The Chaos Kings by Matthew Newman

11-year-old Travis becomes curious about his absent father and decides to live up to his reputation as a king of chaos.

Image generated with OpenAI

After the night's gig, Mother came into my room to check on me. I could smell her boyfriend lighting up gas in the living room. My ears hurt from swimming. I had three pillows stacked up on top of my right ear to deaden the sting. My brother Jesse hated it when Mom came in to check up on me, like he didn't even exist, but she did it anyway. She never knew how to act like a real mom.

"Travis?" she said. "Are you OK?"

"Yes, Mother."

"No, really. Talk to me."

"I'm fine."

She sat down next to me on the bed. "Don't be such a bulldozer," she whispered in the dark. "You don't know everything. You know a lot, but you don't know everything."

She nudged me on my back with her head. Her hair smelled like vanilla perfume.

"Go away, Mom." I knew she was fishing for a hug, but I wasn't going to give it to her.

"It's OK to be a kid. It doesn't last forever, you have your whole life to be a grown-up," she said. She lifted the pillows off my ear. "Why are you pulling away from me?"

I get it. Parents never know when it's the last time they'll tie your shoe or wipe your nose or whatever. It's OK to ask for a hug, but I wasn't asking for one, and I didn't have to give it to her. She always thought what worked for her would work for me.

"Is something bothering you?"

"No."

"Are you sure? You're almost twelve, so bright, almost too smart. Why don't you try just being yourself?"

I turned around to face her. "Do you ever hear from my dad?"

She sat up straight.

"I'm sorry. It just popped out," I said.

"Never."

"Never?"

"Correct."

I turned my back to her so she didn't see my reaction. I closed my eyes, trying to remember his face.

"Travis?"

"Technically, I still have a father," I said.

"Technically, he's never coming back."

"Blehhh."

"What?"

"That means duh."

"You got me, baby," she said, gently placing her hand on my back. "That means I love you."

---

This afternoon I went AWOL from PE class. AWOL means Absent Without Leave. I like how that sounds. I swam back and forth underwater in the pool in our backyard, touching the warm yellow headlight at the deep end thirteen times. Jesse was inside the house, packing up for a spring music tour that Mom was dragging us on with her boyfriend. I bobbed up and down in the water, listening to the screams of the kids at the preschool across the street, all racing around at recess like ants on the blacktop.

The backyard at this house in Pomona was like a fenced-in jungle surrounding the pool. The pool was where I escaped the insects. The metal fence had vines crawling up and down like strands of rope. Insects were always buzzing, and at any minute you could get stung by a bee or a wasp. Dragonflies skimmed along the surface of the pool, humping each other in the air. I know what fucking is. My mother and her boyfriend fuck sometimes.

When I went inside the house, Jesse was packing away, like he was wrapping Christmas presents. "The school called," he said, not looking up. He was filling a box with Mom's concert outfits. I couldn't figure out why he was smiling, since these singing tours were my version of a chain gang.

"I erased the phone message," he said. Then I got it. I looked at him like we were spies. He knew I was the chaos king and the school was after me again. Jesse's face is the opposite of mine, which is what-you-see-is-what-you-get. His eyes were like lost pennies.

"Don't tell Mom," I said.

"You always say that."

"So what?"

Jesse is my half brother, but he acts like he knows me better than I know myself.

"Look at this one," he said. He held up Mom's brass-studded leather concert bra. He dangled it over his chest. "Do you like me? Do you wanna lick me?"

Jesse lassoed his tongue as far down as he could, trying to lick his leather boob. He smiled like a surfboard crashing into a wave. I smiled back and wondered what a boob tasted like.

Jesse tossed the bra back in the box. Then he stood up and smiled like a thief. "You want to see what else I found today?"

He gestured for me to get up and walked into Mom's bedroom. I followed him like a clock, the way the little hand tags along after the big hand.

My mother's room smelled like candles, with roses, jasmine, and sandalwood drifting out of a cave. The curtains were wide open. The afternoon sun was halfway under the horizon. The top drawer of her dresser had a sock hanging out, and an empty wineglass was waiting on the desk. Mom wouldn't have cared that we were in her room, but it felt like I was invading something.

Jesse lay on the floor and stretched his arm underneath the bed. "Wait until you see this," he said.

