I'm Brad. I know, I'm the "supportive friend". That's fine. I don't mind being on the sidelines. I always have been.
I only have two friends, Zee and Jamie, both girls, both misfits like me. Zee is an artist. Jamie, well, she doesn't know what she is. Of the three of us Jamie's like the star. Everything that happens to her matters, and me and Zee are there like supporting players, the background to Jamie's drama. Sometimes her parents are smothering her. Sometimes she's longing to win the science fair award. Sometimes she wants to get into the magnet school. Sometimes her parents had quintuplets and now she's feeling left out.
They think I'm a genius, especially Jamie. I'm not. I just study all the time. Books, textbooks, school papers and reports and tests, it fills a void. It fills my need for, for something. Besides, I don't have T.V. at my house, just an old 13 inch set with a built in VCR. My parents never pay the cable bill so it's been shut off for good.
I go home and I lock myself in my room and I study all night. I read and reread all that stuff. Usually I take extra food from the cafeteria or if me and Zee and Jamie go to some convenience store I'll pick up one of those pre-made sandwiches. My parents don't cook, or buy food for that matter. They buy alcohol.
And I don't live in a house. Jamie lives in a nice house. Zee lives in a nice house, too. I live in a small apartment. It has this tiny kitchen with no windows, the living room with the 13 inch T.V. with no cable, my room, my parents' room down the hall, the bathroom with no window. It's like a subsidized apartment, a tenement, a slum. Outside it's all this paved parking lot and other apartment buildings, not like Jamie's yard with grass and trees and these nice sidewalks. It's nothing like that at all.
Part of my rabid studying isn't just to fill the emptiness. Part of it is so the school authorities won't start asking questions. I dress all nice, you know. I wear pants, not jeans, nice pants and button up shirts and shoes, not sneakers. I look like a little businessman and I get straight A's and I win the science fair ribbons and any other ribbon they want to give out. I win it. That way teachers and principals don't go around saying, 'what's the matter with Brad?' They don't wonder why I only eat at school and steal food from grocery stores and my friends' houses, they don't wonder why I'm not doing good in school and getting in trouble. Food, I can't help it. You have to eat, right? But the getting in trouble and failing school part, that I'm good at avoiding. No one has time to bother with me, anyway. I mean, I'm not calling out for help by my behavior. A lot of kids in my situation would be. They'd be too distracted by their parents' fights and all the drinking, the mornings that they are passed out, the mornings that their hands shake so badly until they get that first shot of whiskey to put everything right. So they'd screw up and fail school and maybe yell at teachers and other kids and all that kind of stuff. Fights. I'm the opposite, I guess.
I've read about it. I know what's going on. My parents, when they're around, are drunk and violent and scary and they are incapable of noticing my straight A's and blue ribbons. Jamie notices their absence from my life, so does Zee. It's kind of a counterpoint to Jamie's life. I'm a lesson for her. It's like, 'yeah, you feel like your parents are smothering you sometimes but look at me, my parents honest to god do not care about me at all,' I'm a parent-ified child. I go to my grandparents and give a variety of excuses for the money we need for the rent. I take care of what I can.
Me and Zee, we ended up getting swept up in this whole quints thing with Jamie. You can't help but like Jamie. She's always kind of searching for herself, kind of trying on these personas. And I know why she can do that. Her parents, they like totally support her, even when they're all distracted with the babies. That's what it is, just distraction. But Jamie's been moping around, thinking they don't care. She should live one day in my shoes. Then she'd know what it's like when your parents don't care.