Warning: the following story contains adult language
My aunt isn’t very religious, but she says that if people think you believe in nothing, they won’t want to buy things from you. So, every week, we head off to the temple to hear about how there are gods watching us and making sure we learn important lessons so when the time comes, we can save the world. I don’t believe a word of it.
I haven’t seen my mother in eight years. When I was really young, I lived with her and a cramped and dirty apartment. Actually, there were a lot of apartments, but they all kind of looked the same. They were always only one room, or at least only one bedroom, always falling apart, and always filled with mold. When I was small, I had terrible asthma. I don’t know why we moved around so much, but I think it had something to do with either debt collectors or gangs. I remember a lot of shady people in our apartments, and I remember my mom taking a lot of strange men back to her bedroom or chasing me out of the place we were living in. I don’t think I need to tell you why.
I didn’t go to school back then. I knew school existed, but mom never bothered to enroll me. As long as I wasn’t bothering her, she didn’t care what I did all day. Bothering her often meant being in the same room as her, from what I remember, so I avoided her.
Outside was heaven. Not that anywhere we were was great, but it was much better than being with my mom and seeing what shady shit was going on. I didn’t have a lot of friends, mostly because I spent a lot of time rummaging through trash. I think I was looking for food, but I soon learned there was all kinds of stuff there if you kept looking.
The best trash was the stuff by rich people’s homes. If you got lucky, you could find broken Magitronics. I would collect them and try to put them back together. Sometimes I couldn’t, because I couldn’t find manuals, but sometimes I could, and I kept getting better and better. Or maybe just lucky.
When I was seven, Mom finally had enough of me. I don’t remember what broke her. I think it was just seeing my aunt on tv and realizing she couldn’t have that life because she wasn’t that great with magic. So she sent me away to Brooks Hallow, where my aunt lived, so she wouldn’t have to see me again.
In hindsight, I was supposed to go straight to my Aunt’s house and beg her to take me in, but young me didn’t get that Mom didn’t want anything to do with me anymore, so I figured I’d wait it out on the streets until the clock ran out, then I could go home. I had a return ticket with the departure date. So I went to the streets and lived off of what I could find and steal.
I lasted three weeks. The police found me and realized immediately that my departure ticket was fake. They also realized that what my mother told me was mostly a lie. I didn’t want to be sent to my aunt, but when I realized the alternative was the orphanage, I let them take me there.
I don’t know why my aunt never contacted my mother. I didn’t know my mother’s phone number, or even her name, but my aunt has more money than almost anyone else, more than enough to get rid of unwanted family members.
Maybe she kept me for the same reason she goes to the temple every week. One more way of assuring the public that she’s the good person she isn’t.
I had nowhere else to go. It was clear that most of my aunt’s servants felt the same way about me that she did, but I consoled myself with the fact that I could escape to the streets, the way I always had. That lasted until that fall, when my aunt enrolled me in school.
I hate school, but that first year cemented that I would never excel in anything. Thanks to collecting instruction manuals, I could read better than anyone else, but I couldn’t write or do math. I was put into a class for people with learning disabilities. I hated it. I felt bored most of the time. Worst of all, my aunt didn’t want her reputation ruined when it came out that I wasn’t smart, so she had her servants overload me with as much homework as possible so I could keep up with my classmates.
Things got better after Rachel was born. Funnily enough, my aunt didn’t even realize she was pregnant until I pointed it out to her. I know she wasn’t showing, but it’s not like it’s that hard to tell if a woman’s pregnant. She was frightened until Rachel was born. She hates children, but I like to think she hate’s Rachel a little less.
Rachel’s a good kid. She’s smart, cute, great at sports, the kind of kid everyone wishes they could have. I like her mostly because when she was born, my aunt hired Mathilda to be her nanny. Mathilda doesn’t like me anymore than my aunt does, but she’s always been nice to me, and helps me when I feel like I can’t take living with my aunt anymore.
I can’t wait until I can leave. I’m better at school than I was, but I’ve made no friends. The only good thing about living with the aunt is that, since she owns a Magitronics corporation, I get to see them being made. I’ve learned a lot since I first got here, and I own a lot of them and can fix them up myself. The nice thing about magitronics is they don’t care about how good you are or how smart you are. If you know how to fix them, they can’t ignore you. If I wasn’t as stupid as I am, I would love to be a magitronic’s engineer.
I just wish that we weren’t on the run. People don’t care if we’re on the streets, unlike when I was younger. I always thought that Rachel wouldn’t have to learn what it’s like when people don’t like you. I wish she didn’t have to learn now.
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