He pulled out a small wooden box, decorated with smeared pastel-colored squares. The box was old, and all the lines and colors were scratched or faded. Only the red blotches stood out, and a mazey path of diamond shapes led nowhere.

Jesse opened the box. There was a Washington state driver's license with a man's face on it. The number was N550-5485-5208. The man's face was smiling back at me.

"Do you see the address?" Jesse said.

I looked at the address, which was somewhere in Seattle.

"That's where your dad lives."

I looked again at the man's face. He was my father. We had the same nose.

"Put it back in the box," Jesse said.

---

In the morning, I heard Mom talking on the phone to someone at school. I always did great in school until the chaos king thing blew up. That was what was happening again now. Mrs. Vasquez, the principal, had called and asked us to come down to the school.

"What is this about?" Mom said as we walked to the school.

"I don't know," I said.

We got to the principal's office a few minutes late.

"Put your hands in your lap," Mom told me.

"Thank you for coming," Mrs. Vasquez said. "I wanted to talk to you about what's happening with Travis."

I looked down at my folded hands.

"Has Travis talked to you about it?"

"No," Mom said.

"I see. Let me fill you in. Your son shot off a firecracker inside a milk bottle under the bleachers," Mrs. Vasquez said. "No one was hurt, but still, very dangerous."

My mother pretended not to hear the thing about the firecracker. This was not the first time we'd sat together in a principal's office.

"I never liked school," she said.

Mrs. Vasquez seemed caught off guard by this comment, but she forced a smile.

"Did you like school?" Mom asked.

"Did I like school?" Mrs. Vasquez said. "I'm not sure what you mean."

My mom was street smart, not book smart, but she read a lot. Ghost stories and books about homeopathic medicines. She moved like she'd read the script.

"Don't get me wrong," she said. "I hear you. I'm not saying I approve of what my son did. I'm not an idiot. If he did it, that is."

The principal pushed up her glasses. She started to explain that it wasn't the firecracker "per se." There was a pattern of behavior that concerned her. "Are things all right at home?" she asked.

"Oh yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right," Mom said. She tapped me on the elbow. "Look over here. Tell her you're sorry."

I looked up at Mrs. Vasquez and nodded.

The principal kept talking. "It's not just the firecracker. He put a lizard in a classmate's desk. Some time back, he started a fire in the trash can in the boys' lavatory."

Mrs. Vasquez took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. "Do you see what I'm getting at? Believe me, we want to help your boy."

There was something in the way she said 'your boy' that set Mother off.

"What do you mean by 'your boy'?" Mother said.

Mrs. Vasquez tightened her lips. It wasn't really a question.

"Your boy?" Mother said. "What the fuck. I didn't know that a ten-year-old kid had to be all grown up."

I was actually eleven, but I get it, ten sounds better.

Mother stood up. She pointed to the photo of my face on the T-shirt she was wearing.

"Do you see this?" She jabbed her finger at her chest, like she was the one on trial rather than me, and then grinned. At that moment, she was telling the principal, I'm beautiful and you're ugly. Looks beat brains every time.

Mrs. Vasquez waited to see if Mother was done. Mother wasn't waiting for anything. She grabbed my hand and pulled me up and out of my chair. "Let's go. The meeting is over."

At the doorway, Mother turned back to Mrs. Vasquez and said, "It was a milk bottle. I bet you wish it was a bomb, don't you? That might get you on TV or something. 'Principal saves school' would be the headline, right?"

We walked out of the principal's office together. We passed other students in the hallway, veering toward the exit. I kept my eyes on the ground. I could hear lockers slamming and the lunch bell going off. Kids were swarming the halls. I shook off my mother's hand. The shirt she was wearing with my face on it felt like a WANTED poster. There are moments in a school where I hate it more than others. I felt dizzy and wanted to leave. My mother put her arm around my shoulder, like we were both in trouble. She meant well, but she never knew how to be a mom.

"Are you OK?" she asked, cornering me in the school parking lot.

"No," I said. "You made it worse."

I stumbled backward across the parking lot by myself, heading toward the bleachers. She caught up and pulled me back by my arm. In a corner of my brain, I remembered the firecracker going off.

"I was trying to help you," she said.

"Please stop," I said.

