All posts by Benjamin Talbot

Welcome to my world. It has been over ten years since I started blogging, and the blogosphere has swelled from a market for self-journalists to a market for anyone with cute pictures to share. My blog site had this same name, except it was on a different blogging platform, or blogform, or platblog; whatever it's called now. I've started this blog to share stories with someone like you. So now you've entered here, the end of the space-time continuum, where braggadocio has no place. You won't leave as the same person, not at least for a couple of minutes.
Fiction

One of My First Uber Rides

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I remember one time when I was bar hopping in my thirties. I picked up an Uber ride when the company had just started. It had to be around 2010.

The driver was a short guy. His head was barely sticking over the steering wheel. He greeted me when I stepped in and asked where I was heading.

“To the Lava Lounge on La Brea,” I said.

“OK, I like that place,” he said. “A lot of famous people go there.”

I hadn’t gone enough to see anyone I would’ve recognized.

My friends had just moved out of town, so I was going to bars alone, which was a little sad, but I was fine with it. You get used to the solitude after a while. I thought, what a weird, ingenious idea was Uber, an alternative to a smelly taxicab. The drivers used their own cars and kept them fresh and clean.

The driver that night drove slowly through the Sunset Strip in Hollywood and stayed well within the parameters of the speed limit. And he was conversational, too, keeping me engaged while I was drunk. Except he was obsessed with celebrities. He must not have been from around there–maybe Glendale–because if you lived in Hollywood long enough, you got jaded. It was no big deal if I saw a famous person at a coffee shop or someplace else.

But anyway, we were halfway to the Lava Lounge when the driver told me, “You’ll never believe who I picked up yesterday.”

I was genuinely curious to hear exactly who. I said, “I don’t know. Who was it?”

“Charlie Brown,” he said.

I said, “Who?”

“Charlie Brown,” he repeated.

I had to wait a few seconds to the let the name register to know whom he was talking about, so I had to confirm with him. “You mean the Peanuts cartoon Charlie Brown?”

“Yep, that’s him,” he said in an impressed sort of way as if he was telling every passenger he picked up.

I didn’t know what to say to that. “OK? Was he nice?”

“Yeah, really nice.”

We were about a block or two away from my destination.

“What did you talk about with him?”

“We talked about stuff.”

He made it sound like it was just between him and Charlie.

I didn’t want to stir things up, so I left it at that.

The driver dropped me off in front of the Lava Lounge.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

“So long, friend.”

I got out of the backseat. I think it was a black Nissan but not altogether sure.

All night, as I was drinking and getting more drunk in the bar, I tried to decrypt what he meant as if Charlie Brown held a hidden meaning. Who was he really talking about other than the cartoon character? Then I decided to let it be. OK. So he picked up Charlie Brown. I don’t know–and I’ll never know–where Charlie was going, certainly not to a bar because he was too young to go to one. Maybe to baseball practice with Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, Peppermint Patty, and the rest of the gang. All I know is I tipped the driver ten dollars and gave him five stars.

Fiction

Latchkey

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I’ve always been somewhat of a loner, whether on purpose or by accident. It started when I was younger. I moved around a lot. I was born in California and lived there for one year, then moved to Kentucky and lived there for two years, then to Florida and lived there for another two years, then to Pennsylvania and lived there for five years, then back to Florida for three years before I moved back to California. If you add it up, it equals thirteen years. By the eighth grade, I’d lived in six cities, and that isn’t counting the many homes I moved into in those cities, so I never felt a firm grounding and never built solid friendships.

I would play alone in the backyard with a tennis ball or a football or a frisbee when my parents were at work. Most days after school, I wouldn’t have a sitter. I played imaginary baseball against a wall by throwing a tennis ball at a chalked-up strike zone beneath a steel pipe. If the ball hit the pipe, it would either fly through the air or roll across the lawn. I would field it and throw it at a tree for a first baseman to call it an out. This helped me practice for Little League because my father wasn’t around.

I also spent time alone in my bedroom, listening to cassettes and playing with action figures, pretending, pretending, pretending. Or Mom would let me roam the mall alone when she was shopping for clothes. I would lose myself in the record store for the cassettes with the coolest covers. If I was with someone, it would’ve been the same thing. They would’ve wanted to go to the arcade. And I did have friends who went to the mall with me. They would get bored in the record store, and I would want to stay in there.

“I’ll meet you at the arcade,” I would say.

And they would be there for a while.

