I push myself back in the chair. Get ready. Here it comes…

“You know it’s because of you that he moved us here,” she spits in my face. “You couldn’t stay in that school.”

Strike one.

“You know it’s your fault he stays out all night,” she leans in. “If you weren’t such a bad boy, he’d be home.”

Strike two.

“You know he never wanted you,” she says, quieter now. The words scrape against her throat as she sucks acrid smoke into her lungs. “You know you were a mistake.”

Strike three.

I’m out.

I get up to leave… can’t stand this anymore… gotta go to Mikey’s. Gotta get outta here. Gotta get away from this place. Can’t just let her do this.

She grabs my arm and pulls me to her. I resist. I pull away. I can’t let her touch me. Don’t want this.

But she touches my face, the burning end of her cigarette dangerously close to my shaggy hair. I try to wrest my arm from her grip, but somehow I stop when I see the tears down her face.

“Don’t,” she says. “Don’t leave me alone again.”

“Where’s Claire?” I say, my teenage voice betraying me. I want to sound like a man. I feel like a man. But this tinny cracking voice comes out of my 15-year-old body and I all want is to be 25 right now.

“She’s a whore… she’s out with some boy, I don’t know,” my mother looks away, taking her hand from my face to suck on her cigarette again.

I close my eyes. Don’t be a fool, Brian. Don’t let her get to you again.

But I do. She pulls me to her and I let her, and she cries on my shoulder. Quietly. Nothing about my mother is ever loud. Always quiet. And in order. Except for when… she forgets…

“Don’t listen to him,” she whispers, as though the hurtful words came from my father’s mouth. “He’s wrong, so wrong.”

What about you, mother? I want to say, but I don’t. I fold my long legs under me and sit on the kitchen floor beside her. I put my head in her lap and she strokes my hair. I know she likes this… I know it calms her down. Though her touch on me is shaky and hesitant.

“I wanted you, you know,” she says… I’ve heard this six thousand times. “I always wanted a boy. A strong, handsome boy like you, Brian.”

I close my eyes and pretend I’m five, not 15. I close my eyes and don’t think about how I am so much more a man than she’ll ever know… and I decide right there that she’ll never know about me. Never know who I really am. Not from my lips, anyway.

Sometimes I can love her. Sometimes I feel obligated and the obligation is enough to make me want to try so hard to love her. To pretend that she’s not just playing with me. To believe the good words that come out of her mouth and to ignore the harsh ones.

Now… the words from her are good… she tells me I am a beautiful boy… she tells me… how she held me in her arms when I was born. She tells me how she would save treats for me as a child. She tells me these things, her nicotine-stained fingers brushing by my ear, washing away some of the words. And then her hand stops.

“But I don’t understand,” she says a bit louder, the soothing tone gone from her voice. “I don’t understand why you are such a bad, bad boy.”

And just like that, she’s changed again. I lift my head and kneel on the floor at her feet. Watching her. Wondering if I’ll take it or not. Not even knowing what I’m going to do. Because I can’t think when she’s like this. If I think, if I listen, if I try to rationalize what demented train of thought gets her from hating me to loving me to hating me again… then I’ll make myself crazy.

So I play along for now. And I sigh. And I sit here. And take in the accusatory glare.

“I know about you,” she says. “I know.”

And I know that she doesn’t but she wants to see fear in my eyes. Wants to scare me into betraying myself… into admitting some thing that she’s imagined I’ve done. But I know how to hide. Do it very well. I drop the shade in my eyes and stare back at her.

Nothing.

It’s blank.

I take it.

Because I know she wants me to cry and apologize and beg for her and the lord’s forgiveness for things that she thinks I’ve done.

But I’ve done nothing to apologize for. I’ve done nothing I wouldn’t do again. I’ve done nothing that I would take back.

If she only knew…

She’d never want to hear it.

That I’ve kissed a man. That I’ve sucked cock. That I’ve had dick up my ass. That I’ve hung outside the gay bars and let myself get picked up by older guys who take me to their city apartments and teach me so many incredible amazing things. They teach me to be a man. To take it like a man. To give it like a man.

Ha. She thinks I’ll admit to smoking behind the school or stealing pens from the grocery store. Those are the things she thinks she knows… she knows shit.

Whatever. I don’t need her love. Don’t need her words. I know the truth – love can be stolen from you too quickly. Love is a false emotion. I watch it play across her face then vanish. I feel love in my heart for her because she’s my mother – that’s the only reason. But it disappears so quickly… it goes away and then comes back. Love is nothing.

All I need is the sense of satisfaction… of belonging… for those few hours in bed with another… being held tight and close and hearing men whisper in my ear that I’m beautiful and tell me over and over and over that they love me. And then tomorrow they pass me by. They ignore me. See… it comes and goes. And that’s good enough.

Good enough for me.

I sit here. Guarded inside, but appearing wide open to her. I stare at her unblinking… look up at my mother, sitting there in her kitchen chair, sipping brandy and smoking cigarettes. And she looks at me… her nose turned up in a grimace. Looks at me like I’m distasteful. Like I don’t belong in her scrubbed clean house.

Finally.

Enough.

I start to get up, but she puts her hand on my shoulder, trying to push me back to the floor.

“You stay here,” she says, and I shrug out from her touch. “You wait for him to get home and punish you.”

I stand up, knocking her hand from me, spilling ashes from the end of her cigarette all over the floor.

I wanna say something, but I don’t. Can’t say too much. Can’t say anything she can use against me later. No emotion. Keep it all inside. If she sees my weakness, I’m dead.

She stares at me, her mouth hanging open in a kind of shock. Didn’t expect me to be so tall. Didn’t expect me to really be a bad boy. Oh mother, I am. I am such a bad, bad boy… in fact I think I need to be spanked, and I know my gym teacher would love to do it to me…

I turn on my heel and walk towards the door.

“Brian!” she screeches, her voice raspy from a night of drinking and smoking. “Wait for your father!”

Don’t look back. Never look back.

Start to push open the back door of the kitchen and run into the old man.

He looks up at me. Past me. Ignores me.

Wishing I was never born.

Worse than being smacked. Worse than being berated.

He pretends I don’t exist sometimes.

I’d rather feel his hot palm smash across my face. It gives me courage. Burns rage inside me. Incites me to get out of this place as fast as I goddamn can. And lets me know that he actually realizes I’m alive.

But this look… of nothing…

Fuck him.

I push by him, nudging his shoulder on the way out the door. He hardly moves, and I just keep going down the stairs, running down the path away… away from everything… from nothing…

Just knowing that there has to be more.