Aeron couldn't remember how old he had been. There was a chance he'd been three and there was a chance he'd been eight or nine. But he'd been old enough to remember, which he assumed had to be enough.
He had been an age of remembrance when his father woke him up early in the morning. It was still dark; the sun hadn't risen yet.
"It's time to take the brakes off this place," his father said. "Come on."
Aeron was only halfway out of his own bed when his mother appeared from around the corner of the doorway.
She said, "Really? You're going to drag her into all of this?"
"I'm not—"
"Hush!" It sounded more like a hiss than it did a hush, which had Aeron chewing on his bottom lip.
It wasn't soon after did his mother and father get into a heated match. It involved a lot of yelling and cursing and blaming on both sides. His mother called his father a bed-haggling tyrant of a father. His father picked up a snow-globe from atop Aeron's dresser and threw it at her. There was blood, but not a lot. Aeron had acquired the safety of his closet, even though, just hours ago, he had asked his mother to close it, in fear that there might be horror-terrors hiding among the hung-up clothes.
The only horror-terror he saw that night was his father's brash behavior and its effect on both his mother and him—pain and fear.
Aeron's father did not drink. Never had he seen his father drink as much as a single drop of beer or liquor. His father did, however, go out. It was unknown where he went, exactly, but when he would come back, it was usually mid-day, from what Aeron had been told by his mother.
Aeron came to his mother's side, but she was already beginning to stand on her own that he backed himself away. As much as his mother was strong, she was also very like his father in that they both did not enjoy the presence of others when hurt. Aeron had learned this early on, and so he taught himself to distance himself when either parental figure was upset.
He heard cursing and a loud clout from the living room and stepped out into the hallway to check. His father had crushed his fist through the drywall.
And so his father did not drink, but he did go out. He took the keys to his truck with his cut up hand and, while on the way to the front door, their black and white Siamese cat Miko came up from the kitchen counter and mewled at his father.
Aeron wasn't sure why, and wouldn't be sure for years, but his father seemed to had found Miko's meowing or presence as a nuisance, because he picked her up by the scruff of her neck and tossed her out on the back porch. Miko landed with a screeching meow and a thud, knocking over a couple metal plant tins and skewering a chair sideways.
Aeron cried. His mother said, "Don't be like that. We'll get a new cat." She busied herself by lighting a cigarette between her lips.
His father slammed the door close behind him on his way out. The neighbor who lived above hollered something and three bangs pealed from the roof in the kitchen. Aeron checked on Miko because he didn't want a new cat, he wanted the cat he had now, but it wasn't until two weeks later did Miko have to be put to sleep.
"Her bottom jaw broke," the pet doctor had told Aeron's mother and him. "And she had fractures in several places."
"Cats these days," said his mother. "They get so eye-crazy for shiny things, they don't know what they're looking at until a pair of headlights hits 'em straight in the face."
Aeron lowered his head. The pet doctor lowered his head, too.
On the way out, two hundred dollars poorer, Aeron asked his mother, "Can I name the new cat? I like Thames."
"You can't name something you don't have," his mother replied tersely. "Now, get in the car. I'm taking you home."
It came to this—Aeron's parents were never physically abusive. They did not leave marks on his body for citizens to peer at the following day. They did not refuse to feed him when he was hungry. They did not kick him out when he presented an interest for things that were not-girly. They did not, they did not, they did not.
What they did do came to this—Aeron's parents were poor, which meant Aeron was poor, too. At one time, when his mother spoiled him with an allowance, he piled the money into a child's safe and kept it hidden until he had more than either of his parents had in their wallets. Until his father had cracked the plastic latch and taken one-fifty; even after he had promised, his father never paid it back.
"Is what I do for you not enough?" he had told Aeron some time after him asking his father why he hadn't gotten the money back. "Do you work sixty hours a week? Do you pay the bills? That money Mom gives you isn't even hers. Whose is it? Mine."
Everything was his father's. No if's, and's, or but's about it.
Aeron found this incredibly unfair, but what could he do? He had thought about getting away from it numerous times before, but he simply couldn't bring himself to run away. If he did, he wouldn't know where to go, and his father made it very, very clear that running away would be the equivalent to death. It was putting the worst-case scenarios into one example and presenting them as given facts.
He wanted something that could call his own, and so when he had moved for the second time that year and enrolled in at a high school during his freshman year, he found Exy to be one of the only sports he truly enjoyed. It was something he could put one hundred percent of himself into and not have someone else deem it theirs. It was having a distraction you were passionate about and doing everything in your power to keep it that way.
Exy was his armor, and he wore it like a second skin.