I walked home by myself. I tried counting my steps back from the bleachers to the street, but I kept losing track. I stopped at a green light and studied the license plate on a purple car blowing through traffic. The man behind the steering wheel was wearing sunglasses. I figured LION 2 was his vanity plate. I wondered if a dad like him would have messed up the meeting with the principal like my mom did.

I spat on the metal letters of a manhole cover across the street from an old bakery. Then I crossed the street on the red light so I would be noticed. I walked into the bakery. The store was empty. The smell of warm dough was everywhere. I lifted a brownie off the counter and walked out without paying. My heart was beating like I was on death row. I waited a whole block before I turned around. When I finally looked back, the owner of the bakery was standing out on the sidewalk, dressed in white pants and a white shirt. He was pointing at me. He was almost a block away, but I could see his white hat and feel his finger staring me down. Immediately, I felt ashamed, but the blood flushing into my cheeks felt good. It was weird, but I liked getting caught. I was sweating tiny drops on my temples, and one fell off my nose. It was good sweat. I was relieved, even though I didn't know why. I laid the brownie down on the sidewalk and ran home as fast as I could.

In the morning, Jesse and Mom finished packing up the van with all the tour stuff. Pop settled into the front seat with a howl and then studied his makeup in the rearview mirror. Mom GPSed directions to the first stop on the tour, which was Joshua Town. We were going to twelve cities in fifteen days, up and down the coast of California. The idea was to build up a following in Joshua Town, and then do the same in Arcata, Nevada City, and all the other places we were going. Jesse and I were bookends in the back seat. In the middle seat between us, Pop had stacked up all the posters he'd created for the tour. On the poster, NIKKI POP was printed in rainbow graffiti letters on the side of a garbage truck.

Pop played his tunes nonstop in the car. Jesse and I call mom's boyfriend "Pop" behind his back, like he's our dad. That's cap. Pop acts like a know-it-all, but he would probably die if he had to wash one of his T-shirts or put away a dish. Mom likes guys who act like superheroes, and guys who think they can crack her.

Mom only got to play about one song a day. Her favorite song was "Drunk Butterfly" by a band called Sonic Youth. Mom liked to sing one of the lines to Pop, over and over. It was about how she loved him but didn't know his name.

"You sing terrible," Pop told her after she sang it to him for the umpteenth time. "Good thing you're hot."

Mom smiled at Pop like that was a compliment. I don't think musical ability was needed in their band. Mom looked good in a way that was rough and ready. She used her looks to sell what they were selling. They were brutal to each other like that. Pop sang the line back at her. Zero rizz. He sang his version slower and more desperate, like he was mocking her, just to rub it in that he was the real singer. She laughed at this, and I think he hurt her feelings, and that was the point. He was saying it's about me, not you, in his smiling mascara voice. His face had pretty and tough all figured out, but his heart was cruel. It was depressing the way she let him sing to her like that. No cap. I mean, I'm not lying.

Jesse and I couldn't wait for the tour to begin so it would end already. In the daytime, we wandered around the towns while Mom and Pop slept in. Our job was to put up the posters on light poles, bus stops, in laundromats, wherever. One day it was over a hundred degrees, and Jesse gave up and dumped the last of the posters into a trash can outside a secondhand record store. "Home at last," Jesse said, laughing, looking down at Pop's garbage trucks all mashed into a pile at the bottom of the trash can. We both sat on a park bench under a balding locust tree to kill time until we could head back to the motel.

The tour was a disaster. On most nights, the clubs were empty, but Pop and Mom slayed away at anyone who stuck it out until the final chord. Finally, we hit the last night in Solana Beach, at the Belly-Up Tavern. After the show, we lugged all the gear back to the van one last time. We were leaving for home in the morning. Pop and Mom sat on each side of the diving board at the neon end of the pool. A bottle of vodka passed back and forth between them. The bottle label was green with two eagles sharing a crown, with the word "GENUINE" below them. "Dedicated to Alexander III and Nicholai II." I didn't understand why anyone would want to know this.

The moon carved out a bruised face high above the mountains. I stayed at the shallow end of the pool, trying my best not to listen to Mom and Pop talk, but I still could make out the words.

"What now?" Mom asked.

"Nothing. This ain't working." Pop said.

