Loving the Campus Monster

Chapter 11 (Dark memories)

Ross

Four Years ago....

'You're a little piece of shit!" Jonathan West yells, spit flying out of his mouth. A thick vein bulges across the angry burgundy of his forehead, and I idly wonder how much longer before my father has a heart attack. "Where did you steal the money for this?" He shoves a piece of crumbled paper in my face.

"I didn't steal it," I mutter gruffly.

That was true. I sold the rifle he got for my birthday last year as well as a bunch of other expensive things me and my little brother Ricky, didn't need. We salvaged together a few things to sell to get a few hundred, thousand dollars I needed for the donation. Not that my father would see it my way, even if I told him.

Either way, it didn't matter. Sooner or later, I knew my father would find out about it. I knew it was impossible to hide from Jonathan West. A safe place simply didn't exist.

"It was my money." I'm going to leave Ricky out of this, so our father doesn't try and turn his wrath on him too.

My words seem to have set off another explosion inside of Jonathan West.

"There is no such thing as your money, you shithead! Everything you think you own is mine! It's all my money. All of it! Do you hear me?"

I heard him. The whole house must have heard him. Except maybe for my mother, who lay upstairs in her room, indisposed, which was code for passed out drunk or stoned out of her mind.

"I really don't enjoy having to part with my money just because you got a soft spot for some fucking sick kids for some fucking reason!"

"They were going to die." I object angrily, knowing as I spoke that the death of a bunch of sick kids with severe form of asthma-asthma that one of his own son's has-meant nothing to my father.

There were a whole lot of kids that were hospitalized with this severe form of asthma that Ricky and I found out about when we were visiting a nearby hospital with our mother to deliver a charity cheque during a Public Relations event organized by our father's company.

Bored by the endless speeches and posing for pictures, Ricky and I wandered the hospital halls until we found a section where we came across a lot of kids with a form of severe asthma. It caught Ricky's attention and hit close to home for him to see so many kids like him being hospitalized for it. We found out that a lot of the kids had some kind of form of it that made it hard for some of them to breathe for more than a few minutes at a time. A lot of the families couldn't afford the medicine to treat them either.

I remember seeing the kids haunted, tired eyes laying in their little beds, coughing and wheezed for breath that they just couldn't get without a breathing mask to help them. Ricky was so sad and heartbroken to see all those kids suffering like him, only worse. He wanted to help them in some way, so he begged me to help them.

I knew our father would never waist more money to help them, so I called the hospital to find out several of the kids either needed a higher dose corticosteroid with other medicines to take with it as well, while others needed to have surgery to replace their bad lungs entirely. Those kids didn't have long to wait either. Knowing this, the doctors were working on growing their own set of lungs since there was such a long donor list, and there really weren't a lot of little lungs out there to be had for little kids. They were really close to finishing this project too since they'd been working on it for years, they just needed a bit more money for it. So, Ricky and I pulled together our money from what we sold to donate enough to help in finishing the project as well as helping out some of the families who couldn't afford some of the medicines or surgery for their kids.