I mumbled, “Fine.” I grabbed a biscuit to sop up the excess egg yoke.
Andres snickered and I shot him a deadly look. At that moment, I wondered: Was his nighttime torture on purpose? Before then I had never really considered that this could be a cruel and sinister plot against me by Andres, but his snicker made me question his motives.
“When did you get to sleep last night? I walked by the room at 2am and your light was still on,” Glenda asked.
I heard her footsteps the previous night outside of the bedroom door, knowing that she would probably question me this morning for the light being on. I had turned the light on at 12:30am when I realized that Andres’s snoring was not letting up anytime soon. By 2am, I was immersed in my well-worn Spider Man comic book.
“He was reading that damn comic book again,” Andres grunted.
“Don’t say damn,” was Glenda’s quick reply. She had a knack for singling out the “swear” words in a sentence. She quickly followed up by saying, “Go get ready for school.” The comment was directed toward no one in particular and all of us at the same time. All three of us boys jumped up quickly to get ready for school.
That night when I had returned to my room, I noticed a bright red notebook on my bottom bunk with a perfectly penned stick it note attached. The note read:
“Jeremy, write down your thoughts in the notebook at night. It will help you sleep. Love Glenda”
Thus began my nighttime ritual of writing sleep deprived, incoherent doodles before bed, and my subsequent obsession with self-expression with words.
Before my parent’s death, I spent time with my cousins (Andres and Christian), but I could never really say we were close. Most of our previous experiences were spent—me curled in a ball at the base of the chair my mother sat in when her and Glenda would drink coffee and chat about “family business”—listening intently. I was never made to go outside and play stick ball with the boys or watch cartoons on the television. I seriously believed I possessed a wisdom that far exceeded the age and intellect of my cousins. After we all moved in together, the same patterns continued.
Andres and I were close in age, sharing a room for years, but that was where the closeness ended. Christian was the baby, five years my junior. He often walked around, thumb in mouth, a sad somber look on his face. I could vaguely remember him talking at the breakfast table before school or laughing at a television program. He was a silent inaudible child. It was not until I became much older that I realized that maybe he had a lot bottled inside, he was just afraid to say it.
Andres was the opposite—tall, athletic, handsome, and talkative (even though most of what he said I regarded as garbage). Christian and I grew up around him instead of with him. He consumed the house with his conquests. His football trophies dominated the mantle above the non-working wood burning fireplace. Newspaper clippings of his spectacular feats covered the old white Maytag refrigerator door. My aunt, a deeply religious woman, believed that every pass he caught, that every defender he defeated defined his special favor by God. She required that the three of us attend church services every Sunday and special Bible class on Wednesday nights.
We were known in our neighborhood as the three attractive, well-mannered boys, walking slowly every Sunday and Wednesday in bow ties and freshly pressed overly starched light brown khakis behind the heavyset stringy haired white woman to church. Once Andres’s football schedule became too demanding during the week, he was allowed to skip the Wednesday class. Christian and I were not; we continued our ritual obediently and without question. I guess we needed extra time with God since we were obviously not blessed by him.
I would sit in those church services doodling stories in my notebook. Glenda glanced over from time to time, imagining that I was taking notes on the sermon. She would flash an approving smile and nod her head in recognition. I would look back at her, grateful for her naiveté and continued my doodling. Andres would sit with his arms folded staunchly across his chest, counting down the minutes and seconds until the Amen was said and we could leave. He would bolt for the door every Sunday and hang out in front of the church after services with some of the other naysayers who were also required to attend. They wore obvious looks of disgust and belittlement on their faces making it a point to say at least one sarcastic comment each time to passersby.
One of the naysayers was Kyle Adamson. Kyle lived down the street from us. His father, Pastor Adamson (I never knew his first name), took up the position of minister after my father died (preaching that he was continuing his legacy). Kyle and Andres were both on the football team, avidly working out and practicing throughout the week together. I also knew Kyle to be obnoxious, arrogant, and completely free of any moral limitations at all. Kyle would kill animals in the neighborhood and call it fun. He would grab the breasts of younger girls in church and dare them to tell their parents. He was notoriously reprehensible. Andres loved him. They would stand outside of church on Sunday daring any of the other more reverent children to cross them. Moreover, when that happened, they would humiliate you in front of their legions of admirers. I had been the victim of their venom once or twice. Once I realized that this had become a way for them to subliminally derogate the church and those in it, I chose to stay inside with Glenda after services. It was my way to reduce any backlash from my generally quiet reclusive ways, which Andres and Kyle did not understand nor even attempt to.
Kyle and Andres would often say that I was “kissing up” to Glenda and the other adults at church because of my disinterest in spending time torturing the younger patrons. In my mind, it was not “kissing up,” but more a place of comfort. Being an only child, this new dynamic of family was unknown to me. I was shy and introverted; the idea of opening myself up to another’s impressions of me seemed daunting. Sometimes though, when Glenda would notice if I was spending too much time in the back pew subconsciously listening to church gossip and affairs, she would encourage me to go play with the other children. When she would strongly persuade me to go outside and play, I would comply, going out the back entrance. I never wanted to go out the front entrance because I knew that Andres and Kyle were outside waiting for some unsuspecting prey to come into their paths. A few other children were also shrewd enough to also go out the back entrance. One such person was Eve Newmont.
Eve Newmont was the darling of the church. I called her that because she was, to most of the adult church members, the walking epitome of what a southern church girl should look like, with her perfectly coiffed long black ponytails and immaculate department store dresses, accented by unmarked white patent Buster Brown leather dress shoes. Her father was a lawyer and her mother a middle school teacher. Eve had two much older twin brothers (she was 13 and they were 19), who had left the home for college recently. This left only Eve at home, so I understood her elitist attitude toward the other children who were not blessed to be the sole focus of their parents attention. At one point I had also been that child, but now (no fault of Glenda’s, she did the best she could), I was one of three instead of one of one.
Eve took a strange liking to me right away and when I would run into her hanging around the back entrance to church she would always say “hi” and ask, “What I was writing in my notebook?” Eve being a girl, I didn’t think she would understand the over-sized super hero faces I was drawing or the short stories about Captain Hero and his ascent to planet Krypton. Thus, I never showed her my notebook and she never asked more than once. Eve was talkative and would dominate most conversations about stories of her two older brothers; most sentences started the same way, “Josh and Ronnie said.” I had never met Josh or Ronnie since they had never come to the church, which according to Eve, was because they didn’t believe anything Arun said. When Eve first said this, I felt a twinge of volcanic anger brewing within me, but after hearing, her repeat the same mindless words repeatedly my senses dulled to her comments. I started to realize that they weren’t her thoughts, and she was just a young impressionable puppet repeating the words of two jock-strapped morons.
On Eve’s thirteenth birthday, her parents hosted a party in her honor. When Arun and Lillie were alive, I was often invited to these types of events as an excuse for parents to invite my father to their homes. After their death, my invitations waned drastically (I didn’t mind though). Surprisingly this year I received