That night Mother snored next to Pop like an ox complaining about something in a language he could not understand. My right ear ached and actually seeped out a tiny drop of blood, but the last thing I wanted was to see a doctor and make the trip longer. I kept the pain to myself. The room was dark except for a red infrared light flashing over and over on the ceiling. I moved the pillow from my ear to my face. It was about a thousand degrees. I didn't know what time it was. I was the only one awake. Mom's delusionship singing was stuck in my brain like a pin.

Finally, I got tired of lying in bed, so I ditched my sweaty PJs. I didn't want to make any noise, but I couldn't help breathing. I put on my T-shirt and my jeans. I poked my fingers into my pocket until I could feel the firecracker and the string poking out from the top of it.

When I stepped outside, the desert breeze was warmer than I expected. The air was dizzy and swirling in crazy gusts, and the sand shifted sideways under my feet, like it was drunk. I climbed up a sloping hill toward the mountains, eyeing a palm tree swaying up ahead like a belly dancer. The game was, after I lit the firecracker, I had to hold it in my hand as long as possible before tossing it away. If I waited too long, it could blow my thumb off.

I only got a few steps farther along when I heard my mother's voice call for me from the motel door. When I turned around, she was waving her arms like she was on fire.

"Travis!" she yelled.

She started running toward me in her bare feet. She got to me faster than I thought she would. Pop was shuffling along behind her in his T-shirt and boxers.

"What are you doing?" she said.

"Nothing."

I held on to the firecracker. It didn't make a sound, but I imagined it exploding.

"What's wrong with you?"

That's one of those questions people ask when they already know the answer.

"Get away from me," I said.

"Gimme that," Pop said, and he twisted the firecracker out of my hand. "Friggin' ding-dong."

---

In the morning, we all drove back to Pomona in a dusty haze. Jesse was crumpled into the seat behind Pop, and I was bored to death sitting behind Mom.

"What are you thinking about?" Mom finally asked me.

"Running away," I said.

Mom turned in her seat and looked at me like a kitten that had its mouth stuck open. Cats spend their whole lives as silent as sphinxes, with their mouths shut tight, until one day they catch themselves with their mouths stuck open. They look so surprised that they can actually open their mouths.

"I want to go live with Dad," I said.

"Hold on. That's a horrible idea."

She turned around and perched on her knees on the seat. She looked at me directly.

"Are you nuts?" she said.

"Where is he?"

"It doesn't matter. He's somewhere. He's as good as dead. All the lies killed him. Someday I'll tell you the whole story."

"I know where he is," I said.

"Your dad is a loser," Pop butted in.

"You should stay out of it," Jesse said.

"Everybody stop!" Mom shouted. Then she zeroed back in on me. "You don't realize what you're saying. You have some babyshit idea of playing flashlight tag with your dad in the cemetery, or a birthday party where he finally shows up and gives you a pinball machine, but you don't know the half of it."

She turned back around in the front seat, no longer facing me.

"Don't ever talk to me about your father again."

"I can say what I want. I can go where I want. You can't stop me."

"Your deadbeat dad won't let you blow your hand off, either," Pop said.

From his seat behind Pop, Jesse slapped him hard in the back of the head. It shocked Pop, and he let out a high-pitched shriek. There was nothing Pop could do, since he was driving in highway traffic.

"Son of a bitch," Pop said.

---

We got back into Pomona early the next day. I went straight to bed and stayed there until the afternoon, when I figured the house was empty and I could get up. It didn't feel like I had slept in, but the clock said 3:07pm and nobody would ever accuse me of being a Time Lord, so I got up to find something to eat.

Through the kitchen curtains, I saw Mom sitting in the backyard by herself. She was staring out over the pool, holding her chin like the famous thinker dude. I thought about how this all started because she wanted a hug. She never cried. She wouldn't cry to get her way, I mean. Some girls want to be like guys, but they still cry when push comes to shove. Mom wouldn't do that. But the other stuff she did killed everything. She let me off no matter what. She made up stupid rules. She hated every dad in the world.

The funny thing is, that was exactly what she started with when I went outside to sit next to her.

"I don't hate your father," she said.

"That's cap," I said.

She looked at me like a broken clock.

"Why are you so mean to me?"

Then she did start to cry. "He's never here. I'm always here. I do everything I can for you. Every little stinking thing. He does nothing."

