"I'm gonna need five more bucks," Lily demanded the next day. When Amando went to retrieve the money, she told him she could teach him the next day.
And this trend continued for weeks. Amando would arrive at the fence, eager and hyped to dip his toes into the musical world, only to have his feelings postponed again and again. The money seemed to drain from his piggy bank; fifty, forty-five, forty, thirty-five, twenty-five, fifteen, ten, five... all the way until he couldn't pay her anymore, and everytime he went to see her, she would be wearing a new pair of slippers, new shoes, new earrings and bracelets.
"You promised me money, didn't you?" Lily growled when Amando turned up with his pockets empty. "I guess I won't teach you after all."
When Amando returned home, he slammed his pillow over his head and cried his eyes out at the sight of his now-empty piggy bank turned sideways on his desk. What had he done..? Had he made a mistake? Was he just not trying hard enough? He had his Pokémon Platinum game cartridge... He could sell it and get more money...
As soon as he heard Lily's playing resounding from Mrs. Daisyshine's backyard, instead of admiring the music at his window, he shut the panel with such force that it might have cracked in two.
One sweltering June afternoon, a few days after his eleventh birthday, Amando went searching around the house for his brand new Pokémon Alpha Sapphire game to find Lisa standing at the front study window, smoke billowing from her lips.
Across the street, Amando could make out Mr. and Mrs. Daisyshine, along with Lily, having some sort of picnic beneath the tree in their front yard. He wasn't quite sure, but it looked like they were eating ice cream.
It didn't take long for Lisa to notice Amando at the door, and when did, she gave him a startled glare. "What're you doing?"
"I lost my Alpha Sapphire game. 'm looking for it," Amando answered innocently. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing." She twisted her cigarette down on the office table, then flicked it into a nearby trash can. Amando could see that, on that particular corner of the table, it hadn't been the first scorch mark to have been inflicted.
With no luck in the study, Amando decided to hunt through Lisa's room. When he was unsuccessful in her room, he went into her bathroom and briefly checked the sink and the medicine cabinet, just in case, when there was a creak, and the floor seemed to vanish beneath his feet as he plummeted back-first onto a thick sheet of frigid concrete. He landed with a crack, sending clouds of dust swirling into the air around him. For a second, he didn't know where he was, until he saw the rows and rows of guns perched on the walls.
It was Lisa's weapon repository.
He gazed around in awe of all the heavy machinery. Some of them were twice his size, three, even. Amando walked over to one of the rifles and stroked his hand over its barrel, leaving a tiny streak in its thick coat of dust. Wow, Amando thought, remembering the times he had crawled into the trapdoor as a little boy after Lisa had forgotten to close it. Everything looked more or less the same as it did then.
Grasping the bathroom rug that had fallen down with him and climbing back up, he decided he would tell Lisa that her trapdoor had somehow broken again. He did just that, and she went to go fix it.
"What were you even doing in there?" She asked him.
"Looking for my Alpha Sapphire game!" Amando replied.
Lisa put her hands on her hips. "You really shouldn't be messing around down there. You could hurt yourself, and that ammo isn't cheap."
"I know."
Lisa spent the rest of that day fixing the trapdoor until she had finally had enough and climbed into bed. After Amando found his Alpha Sapphire cartridge between the couch cushions in the living room and played the game for two hours, he went to sleep as well.
