HOW TO BOIL A HEART

How To Serve A Future

Mommy and Daddy's silverware clinked on the pearly plates and brought the first meal of the day (strawberry pancakes) to their hurried mouths. They were dressed in formal clothes and stiffness, with such a passion for their wristwatches that their eyes simply could not look away. Xavier sat on the opposite side, holding his fork without desire; his thin, anemic face twisted every time the smell of orange juice touched his nostrils, triggering the urge to vomit his stomach, intestines, and heart into the beige straitjacket that was his school uniform. Now and then, as he pretended to put the first piece of pancake in his mouth for the hundredth time, he observed every perfectly stupid detail in his parents: their straight postures, old-money hair, confidence in every micro-gesture, and the enviable blessing of not being tied down by any emotion, not even love. Mommy had the same chocolate eyes as her son, and Daddy had the ginger hair that was passed down from generation to generation, just like the name "Xavier" because families impose more sentences than courts. And what to do when the prisoner doesn't fit in their prison? All of Xavier's features were imperfectly stupid: slumped posture, messy hair, insecurity in every micro-gesture, and the horrible curse of being tied to the rock of emotions sinking his life.

  "Xavier, your father asked you a question," Mommy said with a sharp voice.

  Xavier shrank in his chair; he didn't want to answer; he didn't even want to open his mouth. "Sorry, dad, can you repeat that?"

  Dad took a deep breath, as he did every time he heard his son's gnat-like tone. "I asked if you'd started studying for that test."

  There it was. The test. Xavier was about to fail a subject; the test he'd have the next day would decide everything.

  "Yeah, I spent the night working on it," he replied, impatiently lying.

  The truth was that it had been a long time since he had touched a book; he spent hours looking at the canvas or thinking about the canvas to pay attention to some algebra question or who fought in the Great War — even though he would pay attention to some topic about the human body. And even if he was working hard for the next test, his situation was worse than his parents imagined. Well, let's just say it wasn't just one teacher who said he could fail the year.

  "Enough to make up for your last grade, I suppose," Mommy said, taking a sip of her bitter coffee.

  And as part of his morning routine, Xavier felt tiny. Sitting in front of his parents... their voices giving him jolts of discomfort every time they were uttered... He couldn't help but feel irritated. He felt the agony of screaming out loud, of throwing plates at the walls, and of sinking into his bed. It was like a tightness in his chest (not like in the romantics or depressives, but most like in the impulsive serial killers) that squeezed his organs and filled his bones with anxiety to start a fight. Not exactly anxiety, but like screaming impatience.

  To answer his mother, he just nodded with his eyebrows raised as if the answer, despite being a lie, was the most obvious thing in the world.

  Daddy also took a sip of his coffee, dissatisfied with the boy's vague answer. And Xavier—despite feeling sick—took a sip of his juice, not happy with that suffocating atmosphere that only parents knew how to create.

  "I really hope you're working hard. You weren't like this before, you're letting yourself go at the most important moment of your school life: the countdown to college."

  That was the trigger for Xavier to decide that he would never have a meal with his parents again (he decided it every day). He nodded again, muttering an "uh-huh" and standing up.

  "We're serious, son. You have more than enough opportunities to have a good future, people would kill to be in your shoes." Xavier didn't care if it was his father or his mother speaking, because the two were already mixed in the vomit stuck in his throat.

  He just sighed, not paying a single bit of attention. He decided not to wait for his mother to finish her breakfast and went straight to the front door, but his vintage house, with all the immortally boring history of his family, wasn't big enough to give him any privacy.

  The front yard smelled like wet grass and dug earth; however, the gardener wouldn't be back until later. He leaned against the wall and looked at the sky; the anger followed him from the table to there, but dissipated when he paid attention to the clouds, wanting to use their patterns in a painting where that same sky witnessed a profanity or a consecration. Perhaps he could skip school and paint it.

  After a few sighs, and also to ignore the sound of his mother's car starting in the garage, his neurons decided to replay the most recent breakfast speech. Yes, he was no longer the same. When he was still a child and controllable (not immature, because he never abandoned that comfortable thing), he was the son everyone would most like to have: affectionate, happy, responsible, intelligent, and hard-working. He didn't know where or when things went wrong, because now he was cold, depressed, irresponsible, idiotic... Well, he didn't stop being hard-working; he just chose to be hard-working at something else.
Possibly, the change happened between puberty and the first big disappointment—or it was the dust in his room that blocked some systems in his brain. Sometimes he thought about trying to change again, to do things right while he still had time, but the will simply wasn't there. When he used to think about the golden child he was, the knot in his guts always made him want to bury his head like an ostrich, despite the current version of himself being just a failed bag of bones who feared the power of an eight-year-old. And the only time he could truly free himself was when he grabbed a paintbrush and violated some canvas, because escapism is the best part of being an artist—until that escapism and talent become slaves to an ambition too strong for the soul.

  Oh, if he could rip off his skin and put on another one, he would do it in a heartbeat. Maybe he would choose a waiter to serve a future that would finally make his parents happy, or a chef to cook some success sold in a package of ready-made batter. But despite these plans, he knew that the only right choice would be to use the skin of a sun to stay far away from that place while shining over any shadow of uncertainty.

  Stomach, intestines, and heart... perhaps he could turn page 32 of biology into art...

  He stopped his daydreams and turned his head hastily when the dog barked. But there was no dog. The sidewalk of the condominium where he lived was empty, only birds were singing in the jasmine trees. Another thing about this poor, rich boy is that he heard dogs barking in his mind because, why not?

  But the horn he heard next was real. His mother's car was already out of the garage and ready to go. Xavier took a deep breath and felt his irritation returning. Yeah, he would need a new skin as soon as possible.