the street.”
“Good. Although I think you might do well not to speak about me to anyone.”
“Like my parents?”
“Especially them.”
We were at my front door. I took the key out from under the mat and opened the door, then punched the code on the security system so it wouldn’t go off. “Be it ever so humble,” I said and invited Andrea in, but she seemed frozen on the front steps.
“I can’t go in. Sorry.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. But I just have a feeling that I shouldn’t be in your house. It’s almost like I’m not allowed.”
“Where will you go?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be around. I’m not really going anywhere.”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“It’s okay,” she said, touched my hand once, and began to walk away.
I assumed that Andrea’s not wanting to come into the house had something to do with my parents. If buildings absorb negativity then my house had absorbed its share. Andrea was sensitive in this area. She had told me school had an odd balance of positive and negative that didn’t “overload” her emotions.
A sixteen-year-old should probably never try to describe his own parents, but this one will do that anyway.
My mother must have been a knockout when she was young — in fact, I can tell that men still find her attractive. She uses her good looks and flattery of the male species to sell houses. I find this appalling, but then this is my mother. The woman has smarts but hides them sometimes, which I think makes her conniving.
My father was class president in high school and valedictorian at the university he went to. He was an achiever and always wanted to be the best. He married my mom because she was this great-looking woman. While others of his generation set about trying to save the world, my father set out to make a lot of money. What he actually does each day is a bit of a mystery to me, but it involves persuading big-time investors to invest in corporate bonds. He’s explained to me what a corporate bond is but it doesn’t really make any sense. A company that already has a huge amount of money borrows from another company, or a wealthy investor, more money to do something that will make them all more money.
Dad was a high flyer in this circus until some of those corporations went bankrupt and his bond buyers lost big bucks. So poor old Dad had to step down several rungs on his corporate ladder.
Both Mom and Dad had decided not to have any children but to dedicate their lives to the worthy cause of capitalism, but I came along, prompting my father to give up faith in various birth control methods and have a vasectomy, which he often speaks of in public.
As previously noted, I was a peculiar child, although no one could pin me down with a label. Attention deficit disorder, maybe. Hyper attention deficit disorder. Other terms were applied. My loving parents fed me Ritalin for a couple of years, and the teachers noted how my behaviour had improved.
I kept trying to fly — jumping from trees and roofs and second-storey windows. Skateboarding took me to the next level, and Ozzie was my coach. After the accident, I was a little stranger to the world, but I felt just fine after the headaches went away.
I didn’t have friends like most kids, and a lot of the kids I knew, if given the chance, found ways to make fun of me. I was more interested in the paranormal than the normal anyway. So once Ozzie had moved, I was pretty much on my own, trying to bend spoons with my mind, travel by astral projection, or devise ways to make contact with those aliens that I was sure were watching over us.
Periodically, a teacher or a school principal would report my odd behaviour to my parents, who had long since given up on their dream of having a normal, possibly even a high-achieving, son. I know I was a disappointment to them. Once there was discussion with medical experts about reconnecting the right and left hemispheres of my brain more effectively, but the doctors concluded that it couldn’t be done.
In truth, I was glad I was not normal. Normal seemed dull. Predictable. In my curious universe, all manner of entertaining surprises happened. Which is why I stopped taking my pills, my meds, as my mother called them, quite a while ago. My parents thought I was taking them. Certainly the drugstore was paid handsomely for the prescription. Clearly the doctor had made notes about how effectively the medication was working on his patient.
Often, as often as possible perhaps, my parents chose to leave me alone. They had little interest in the things I was interested in. They thought extra-sensory perception was a lot of hogwash. Even if my father believed ESP existed then he probably would have used it to persuade clients to buy his bonds.
One of my favourite ESP games was to look at someone who was not looking at me. Anyone. A guy in a mall. A girl in class. Seven times out of ten, if you looked long enough, the other person sensed someone looking at them and turned to look at you.
My mother wished I would stop going out on the lawn at night with my telescope to look for UFOs. The neighbours thought I was spying on them, but I had little interest in my neighbours. I saw things in the sky that might have been UFOs, and I would try to send the aliens in the spacecraft telepathic messages like, “If you receive this, please bring me ice cream so that I know you can hear me.”
But not once did an alien with ice cream show up at my house.
My parents, I’m sad to say, were in a kind of competition with each other over who was the most successful at their work. I think my mother was slightly ahead of my father, and this was not good at all for the male ego. I don’t know why they were so caught up in their jobs, and they couldn’t understand why I didn’t have more interest (or respect) for what they did. I didn’t want to grow up to be like either one of them.
I was fed well. I had a nice room, a computer, and a bunch of expensive video games that I quickly grew bored with. My parents would buy me only the so-called best of brand name clothing. For such a weird kid I was always well-dressed. But I knew there was more to be had from life. Someday I hoped to work on a SETI project as a scientist or possibly train chimpanzees to speak with sign language. My preference for employment would be working with either aliens or chimps, but not people. My communication skills with my own species were remarkably weak.
My mother would say, “Simon, you can do whatever you want with your life as long as you have a solid education and apply yourself to something practical.”
Practical was not any area that was on my radar.
“Simon,” my father would say, “you can become whatever you would like to be. Just strive to be the best.” These were the words coming from a man who had descended from an alpha male ape. Being the best at something sounded exhausting.
The house resonated with my parents’ arguments over money or me. It seeped into the walls and ceilings and floors. The living room carpet soaked up lectures about success that meant little to me. The furniture absorbed my mother’s late-night strategies for selling an expensive house to a man of modest means. The paintings on the walls changed colours sometimes if both parents were in the room together arguing about whose money was really carrying the household.
I did not like all the woe that piled up around the house like the old newspapers and magazines I kept in my room for my clipping
