seems to work out though. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!
Giovanni’s parents must know what’s going on because every weekend we smoke in his room with the girls and they never intrude. We have a good few months doing this, but then, in early summer, my parents want my siblings and me to join them at their summerhouse on the water, which is well out of our neighborhood, far away from my friends. I get out of this as often as I can, choosing to spend weekends at the Russo house instead, and it’s not long before it hits me that my home is vacant with my parents and siblings at the beach; we could have fun there without any adults around. So Giovanni, I, and a few guests start using the hot tub there, along with the rest of the house’s features. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner.
One night, while hanging out at my house, one of the girls gets so drunk that she decides she needs to leave. She’s only fifteen so she doesn’t have a license, and she wouldn’t be in a state to drive anyway, so she calls her mother from our home phone to arrange a ride. A little while later, the girl’s mother tries to call her back on the number the girl called from, presumably to say she’s on her way, but the call is automatically forwarded to my parents’ summer home. When my father answers the phone—at an ungodly hour—he figures out what I’m up to. He busts me the next day.
And so it is that my actions finally catch up with me. My parents, of course, do not hesitate to punish me severely for “breaking their trust,” as they put it. It’s mandated that I go to the summer home with them and stay there until summer is over, and they assign me a rigorous never-ending gauntlet of chores. Most are basic house care but others are ridiculous, such as picking up sticks in the yard from sunup to sundown and raking the beach every day with a heavy steel rake.
My days begin bright and early. I’m woken at the crack of dawn by my dad turning on the lights in my room, hitting me in the face with a flyswatter, and stating my list of chores for the day before he heads to work. If I pull the covers up over my head, he smacks my stomach. Afterward he sneaks off to the liquor cabinet in the garage and through the thin cottage walls I can hear him unscrewing the cork on a scotch bottle and then taking a few glugs straight from the bottle. As I sit on the edge of the bed, dazed and half-asleep, my mom barges in and starts yelling, “Get up! Do what your father told you!” She continues to hound me as I get dressed, ignoring my request for privacy while I do so.
When the berating is at its worst, inhumane, really, I can’t help but scream back. “I didn’t do anything! Why are you treating me like this? Leave me alone!”
A look of disgust overtakes her at this point and she replies with a comment like, “We just might have to get rid of you,” and then slams the door. Moments later, I hear her in the garage consoling my father, who no doubt has been listening to our interaction. “Are you okay, dear? Did I go too far?” she asks him while he weeps. Why he weeps, I don’t know. Could it be that he hates me so much, or is so disappointed in me, his son, that the feeling overtakes him? I try not to think about it.
This is the summer I learn how to cook, do laundry, clean, and shut down emotionally. My parents treat me like shit, and what’s even worse than that is that my siblings are punished if they don’t also treat me poorly. I’m turned into the family scapegoat.
My oldest sister, Lindsay, manages it best. She always wanted to be an only child and is a very tough person to interact with. She can also be extremely selfish, with no real concern for her siblings, so when the mandate comes down from our parents, she simply carries on in the same way she’s always treated me, with disregard. Allison and Austin are horrified and confused as to how to handle the situation. We were friends! When a relative or someone else drops by the home, they blurt out, “We’re supposed to treat Nick like he’s a child, like he’s ten years old,” to sort of warn them. Allison and Austin, however, God bless them, never once join in. Allison gets grounded many times for being kind to me, and Austin gets sent to his room for things like being caught playing video games with me, but they never cave and always show me love.
When no one is looking, I do my best to talk with them about what’s going on. I sneak into Austin’s room at night to level with him about the situation and say that I’m sorry. He receives it well. Then, to avoid being heard as I pass my parents’ bedroom door, I get on my hands and knees and quietly crawl into Allison’s room to talk with her too. She always says that it’s not my fault, that our dad is a sick person and our mother enables him to be that way. I try to delve deeper into this conversation with her, but she doesn’t want to go there, so she politely asks to be left alone so she can read her Animorphs books. Allison is willing to do anything to get ungrounded, and that usually involves doing laundry or babysitting, while her allowance of ten dollars per week is withheld. Once free, she does the same thing I always did, getting out of the house and bouncing around her friends’ houses for as long as possible.
With retrospect, I’ll know that this is a turning point for my siblings too. They do their best to ignore how my parents treat me, but their overall morale and emotional health noticeably deteriorates as the months go by. I’ll later come to believe that they must have suffered just as much, if not more, than I did by being forced to act like they condoned the abusive behavior directed at me over the years, and to sometimes participate in it.
Toward the end of the summer, my parents decide to enroll me in a private Catholic high school for the upcoming fall semester. I don’t want this, but no one asks or cares what I want. There’s no discussion. They tell me after the fact. As I am preparing to start a new school and face a new crowd, I discover that Giovanni, two of my other friends, and several of the girls we hang out with took the school’s placement test late that summer and are also scheduled to start there in the fall. I don’t know if they’re all going there for me, but Giovanni makes it clear to me that my going there is the reason he’s switching. He says, “My family will always be here for you.” It seems strange to me that he would do that, though I am deeply touched. And so with school around the corner, I begin to feel optimistic again. However, those feelings prove to be short-lived.
Shortly after making the varsity football team as a freshman, I tear my right hip flexor tendon so violently that during the course of its separation, bone fragments are ripped from my pelvis. The injury is so bad that I can barely walk. It’s a particularly big blow because the only time I am allowed to leave the house other than to go to school is to lift weights with the football team two or three times a week.
Then, a rumor spreads through this smaller, snobbish private school that Giovanni and I are supplying older kids with pot, which inexplicably doesn’t afford any favor with the student body. Sure, we caught a few rides with older guys here and there and smoked with them, perhaps selling a few bags to them at a football game, but I’m essentially on lockdown, lucky enough just to be able to spend time at the Russo house. Kids pass by us in the hallway and one of them will stop, point a finger, and say, “You do drugs,” and then keep walking as though we’re stinky swine. To be cool at this school means to be better than other people. Kids are constantly trying to place themselves above those who threaten their social status. My flashy watch gets stolen out of my backpack during lunch and days later I see an upperclassman I thought was my friend wearing it. What can I do or say? “That’s my watch, give it back?” How can I ever become cool and fit in? Without winning football games, it seems as though an intangible bargaining chip that once existed with my peers and the school administration has disappeared, and I’m totally out of luck. The girls I once courted on a regular basis no longer look at me. Several teachers scorn me. They refuse to call on me or rudely respond to my questions.
I desperately miss having contact with the ladies, so Giovanni and I start arranging outings on weeknights with several girls from our former school. We all sneak out from our houses, and the girls pick us up late at night. We drive around for a while before parking to get high and fool around. It’s not long before we get pulled over by the police at an inner city park and are arrested for possession of a controlled substance. The cops say they’ll let us all go if our parents come get us, so I reluctantly make the call home. My dad is not happy when he shows up at the park and takes me home. Giovanni later tells me that his parents weren’t upset about having to get him, but were mad that we don’t just hang out at his house, that we don’t