’d found at Marshall’s for fifteen dollars. Designer labels didn’t mean anything to me, but looking nice at all times did.
If you want to be successful, dress as if you already are.
I’d read that in a magazine once. That advice went hand in hand with a Yale study I read about that showed people who dressed nicely or professionally were taken more seriously. I had serious goals, and any preconceived notions about me—a poor farm girl from Nebraska—would only get in the way.
I tied up my long, coppery red hair in a bun to keep it out of my way for work. A little mascara and lip-gloss was all I ever wore for makeup. As I dabbed sunscreen on the light smattering of freckles across my nose, my phone chimed with a text.