Seeds of Tomorrow

One

The house was packed, and the sounds of the girls running around screaming were getting under his skin. Nothing more irritating than a pack of feral middle school girls. Rocco put his headphones on a turned up the music in an attempt to drown out the sound of his little sister Audrey and their cousins as they freaked out over some boy band in the living room.

It was his dad's fortieth birthday and everyone was there. Grandma Linda and Grandpa Bill. Aunts Holly and Brooke and their kids. Kali and Pat with their rambunctious blue heeler, Cowboy. Fernando and Madi and all their goddamn kids. Along with Marisol and Chris, his half-sister Giana. The only people missing were Lissette and Victor. Lissette was in college and Victor worked construction so he would be there when he could be.

He knew that his dad would be in soon to nag at him to socialize but who wanted to hang out with a bunch of middle school-aged girls or middle-aged people? Rocco was someone may have been an extrovert in most cases but this was not one of them.

The house was always crazy like that. Audrey always had her annoying little friends over and they were loud as hell. A few of them he knew had crushes on him and would bug him as soon as he came out of his bedroom. "Hi, Rocco!" followed by a raucous of giggling. His dad said they sounded like a chicken coop and he had to agree.

And then there was Gabe who was going through an awkward phase. He'd had a thing for one of Audrey's little friends but was too shy to even say anything to her. Rocco told him to just talk to her, wasn't that hard but Gabe wasn't all that confident.

Confidence was something Rocco had never struggled with, he'd always been confident. His dad's side of the family said he got it from him and his mom's side, the bio side, said he was just like Fernando. "You will be trouble for the ladies when you're older!" Grandma Gladys used to say to him, "You are just like your Uncle!"

His dad saw it too and because he and Uncle Fernando were sleazebags, he automatically assumed that Rocco was just like them and Krist "would be goddamned if he was a grandfather in his thirties!" Shit, Fernando was a grandfather before he was even thirty-five and freaking loved it. He had three grandchildren already, two from his oldest son Xavier whom Rocco had only met once before he'd been shot in a drive-by, and then one from Victor. Rocco wasn't exactly sure how old Victor's kid was but he was no older than four.

Which was another thing his dad would use as an example of what not to do. "Your cousin had his kid when he was your age, do you want that to be you?" Rocco had zero intentions of having kids any time in the next decade but he liked riling his father up by telling him he thought he'd make a pretty good dad.

What was crazy was that his dad had been pretty chill and kind of a pushover up until he'd hit his teen years. Krist got a wild hair up his ass and became this strict, noisy, non-stop lecturing parent who assumed Rocco was out there wilding out, spreading his seed, and doing all the drugs. Right. The thought was laughable.

At seventeen, Rocco may have smoked weed on the regular but he was a pretty good kid. He got good grades, excelled in sports, had a little part-time job, and hadn't done more with his girlfriend than finger her and get an awkward blow job. Now, he definitely wanted to have sex with Evie but neither of them was ready for that step and he'd actually talked to his mom about it. Unlike his dad, she listened without lecturing and treated him like his own person, not some repeat of Krist.

His mom let him know if or when they decided to take that step, she would be willing to help get them contraceptions if they needed them and had even told him where they could obtain them for free. She also promised to keep their talk between the two of them because his dad would go off on one of his tangents. She may not have been the woman who gave birth to him but he couldn't have asked for a better mom, she was seriously the best. And when his dad would get on his case, she was the one to interject and point out that he was overreacting. Mom had a way of talking to people.