SAVE BRANDON FUNKE

Save Brandon Funke - Book One

Save Brandon Funke

Book One

Chapter 1

"Please don't stand there, darling. There might be snipers."

Brandon Funke stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of his personal living room and looked down at the street below. It was a long way down. Department of Sanitation dump trucks full of sand were lined up on Fifth Avenue, barricading the building, protecting him and his family from harm. Beyond them were the protestors, thrusting up their signs and chanting. Get us out of this Funke! or F—you mother-Funke-r! or Don't Funke with Democracy!

The other day he'd smiled and given the thumbs-up to a teenaged girl holding up a sign that read Funke = Democrazy. Within an hour his thumbs-up was all over the news and social media. His father felt compelled to send out a Tweet saying Brandon had only done it because the girl was pretty: I taught him well. If that's what 'Democrazy' looks like—smoking hot!—I'd give her more than my thumb. Brandon felt sorry for the girl, who'd cut school to be there and had gotten into trouble with her school and her parents—or so the press said. Since then he never waved at the protestors or even looked at them.

"Please, the glass is not bullet-proof," his mother, Medea, pleaded again. "Thursday. In three days. Then it will be made bullet-proof and you may stand there."

It was their usual Monday afternoon visit—after school and soccer, and before tutoring, dinner, and xbox—but Brandon wished she would retreat to her own living quarters, one floor up, so he could think.

"Darling," his mother said again, because he had not moved away from the window. "Please wait until Thursday."

"They don't like him," Brandon said. He squinted down through the rain-soaked dark. Fifth Avenue gleamed warmly beneath the streetlights. So far it had been a cold November, but it seemed warmer out there with the protestors than inside. Even the yellow taxis looked warm. "They hate him. They hate us."

"Come," Medea murmured in Czech, her preferred language when she wanted to sound alluring. She patted the soft seat cushion, gesturing for him to join her on the sofa. He went and sat down, elbows on his knees, slumped over the way he was never allowed to slump in public. His mother wore a tight dove gray dress that showed off her whole body and nude high heels. She smelled like new leather and perfume. Brandon's black and white cat, Butthead, jumped into his lap and dug his claws into Brandon's thigh, piercing a series of tiny holes in his khakis. Butthead was the only thing Brandon had ever given a name to in his entire life. Butthead rocked.

"Keep that monster away from me, the dress is Gucci," Medea growled in Italian, her preferred language when she was angry. She smoothed the fabric over her long thighs and cleared her throat delicately. "Who told you the public does not like us," she demanded in English. "The unpleasant boys at school?"

Brandon attended West Side Wise, a secondary school for gifted students and children with learning differences. He was a terrible student, but got stellar marks because the teachers and administrators were all suckers. His father had basically built the school. There was a golf course on the roof and a pizza chef and a bartender who mixed Shirley Temples and virgin daiquiris in the cafeteria. Once a month a trainee stylist from his mother's stylist's salon came to style the teachers' hair. The kindergarten had its own lion.

Brandon tried to imagine what would happen to his friends at school if he said yes, if he lied and told his mother that he'd been bullied. They would probably be expelled—from the country. Bullying was Medea's special cause because apparently she'd been bullied as a child for being tall and thin and beautiful.