Chapter 1
"Ring!" the bell signals the end of another exhausting school day. I pick up my books and wearily head down to the locker rooms. "Abel," my best friend Tom, a dark-skinned lad wearing thin spectacles says. "you are going for Jordan's party, aren't you?" "Party?" I muse. "No time for that. Exams are coming next month and we should be hitting the books." Tom groans aloud and says, "Hey, man. Don't be like a nerd. Look at Johnson Beetee over there. He stays in during recess, his nose in his books. I'll bet that he will head straight to the library after school and study until dusk. What a boring life. A life of books and no play." I put out my hands as a show of mock defense. "Hey, I'm just doing what I need to do. I don't wanna flunk and neither do you." I say worriedly. "No one's going to flunk, Abel." Tom grunts in disapproval. With that he grabs his bag and disappears.
I sling mine over my shoulder and hop on my bicycle. As I start to pedal my way home, I hear someone jeering at me from behind. "Now guys, that is what we call a low-life loser. Someone who thinks that he is greater than anyone else all because he works hard and be a good kid and a teacher's pet. Abel is a tell-tale and a weakling." I hear more laughing behind me and I wonder if it is Cato and his goons again. Every time he sees newcomers in the school, he and his friends will subject him or her to a week of teasing and abuse. If they merely bear it (as most would do) or show that they are sporting, they either join the gang or the harassing stops. But in my case, I was a fool and a mere child who was told on day one in kindergarten to report to the teacher if someone teased you. And I did and I became a pariah. Well, not a total reject like Beetee. Just avoided by the ones who don't want to know me and taunted by Cato's guys.
Sometimes I don't understand the country we live in. You may think that I'm worrying about things not concerning my age, and that I should just look to my books or wild parties for that matter. But if you are an American living in what we call the Land of the Free, you had better learn some hard facts and wake up. To put it in a nutshell, take for example the conventional plan of life. You go through school, study hard so that you get a good job. In school, you either study hard to set yourself apart from others only to be scorned, study normally in an attempt to achieve normalcy and acceptance, or just blend in with carefree students, those who bully and live wild and think that God is a joke. Even if you try to choose the right things, you get some stones in the cherries most of the time. I'm not saying that it's useless to work for success. You can earn good grades, a degree in college later on, but at what cost?
Not money, time or energy. Those costs are worth it to be sacrificed in the name of success. But every day I see Johnson Beetee putting his reputation, his sanity and his self-control, the ability to know when enough is enough and his sense of justice on the line with Brandon calling him a 'zombie nerd'. I guess Cato means one who studies mindlessly just for paper qualification. But I know Beetee doesn't. The teachers seem to be blind, either busy in heaps of paperwork or abusing students of different races like African-Americans or Chinese. So blind and busy that they don't have the time to put Cato and others like him to justice, allowing them instead to prowl about like lions to humiliate people, making them feel like cold white trash. The other students of different races have it worse. Cato once extorted money from a dark-skinned girl called Rue Amadi on a daily basis until she transferred out of fear, thus giving our school a bad name. See what I mean?
Come on, you need to think and act rationally, not like a person out of control. I am still fuming over this when I arrive home. I come back just in time to see my older brother Brandon hauled into the house by mum. I feel anxious when I see a cop just at the gate, shaking his head sadly. "He's done it again." the police officer says. "Did what?" I ask. "Got into another gang fight." the cop sighs and leaves. With no other choice, I head into the house preparing myself mentally to absorb every curse that my mum spews out at Brandon.
"You say you want to hang out with friends?!" she screams. "Friends who waste their time on the streets and deal with gang wars and drugs and you want to join them! I'll give you something to hang out with." I hear a clang and a resounding whack. Brandon storms out of his room with a bruised cheek and shouts back, "So what? I didn't even pick up a blade to stab that kid! I just made myself scarce. And I don't want to be stuck in this stupid house, with you and your useless 'religion' and just look at what all these did to my little bro." He glances at me almost pitifully. "Brainwashed him and made him think all your stupid ideas and nagging. Made Abel a dull Jack. I'm just sick of this stupid family and this stupid life of mine!" With that, the door slams and he's gone.
That's Brandon for you. He's not a bad sort, but he had it worst than me before when dad was into heavy drinking and gambling. Dad drank and gambled the car and grandpa's fortune away as a rash young adult. He got to his senses too late to find that the results were one stressed out nag of a wife and a rebellious teenager. True effects of a neglected household. Then I came along. Brandon knows what's right and tries to stick with it, but he voices out his disagreements constantly and tries to emphasize it. I have no qualms about it but mum always takes it as rebellion. Let me say this for mum's case, if you always take everyone around you as your enemy, all you'll have will be enemies and not a single friend in the world. But I guess I can't blame her as she has had years of being distrustful even to her own husband, who used to beat her for money to satisfy his lusts. At least dad now works late into the night in an office and attends counseling every weekend. Court-ordered.
Mum looks as me as if she would eat me up in one gulp and says, "Abel, you had better start with the house chores or else you'll be useless cold trash like your brother! Get to work now or else I'll also give you something to hang out with like your brother." As I scramble to settle down and to get the broom, she receives a phone call from a church deacon for some project. "Alright, I'll be coming along." she says. After admonishing me to continue my daily tasks, on pain of the belt, my mum disappears from the house for the day. As I sweep the floor carefully, I muse to myself what a show my mum is putting on, a busy, efficient and a likable worker and community leader outside, but a nagger and an angry disciplinarian at home.