I remember in the eighth grade, my friend Jonathan and I went to the mall, and an adult started following us. We hid in the racks of a Macy’s so the man wouldn’t find us, unsure what he was capable of. The only danger at the mall was the threat of being abducted, but I usually didn’t worry about that. I was too engrossed in the cassettes.

It wasn’t as much about the music but more about the album covers. I remember I bought every tape by Iron Maiden because the album covers were so sweet. The music wasn’t all that special. The same went with AC/DC. Their music was okay, but their album covers allured me. I bought all their cassettes with the allowance my mother gave me. She would get upset because I was wasting money on those stupid cassettes rather than saving up for something better. I didn’t know what she meant by “better.” She never told me. I don’t think she knew either. But I bought what I wanted to buy, and I would listen to those cassettes every day after school. They wouldn’t allow me to bring my Walkman onto the campus.

I still consider myself a latchkey child. The only difference is that I’m an adult who comes home to an empty apartment and gets lost in his own world. I haven’t changed much since adolescence, and that’s fine. In my view, most people don’t. I run into old friends, and they’re the same. They were latchkey children, too. We were fortunate. Who wanted to come home from school to the same old parents every day? No privacy. I needed that solitude after dealing with kids and teachers all morning.

Fiction

A Tangled Web

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I belong to an online writing community. To earn points, I write critiques for other writers. Enough points grant me the opportunity to post my own work for others to critique. I joined it five years ago, and I can’t forget my first one ever—not one that I wrote, but one I received. It was the most vicious criticism I’d ever read about my work. I won’t mention the person’s name, not because I don’t want to expose the person, but because I forgot it. I wouldn’t have exposed the name anyway if I remembered it because I’m not that type of person.

Anyway, I remember him writing that I shouldn’t use metaphors because I wasn’t that good yet. He tore every sentence of prose that I wrote, meaning not one sentence passed his test. It was a true story with names changed to protect real people, about my time as an intern in Hollywood. I lost sleep over the critique. It was that hostile. I thought I could never write another story again.

I could write a message to those who critiqued me on the website, any message, as long as it wasn’t hateful. So I simply wrote, Thank you. And he simply wrote back, You’re welcome. That was the end of our exchange and our parting words as well.

Just out of curiosity, I read his story. We could post chapters of our manuscripts on the website. I must say, he was a pretty good writer, so I couldn’t write him back saying, Your writing sucks, too. That would’ve been untrue.

His criticism of my work was so vicious that after I posted more work, I wouldn’t read the critiques. I just stuffed them in a bottle and watched them float down the river. This went on for three years. I would post a short story for others to review and receive emails when people critiqued the work. The emails would tell me how many words the critiques were. In a nutshell, the fewer words, the better. If someone had written something like a two-hundred-word critique, that was a good sign. But if someone had written a thousand-word critique, that was not a good sign. Some stories did receive over a thousand words. And my heart would start pounding. I wouldn’t read them.

I finally brought this problem up to my therapist. We practiced EMDR to desensitize the blows of criticism. Let’s be frank. There are bigger worries in the world than critiques of my work. But to me, it was significant. EMDR (or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a technique used by therapists in which you follow a round light left to right and right to left with your eyes while you relive the painful memory. You’re supposed to report the physical sensations in your body to the therapist after each round. When remembering the critiques, I would feel the pressure in my chest and throat. After several rounds and several sessions, the bite of the critique wasn’t as vicious.

My therapist and I decided to read the next critique in our session. I read it out loud, and we examined the meaning behind the words. Over time, the critiques weren’t as bad as before. I could handle the criticisms better. They didn’t feel as personal.

We continued EMDR through each critique until I could read them on my own and didn’t need her help. This took about half a year to resolve. Now I can read critiques like they’re nothing. As I’d said, there are much worse worries in the world than a critique of my literary work. But I’m so self-absorbed that I can see why they would bother me so much.

I now welcome the critiques. They help me more than they hurt me, I guess because my writing has grown. It’s an ingenious website. I won’t bring up its name just like I won’t bring up the name of that vicious first critic. I hope he’s doing well. Wink wink.

Non-fiction

My Four-Year-Old Laptop

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My laptop has endured a lot of hell. I don’t treat it as well as I should. There are scratches and smudge prints all across the screen. When the sun glares on it when I sit outside, I can’t see much of it. I have to move somewhere in the shade.

But I’m typing this in a coffee shop where it’s colder than a refrigerator. It’s windy in the desert, so it’s freezing outside at seven in the morning.

