Home is a Four Letter Word

chapter twenty

The Last Week of April

When Jake walked into the living room after getting home, he didn't know what he was saying, all he knew was that he was saying it. His parents were watching a movie on the couch, but given the action scene that they were in, Jake bet it was almost over. He contemplated if his interruption was worth the few minutes they would wait on him, or if for the sake of argument he should put it off until the movie was finished. Yeah, fuck that. He wasn't willing to wait.

"Hey." He muttered as he walked in, purposefully stopping in front of the couch instead of heading straight to the stairs.

"Hey honey." His mother mumbled, curled up against the side of the couch clutching a cup of tea as part of her nighttime ritual.

"Can you pause, please?"

Although he stood up straight to put on a relatively put-together front, his heartbeat was racing and his face was starting to flush. He hadn't even gotten to the hard part, yet it already felt like he was going to start crying, or screaming—the two urges indistinguishable at this point.

You're going to have to get through worse than this. Just get it over with.

"What?" His father looked up, squinting his eyes on the edge of sleep.

"Pause it, Jim."

"Whatchu need boy?"

He pointed the remote out at the tv, taking a few clicks before it finally decided to stop. Even though he swore his hands were beginning to shake, Jake pulled the letter out of his back pocket—the place he had been keeping it since he re-read it again after school as if it meant anything more than it did the first time, or made this conversation any easier. He opened it up for them to see, but knew neither of them could read it from that far away.

"I uh... found my OSU acceptance letter." He stated as clear as day.

Nice start.

His father looked at him unamused while his mother pondered him a bit confused.

"What do you mean 'found' sweetie? Did it come today?"

Jake would have been taken aback by her seeming innocence if he wasn't so pissed at his father.

"No momma. It came a long time ago."

He tossed it down on the table in front of the couch.

"I just found it." He looked to his dad. "In the toolbox... opened. So, somebody read it, but it wasn't me."

Yikes. That was a bit snappy, wasn't it?

Jake half expected some reaction from the accusation, but his father's expression hadn't changed the entire time. He didn't know how the man could be so stoic when he felt like he was on fire himself. This was the scariest thing he had done in his life, to date. And that even included when Aaron chased him through the woods with a chainsaw just to fuck with him and accidentally fell on top of him with it still running.

His mother was sitting up now, her face looking like she had been on the verge of sleep, but now she was blinking herself awake to understand what was going on.

"Jim...?" She set her tea down on the table and took the letter up in her hands instead. "You hid it?"

Meanwhile, he and his father were locked in a staring contest. Jake was trying to convince both himself and his father that he was confident in what he was doing, when in fact, he felt like he was crumbling under his glare alone. Nothing good ever happened when his father looked at him like that, and Jake couldn't help but count the seconds it would take for him to dart up the stairs when things turned to shit. Finally, his father caved and looked over to his mother with a sense of animosity.