"I'm sorry you have to do every stinking thing, Mom," I said. "It's your job, Mom§."

I got up from my pool chair. I kicked it into the pool. We both watched it sink.

I walked through the house and out the front door, not sure where I was going. I told myself just make it to the next town. My phone said the freeway was three miles away. I wandered down the service road that ran along the highway. Cars were whizzing by, but I didn't see anyone, and no one saw me. Finally, I came to a truck stop. I followed the hot dog smells, not sure what was next. I bought a 7-Up soda from the gas station vending machine. Then I sat on the bench to catch my breath.

I sat there until I saw two kids coming out of the Quik Mart. There was a blubber boy talking really happily and loudly with his sister. He was eating cotton candy out of a pink plastic bag. They were obviously out-of-towners, rich kids going somewhere for the weekend. The boy's hair was blond and flopped over in a stupid curl over his forehead. He was wearing a T-shirt with dolphins jumping out of the ocean. I don't know why, but he made me angry. I walked over and told him to shut his trap. He giddy-up laughed at me. His laugh surprised me, and it hurt like a punch in the stomach. His sister had a sunburned nose and freckles all over her arms. The boy thought I was joking, but his sister knew I wasn't. Without really knowing what I was doing, I suddenly smashed my green soda bottle of 7-Up over a concrete post. The post was there to prevent people from ramming their cars into the gas station. "I'm not kidding," I said. His sister started screaming. I knew right away this was very wrong. I threw my half of the broken bottle on the ground. My hands were shaking.

The kid and his sister ratted me out, and before I could give the cops a phony name and get off with a warning, they drove me home and my mother was holding me by my shoulders, yelling in my face.

"What do you want?" she said.

"I want to go see my dad," I said.

"Go then," she said. "I can't handle this anymore."

The next day, Mom took me down to the Amtrak station. She bought me a round-trip ticket to Seattle. It had an open return date, she said.

"When this goes south with your dad, you get back on the train and come home," she said. "I love you."

Then she crushed me with a hug and walked away.

---

When the Amtrak pulled into Seattle, I got off and went into the train station. It was raining outside, and that made all the high-rise buildings, billboards, and trains look blurry and hopeful. I texted my dad with the number Mom gave me, but nothing came back.

I watched the people moving around in the train station, wondering what he looked like. Everyone in the station had extra clothes on, like they were dressed for several days at a time. There was one Amish family gathered together on a corner bench. Mother, daughter, father, son. They were all dressed down, like it was a sin to be fancy. The father had the same beard all the Amish dads have. The mother sat close to her daughter, and they both had coney white bonnets jutting sideways off their heads. The daughter looked exactly like her mother, except fifty years younger. She had on an army green dress that covered her body from head to toe, two sizes too big. Her face was the color of a pear. She looked really pretty no matter how hard they tried to hide it.

I looked at the little Amish boy and wondered what it would be like to be him. His eyes had the fairycore look of someone who believes in heaven. I have never said a prayer in my life, but at that moment I wondered if Jesus was wandering through the train station, AWOL from heaven, looking for one more kid like him to save. The boy looked at his father, and the father looked down at his book. He must be reading a Bible, I thought.

Just then, I heard my father's voice.

"Travis?" he said. "I'm here."

I turned around and there he was. After all this time, he was in front of me again. He had on a porkpie hat, shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt. He was larger than I expected, rolling slowly toward me like an oversize bowling ball. I wasn't sure what to do.

"Are you Travis?"

He waited for me to speak.

"Yes," I said.

"OK. I don't want to grab the wrong kid." He tilted his hat sideways on his forehead and laughed. I laughed back and waited. He hugged me. Then he backed up and looked me over. His face was blotchy and blank.

"Been a while, huh?"

"A long time," I said.

"Rascal. You're all grown up now."

"Thanks," I said.

"Don't thank me yet. Your timing is horrible, but we'll see. Are you hungry? You look skinny. I've got one stop to make and then we'll eat. Deal?"

"Deal."

"Give me your suitcase," he said. I did.

There was something in the way he sigma walked ahead of me that matched how I'd imagined him. He was a loner and a tough guy. People were afraid of him, and his walk told people he was bigger than he looked. His free arm swung hard out in front of him, like he was pushing something out of his way. This was my catfish version of him, but it was colored by how he really was.