I’ve survived many laptops. Most of them were Windows computers that lasted no more than three years. They would get viruses for no reason, so I would have to replace them with the next janky Windows computer.

Then my dad suggested I just buy Apple products from there on out. I haven’t had one die except for that one time when I used the wrong screen cleaner, and it destroyed the screen to where I couldn’t see it anymore.

That led me to this machine, which I bought during COVID. It has stood the test of time.

I get post-traumatic stress when it comes to my laptop. I protect it as if it’s sacred because of one time when I went to feed my girlfriend’s cat in East Hollywood. It took me three hours to clean up what the cat had done to her apartment.

When I came back out, I discovered my laptop (a Windows) missing from my backseat. All of my work was on that machine — I believe it was a Dell. I’d never saved any of it to an external hard drive. All those years of hard work were in the hands of a thief.

I began to cry on the street adjacent to Paramount Studios, where I was hoping someday I would get to send my unsolicited screenplay only to have it thrown in the trash.

After crying, I drove to the Hollywood police station a few blocks away to do the only thing and report my missing laptop. The policeman blew the steam off his coffee.

“What do you want me to do about it?” he said.

“Go find it.”

“You got a slim-to-none chance, pal.”

I knew I did, but I was desperate and hysterical.

Needless to say, they never found the laptop. I don’t even think they looked. I filled out the police report anyway, but the time it took me to do so was a waste. The thief had probably already sold it by then.

What valuable lesson did I learn after that incident? Never leave my laptop unattended in the backseat of my car in East Hollywood — or anywhere, for that matter. Protect it as if it’s my child. I did neither. I trusted the world at the time, in my early thirties.

Now I’m hypervigilant. I’ll drive with the laptop in my backseat and constantly check to see if the bag is still there. If I don’t feel safe, I’ll move it to the front seat, as if a thief could’ve been hiding, took my laptop, and jumped out the window without me knowing. Or somehow, I’d absentmindedly left it at the coffee shop where I was driving back from.

And I’ll constantly stick my hands in the bag to make sure the laptop is there as if it had fallen out somewhere without my awareness.

It’s a brain disease, but that’s how much I value this laptop. I value many things in life, and more than half of them are objects: my laptop, my iPhone, my Xbox, my clothes, my Toyota, and my apartment. All of them are vulnerable to theft or damage.

I don’t know how much longer my laptop will last—maybe another year or so if I’m lucky—but it contains so much valuable stuff that I can’t stand to lose it or have it break down.

Anyway, like I said, it’s a cold morning in the desert. I have goosebumps on my arms. My fingertips are numb. I just devoured an egg and bacon sandwich on an English muffin, and I feel full afterward as I type away on this thing. I’m worried that the grease on my fingers will damage the keyboard. The keyboard is full of sand after typing in a sandstorm out here several weeks back. I’m afraid to clean it because I might use the wrong chemicals.

Then what?

It could break down.

At least my files are stored in a cloud somewhere, so I won’t have to worry about an external hard drive. Everything is stored in a cloud these days. Where are these clouds? Are clouds completely safe? I don’t believe they are. Nothing is safe.

Non-fiction

Self-Taught

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My writing has been self-taught, except for a few screenwriting classes at universities. I read many creative writing books and committed many hours of intensive labor but never set foot in one of those creative writing classes.

A friend of mine once set me up to audit a screenwriting class at UCLA sometime in my twenties. That’s right. It was free to sit among pursuers of a Master’s degree. It felt like winning a lottery. What was the professor’s name? Anyway, she taught us the rules of screenwriting. This was before my dive into the creative writing books and before my collaboration with an ambitious soul.

The class hated me. They knew what was up. The students would comment on each other’s work, but when it came to my turn, one of the women said to me, “I’m sorry, but I just didn’t have time to read it.”

I didn’t understand what she meant. She’d had time to read everyone else’s work.

My psychiatrist said, “You know what that means?” He raised his middle finger at me. “It means fuck you. I paid for this class, and you didn’t.”

She’d offended me. But that didn’t stop me from attending the classes.

At the end of the semester, the professor called me into her office. I was excited to hear what she had to say.

“Throw all of it away,” she said.

I’d completed the first draft and spent all those hours, and there she was, telling me to throw it all away and start over. It hurt.

The rewrite never happened. I moved on to another script, one that didn’t make me cringe.

Then, the ambitious soul came into the picture. He found me online somehow.

“I got this idea, based on a book series about marines in space. I need someone to help me write the scripts.”

