Reality Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

singing along.
    Mom is at the kitchen table sawing off the bottoms of moisturizer bottles to use the inch and a half that never gets pumped up by the too-short pump straws.
    She’s wearing safety glasses, wielding an electric knife—like the kind you slice turkey with. There are eight moisturizer bottles on the table, and next to them is a tub. She’s filling it with the lotion she gets out of the bottles that she’s sawing.
    This is the shit she cares about. Not what Real Nanny told her about being fair and equal to all of her children. Not the twenty-one-year-old daughter getting planked in her basement and becoming more dependent by the day. I admit, part of me wants to take the electric knife and, well, you know.
    She waves. I wave back and go upstairs to my room, where I can unsee what I just saw.
    GERALD’S HAPPY PLACE . That’s what the sign on my door says. GERALD’S HAPPY PLACE . I’ve had that there since I was thirteen and got suspended the first time for fighting. I mauled this kid’s face. Tom something.
    Tom had it coming.
    Back then, Tasha was still off pretending she was in college and Lisi was in high school while I was stuck in middle school with no one to protect me from all the assholes who called me the Crapper all day.
    So I took a bite out of Tom What’s-His-Name’s face. Scarred forever. Mauled by a crazy, untamed warrior.
    I mauled him so bad they sent me straight to Roger, the anger management guru. That first day, he asked me where I was happiest. I didn’t tell him about Gersday. I just said, “My room.” So we made this sign and I hung it on my door.
    I guess I
am
happier here. I have my own bathroom witha shower. I have a loud stereo. A computer. An Internet connection. Everything you need to separate yourself from everyone else.
    Except: Tasha still lives in the basement. And Mom still never wanted me as much as she wanted that inch of moisturizer at the bottom of those bottles.

10
    HERE’S HOW I handle Monday mornings. I put on my headphones and listen to a crazy playlist of tribal drumming from Native American powwows. Lisi got it for me at a powwow she went to with her stoner boyfriend last year.
    I listen to it from the minute I pack my backpack to the minute I park in the school parking lot. If I’m early, I even sit there and listen until the very last minute. Then I put on imaginary war paint. Three red lines under my eyes. One black stripe across my face. The same red stripes down my arms. One red stripe from my bottom lip down my chin. I have already decided that if I ever graduate from this shithole, I will wear the real paint on graduation day.
    When I go into school, I am a warrior. I’m noble. Fair. I’m the chief of my own tribe. I
could
scalp you. I
could
be dangerous. But I choose not to, which is why I’m the chief.
    Up until this year, things were different. I wasn’t choosing anything. I still had all Roger’s bad anger words in my vocabulary—
should
,
have to
,
deserve
. I was still out of control.
    It wasn’t just Tom. There were others, too. The broken arm in freshman year. And nose. And that time I tried to crush a kid’s neck last year. I memorized the walls of the middle school principal’s office. I memorized every inch of the high school’s in-school suspension room. I memorized every time they told me I had
one more chance
. That was five chances ago.
    Roger was never impressed. Now he is, though. Because now I know about my triggers and how to block them all out. I put on my war paint and my feathers and I walk into high school and play chief.
    “Hey, Gerald. I heard we won yesterday.” That’s the kid whose locker is next to mine. He’s a cool kid, pretty much. Plays in the jazz band and smokes a lot of pot.
    “Three to one,” I say.
    “Nice jersey,” he says.
    I look down at my jersey and remember the hockey lady and how this is my not-taking-any-shit jersey. It’s like I’ve got a double layer of chief on