Gavin Reed was born October 7th, 2002. Not a bad day, as days went, if one discounted the cold front that had swept through Detroit, chilling his mother as she drove herself to the hospital. Everyone had to be born at some point, and October 7th was as good a day as any. Fine, then. A normal day. An unremarkable start to an unremarkable life. What he had a problem with was the year. 2002-- the year of the birth of the greatest mind of the century, of the man who had guaranteed that his face would appear on issues of the Times and in textbooks forever, who had revolutionized technology and society before his twentieth birthday.
And Gavin Reed.
He'd always been a fractious, fractured kid, picking fights on the playground with opponents twice his height. Maybe if he could win against them, he could win anything. Be anything. Anyways, it always felt like victory. His bruises and split knuckles were magnificent trophies, and he wore them like the Olympic medals they were. Like he was a hero. He'd walk down the city streets as night began to fall, drawing breath after stinging breath to the beat of his sneakers on the pavement. The air would smell of the conflict. It was good, and the street lamps always led him home.
Or back to his house. He wasn't quite sure when he realized that his mother didn't care whether he came back bleeding, or if the knees of his infinitely-handed-down jeans were ripped, or if he'd chipped the tooth he'd just grown in, but he knew that the realization was quickly followed by another.
That his mother didn't care whether he came back at all.
But he wasn't sure if that was fair. She wasn't exclusive in her unconsciousness. From the moment she left her room in the morning, thin frame gaunt under the gaudy stripes of her waitress uniform, or the severe black button-up of a sales associate, or a flimsy dress trying to look more expensive than it was, to the moment she returned home and retreated back into her room, mumbling that she needed a break, she was asleep. Gavin would watch the smoke curling out from underneath the door from the couch during the ad breaks on TV. He liked the live-cam cop shows the best, and when that room had been his, he'd saved lunch money, when there had been lunch money, to buy posters from some of them. They believed in what they did, and they saved people who needed saving, all while looking undeniably cool, poster-worthy, in fact.
He had the couch now, and no posters.
School became unbearable as he became aware of the fact that everybody around him expected nothing of him but failure. Like they were all just watching for Gavin's star to fall out of the sky, mildly interesting in its brilliant plunge toward the ground, and maybe even further, if he gained enough acceleration in the falling. Like it could happen at any time. In the cafeteria, where he turned in his meal vouchers with his face firmly set against tears or embarrassment. In the library, where he read nothing but escapist fantasy comic books. Even in kindergarten, where his mother had enrolled him a year early for a proxy babysitter in the form of the educational system, he could feel the weight of their condescension. There was no way he, with his too-big clothes and even bigger mouth, would ever amount to anything more than another statistic to be filed by the city welfare program.
He showed them by dropping out his junior year of high school.
In retrospect, he knew that he'd probably just confirmed what they'd thought of them the whole time. That his peers wondered when they'd see him show up in the soup kitchens they always volunteered so ostentatiously for. They weren't right, because he did become a productive member of society (as his part-time job indicated), despite needing to fake his age. He didn't think his employers really cared, because he always showed up, did his job, and left. Something they were hard-pressed to find nowadays, they all said. And they were never condescending toward him, even when his one pair of sneakers was riddled with holes from walking back and forth across a city he couldn't afford to pay bus fare to transverse.