The idea was silly to me, but dollar signs were in my eyes. This guy really saw potential for a franchise to start based on these books that were written.

So we began our journey through the script about marines in space. The characters were stereotypes to the ninth degree. You had the cigar-chewing colonel, the tough-as-nails female officer, the Native American lieutenant who shot flaming arrows with his bow (in space), among other flat characters.

“Can I use a pen name?” I asked the guy.

“For what?”

What was there to say? He couldn’t hear about my embarrassment about the project. He was too prideful about it. He grew up reading the book series as a kid.

We even met the book series creator in Florida, where my partner also lived. The creator was an old man who lived in a meager house with dirt and trash everywhere. He was a sexist ex-marine who called all women mercenaries.

The project did go somewhere, just not all the way. Cable networks were interested; actors whom my writing partner had handpicked were interested. He even had a university art department sketching the storyboards. Everything fell in line, but it came up short after our agent dumped us. He saw the potential disintegrate, and so did my faith.

My writing partner and I stopped talking after about ten years of communicating and writing new drafts of the same old script and sequels. It was tiresome. One day, it was a film idea; the next day, it would be a possible TV series. It was Screenwriting 101 to me. Forget about the class at UCLA. It taught me not only the creative but also the business side of things, and it made me jaded. Industry people were flaky. Besides, there was no more belief in the project, and there wasn’t much belief to begin with.

As I’d said, this was just an education. I wanted to focus on my personal projects. Eventually, my enthusiasm for screenplays would die, and I would put forth my energy toward a manuscript, which took seven years to write.

I wrote my final screenplay in 2018, but after my friend wouldn’t read it, which was another problem (finding readers), I decided to give up. Now, I write nothing but short stories because I have no more novel ideas.

Should I take a creative writing class? What about a writer’s group? A therapist told me to join one, which made me skeptical, not about him but about groups, maybe because of my fear of judgment. What if their work is way better than mine, and I don’t belong there? Or the opposite. What if my work is better, and theirs is trash?

Anyway, I shall continue my journey through autodidactism, a word I learned from Hemingway. Who needs a school when there’s a wealth of knowledge on the bookshelves and the real world?

Fiction

Dating Wasteland

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My twenties were a waste of time. I tried to date as many women as I could and actually counted the number.

“How many women have you dated?”

“Oh, it has to be at least a hundred this year.”

So much for having commitment. It was all about the quantity to feed my ego. My ego was a bottomless pit.

I forgot the names of more than half the women, maybe because it was more than twenty years ago. There is no pill to help me remember those names.

I do remember places and voices, the kissing and touching, the Santa Monica pier at night. We lay in the sand and made out in the car after seafood.

And then I found out that she was dating everyone else at my work. This was way back when it was acceptable to see someone outside of the office. I stopped talking to her, although I was still attracted to her light brown hair and fair skin.

She texted me one morning, but I never texted back. Fine, don’t talk to me anymore, she wrote. We’re over.

And then I had to see her at work, and the awkwardness was overwhelming.

My friends had to know how many women I dated. It may not have been so important to them, but to me, it was paramount. I needed to be the leader on the tote board.

And then, as I grew older, the scores would lose their relevance. Friends got married and divorced while I stayed single, still trying to stay in the lead. But I was all alone, in first place of course, because now I was competing with myself. It was more losing than winning. I would win maybe a few times out of the year.

The dating stopped altogether.

I remember one awkward date when I was twenty-six and she was twenty-one. Her father chaperoned us to the movie theater. The movie was a love story that she’d chosen, not me. Her dad sat behind us, I guess to protect her. There would be no kissing, no hands held, no hugging on the date. I never dated her again, but we remained quasi-friends.

There came a point when I wouldn’t date at all. I became jaded. Every relationship began and ended through phone apps. And I had to pay to continue with them. The apps were pimps.

I remember talking to a woman for over a month in my late thirties, using one of those apps (I forgot which one). It said in my profile that I was a writer. She thought I was one for that whole time until one day. I mentioned what I did to make money because, as most people know, writing doesn’t pay the bills. She ghosted me. It hurt like hell.

That was when I knew that dating wasn’t a game anymore. No one was keeping score, not even me. I quit that app and quit looking for dates. It wasn’t worth the trouble.

Fiction

The Time I Had an Accident

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Out here in California, we have the pleasure of In-N-Out Burger. I used to eat there a lot when I was in college.