We drove in his silver Jaguar to a junkyard where a German shepherd was chained up outside the office. Wrecked cars were stacked up all across the lot into mashed iron towers. Gouged-out headlights and missing plates were just another Tuesday. There was a fire burning somewhere. As we passed through the gate, the soaked, angry dog lunged at our car. Two guys in blue mechanic shirts sat on the trailer porch and waved at my dad. He waved back, and the men went into the office.

"Wait here," he said to me.

When he came back out, he shook hands with one of the men and nodded a few times. They handed him some keys. One of the guys pointed to an electric motorbike leaning up against an aluminum shed across the lot. We walked down together to the end of the junkyard to look at it.

"Do you want to ride it?" my dad asked.

"I'm not old enough to drive," I said.

"Who says?"

I drove the bike up and back a few times on the cracked concrete path while my dad watched. I laid a long, jagged scratch coming in. It was easier to ride than I thought.

"See that? Fucking motohead. Never lose your nerve," he said as he took back the keys. "Remember how I wrote you?"

"I remember," I lied.

Then we drove back to his house. The rain was drizzling, but it was hot at the same time, and it smelled like tar. His house stood at the top of a curling driveway, which had just been paved. The bricks were white and gray, like the colors of a kitten. The stairs were a long stony tongue sticking out from the front door, and the vertical windows looked out over manicured bushes built on garden Botox. Off to the side was a fountain of concrete birds, all spitting water into a pond, oblivious to the rain.

In the dining room, a crystal chandelier dangled golden icicles over the table. On the walls, pictures of my dad holding up dead animals: a marlin, a rabbit, a buck, an elk, and a bushel of trout.

"It's just you and me tonight, champ," he said. "Wait here while I get dinner."

Who was missing? I didn't ask.

He brought the food to the table from the kitchen. He dished giant portions into formal serving dishes, like we were at a dinosaur's wedding banquet. We sat across from each other and mashed the food down so it could be swallowed. Turkey legs, sausage, corn, a mountain of mashed potatoes, pudding. As we ate, I snuck looks around the room for signs of human life. I didn't expect to see a picture of me, but I was looking for a picture of a girlfriend, wife, or son.

He seemed to be a little nervous, but he was trying to be nice. He asked me what grade I was in, and what hobbies I had.

After dinner, he asked, "Do you want to see my man cave?"

"I do," I said.

We went downstairs into a room lined wall to wall with more hunting and fishing photos. In one, my dad was carrying a dead deer over his shoulder. A TV monitor covered one entire wall. In the corner was a giant antique safe. The old black metal door still showed the initials and last name of the safe company in chipped gold letters, above the combination lock.

"If you guess what's inside, I will give you a thousand bucks."

I had no idea, so I gave the obvious answer.

"Money?"

"Ah-haaa," he said. "Nope."

"Jewelry?"

"Nope."

He walked over to the safe and twirled in the combination. He swung the door open to reveal shelves full of black handguns and rifles. Each gun had its own stand and a red or blue velvet encasement. They were all locked and loaded like gun molls.

"I have fired every one of those pieces," he said.

"I see the pictures," I said.

He paused and handed me a twelve-gauge shotgun.

"Try this," he said.

"No, thanks," I said, pushing the gun away.

He pushed it back at me. "Don't be such a pussy," he said. "Is that how she's raising you?"

"No," I said. "I don't like to kill things."

He smiled and nodded. "Yeah, that's how she does things. But she sure as shit won't do that again to me."

"Do what?"

"Yeah, yeah." He smiled as if agreeing with himself. "Now I'll show you." Then he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a picture of himself, a woman, and a boy. I could tell that he had found the moment he was waiting for to show me the photo. "This is my second chance," he said.

I studied the boy. He looked about my age.

"Is that your family?"

"My real family. No offense. I told them to stay away tonight so I could talk to you. Man to man. You're here, so let me talk to you. No BS. I want to set the record straight. Plain and simple. Do you want to know the truth?"

I thought about what my mom had said about how all the lies he told had killed my dad. I knew that was actually a lie, since my dad was literally standing in front of me. I nodded my head, confused by brain rot.

"I don't know what she tells you about me. You're too skinny. What's your mother feeding you?"

"She's feeding me," I said. "I eat every day."

