Seven Years Later
It really sucks when, two days before you’re finally done being a freshman, you learn that you’re going to be a freshman again, especially when you need to be a freshman at a different school. That’s really all that Jesse had to think about during his summer vacation. That, and the fact that his father was going to die soon.
To be honest, he hadn’t really been thinking much about the second one at all. The only reason he really even knew about it was because it was all over the news, and on the screen of the ancient computer his uncle kept in the living room every time it was turned on and the default Yahoo browser came up. And in the paper, when his uncle made him get it. It was even in school, when the debate team argued over whether or not the death penalty should be used. He himself had been assigned an essay to write on the subject in English, a five paragraph persuasive essay either asking that the death penalty be used in all states, or never be used again. Part of why he had failed English was because he had politely refused to do the essay. He knew it wasn’t his teachers’ fault for being so insensitive towards him; nobody knew he was the only surviving son of the infamous mob boss, Vincent Malone. Nobody, that is, except for his Uncle Paul and his younger sister, Laura.
He sighed and jammed his thumb into the stubborn old power button on the computer’s monitor, trying to come up with something else to think about. He considered taking a walk through the woods, but was quickly deterred by the nasty weather outside the living room window. It was so boring in his uncle’s tiny cabin of a house. He was being forced to live there until his father was euthanized. Euthanized, just like an old dog that had outlived its days. That was what his father had come down to being; a miserable old dog locked away in a cage for being the mean pack leader of a bunch of other mean dogs. Who the hell was even in the mob these days, anyways? My father’s a prick, Jesse thought wearily for the umpteenth time. There was just no getting around it. And I’m the son of a prick and his bitch. Awesome. He got up and wandered to the kitchen, found a bag of chips and sat back down on the couch. He flipped through the channels of the old TV. Even though he lived up in redneck city in the middle of a nearly unpopulated forest, he was still the only kid who still had a TV as old as this. Turning it on you would be surprised to find that it actually worked in color, let alone had a remote to it. That was the last time his uncle had made an expensive purchase, when they came out with the remote control.
As he scanned the television, his sister Laura came in, dressed in a yellow raincoat and muddy, purple rubber boots. Drops of rain rolled off the top of her hood as she turned to shut the door. It didn’t do much to block out the loud sounds of rolling thunder.
“What the hell have you been doing?” He asked, looking her up and down skeptically.
“I was by the river,” she said, her face flushed as though she’s just run up the hill to their house in the pouring rain.
“First of all, it isn’t a river, it’s a brook,” he said. “Get it right. Second, why would you go out in the middle of a bunch of trees… to stand on a muddy hill… by running water… in the middle of a lightning storm?”
She shrugged, hanging up her raincoat on the wooden hooks by the door. “I’m not scared.”
“You’re an idiot,” he said. “You need friends.”
“Look who’s talking,” she said, unphased and getting mud all over the dark white walls as she kicked off the boots. “Freshmore.”