He didn't like that answer. He shook his head and cleared his throat. His eyes widened into bloodshot balloons.

"Listen to me. She knew damn well what she was doing. She gave me no choice. I was too young to have a kid - you, I mean. Let alone foisting your goofy brother on top of me too. I had to go."

"Oh" was all I could come up with.

"I'm just trying to set the record straight. She's a lying breeder. OK?"

That phrase made me sick to my stomach, and I couldn't hide my frown.

"Don't look at me like that," he said. "Don't you fucking look at me like that."

I shook my head and held my expression.

"This ain't gonna work," he said. "You are a whole can of worms. Let's see what happens for a week. Nothing else, you go back with your mother and brother next week. Deal?"

"No deal," I said.

Without thinking about it, I took a step closer to him. "Jesse isn't goofy," I said. "He's my brother." My voice wasn't shaking, and that surprised me. "Mom isn't a liar, but you are. You're a liar, Dad. You're wrong, and you shouldn't talk about her like that."

He started to walk away.

"You never wrote me."

"No shit," he said.

"Liar."

He kept walking.

"I don't want to live with you."

"Sleep on it, tough guy," he said. "Your room is down the hall. Good night."

He slammed the door behind him.

---

That night I knew something I didn't know before. As I lay in the bed, I waited for my ears to hurt, but the pain was missing. I listened for the sound of my dad's footsteps, and his voice, swimming in and out of dreams. I slept until I saw a sliver of light under the door. It was dancing in a way only light can do when something mysterious is alive. A boy can only love his dad, and I was not a boy anymore. In the morning, I left a firecracker under the pillow.

The train back to Pomona stopped a few times at stations. I played video games in the terminals. Or I sat by myself under a little white bulb on a chair by the exit, wondering if I might run into the Amish boy I'd seen on the way out. I knew I wouldn't see him, but I was looking for him anyway. I wanted to tell him my story before it was too late.

After a while, I just told my story to myself, pretending the boy was sitting next to me. I asked him what if he lived somewhere else and his life was different. What if we were brothers and he could no longer be saved. I told him Jesus didn't like me, and that I knew Jesus liked him. He had to choose. We lived on the streets and panhandled for change so we could buy ice cream and comic books. We had no father. We stole things and ditched school. It was not the life we chose, but we were together, and we were the chaos kings. One day our mom told us she was sending us back, that our father had somehow shown up, and that he wrote a letter and wanted us back. But we did not want to go. We climbed up to the roof of the apartment building next door, folded his letter into a paper airplane, and let it drift to the ground. We blew up firecrackers to celebrate and swore we would never leave. There was a dog up on the roof with us that had followed us on the stairs. He barked over and over to let us know he would never go anywhere without us if we stuck together. I told this kid that he secretly saved me from jumping off the roof even though he didn't even know that was what he was doing. That was a lie. Then I asked him for his decision.

The kid smiled, but it made me sad. Before he could speak, I changed everything, because this kid didn't do anything wrong, he was really a good kid. He didn't deserve the life I had, even if I did. I told him it was OK, it was OK for him to go home now, everything was OK now, and Jesus was going to take him back.

Then the kid chose Jesus over me, and that made me really happy.

I stopped looking for the kid and got back on the train. The seats were blue and cushy. There was an African American couple sitting across from me who asked where I was heading. I told them I was going home. They seemed happy. "Home is the best," the lady said and smiled. Her eyes were shiny and bright, like she'd just won a prize. "God bless you, child," she said.

When I pulled into the Pomona train station, no one was there waiting. I wondered if my mom had missed my text. Then I heard my brother's voice.

"Turn around, you idiot!" It was Jesse. He was walking with his hands raised over his head. He ran over and picked me up in the air and carried me out to the parking lot.

Mom was sitting in the back seat of the car. Jesse got in the driver's seat. I was riding shotgun. I was shocked to see them. Everything was rushing in my head like a dream. We were in an old black Volkswagen. Huge raindrops were falling down on the hood of the car like silver dollars. Jesse kicked over the engine with a roar. I had just ridden for 1,031 miles, and my brother and my mother and I were suddenly doing donuts in the parking lot. Jesse was spinning the car around and around in circles, over and over. We were all laughing our heads off. I finally had my second chance.