One time, on a weekend in Garden Grove, I ate not one but two Double-Doubles. I drove my Honda CRX to Tower Records nearby to browse the rock and hip-hop sections, back when record stores still existed. They tended to help me relax from all my worries to the point where they became a natural laxative.

I suddenly had to use the bathroom, except Tower didn’t have one for customers. This wouldn’t be a short and sweet trip either. I really really had to go urgently. There was no time to stop and consider which bathroom I wanted to use. I had to go now.

So I scrambled out of the store and hurried to the first business I could find, which was a motel. The door was locked. The concierge (or whom I considered to be the concierge in a dump like that) stood behind his counter looking at me with fear.

I banged on the glass. “Sir, help. I need to use your bathroom now.”

I could read his lips. “What?”

I had to yell louder. “I said, I need to use your bathroom now.”

He shook his head and said no as if I was going to hold him at gunpoint if he opened the door.

Then I couldn’t hold it anymore. The warmth poured down my left leg. I could feel myself melting in the sun.

I wore shorts so the concierge could see what was happening, too. The look of horror on his face rivaled mine. It was too late. What was done was done. There was no use in scrambling for a bathroom then. I would have to drive back to my dorm with it down my leg.

Fullerton was about a thirty-minute drive from Garden Grove. I used a knitted blanket, which was conveniently in my car, to cover my driver’s seat and drove home with the windows down.

When I arrived at the dorm, it was a long walk to my room. Of course I was going to pass a few students.

One of them walked past me and asked, “What happened to you?”

“I fell in mud,” I said.

And then I locked the door behind me. I took a shower and changed clothes, knowing never to eat In-N-Out and browse at Tower Records again.

Non-fiction

The Bargoyles

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Mike would come in every night before everyone else did. He called our crew the Bargoyles because it was the same cast of characters. There were me, Mike, Sean, Ethan, and a couple of others I never knew the names of. We all sat at the end of the bar.

The bartenders hated us because we were the first ones in and the last ones out, and we were hogging up space for the other patrons.

Mike would get the drunkest. He drank Jack and Cokes all night, using red straws to count how many he’d drunk because he would lose count. The bartenders couldn’t stand him, especially because he would play the same damn songs on the jukebox. The jukebox was a digital one, not the retro kind where an actual record would pull up. You would use a phone app to play the songs. This gave Mike more wherewithal from his bar stool.

“Don’t you have anything else to play?” the bartender said to him.

The bartender wanted to listen to hip-hop or something more uptempo.

Mike’s songs were sad. They had to do with drug abuse, loneliness, or heartache. I didn’t mind the songs, but after a while of him playing them every night, I could understand the bartender’s point of view.

“You’re driving away customers,” he said. “My customers.”

“But we’re the Bargoyles,” Mike said.

He even bought us blue t-shirts with the word Bargoyles on them and actually wanted us to wear them. It was a joke—an unfunny joke. If we didn’t wear them, we weren’t part of the Bargoyles. And he bought drinks for only the Bargoyles.

But enough about them.

Mike illustrated comic books with his talent until one day. He was laid off by a couple of dude-bros who’d taken over his company once the founder had died. So now Mike’s drinking got worse. Not only was he at the bar before the rest of the Bargoyles, but he was at the bar when it opened. And he would stay until it closed. When it closed, the Bargoyles were the only ones who stuck around after hours.

I didn’t hold onto many memories of those nights because I would black out. Mike would order shots of whiskey for me and the rest of us. I would wake up with nasty hangovers and forget how I got home.

It was the only place I wanted to be after leaving my lousy job until one day I stopped going.

I was forced into rehab at forty-one. I never said goodbye to the Bargoyles. They heard about what happened to me through social media. Rehabilitation took a month before I was released.

I wouldn’t go back to the bar on La Brea, but I learned that Mike would move back to Connecticut. No more sappy songs. No more Bargoyles. The band would break up. I almost felt like the nucleus—the cause of their breakup.

The bar burned down while I was gone, too. They changed ownership and gave it a new name. This all happened during that month as if the world had turned upside down. Every time I hear those songs, I think of Mike and the Bargoyles and how much I miss drinking. I’ll walk by bars and poke my head in, wondering if I should have just one innocent pint of beer. But I know one would turn into two, that two would turn into four, that four would turn into eight….

I keep walking with those songs in my head.

Fiction

The Last Concert I went to

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The last concert I went to was almost ten years ago. I invited an ex-girlfriend to drive down to Los Angeles to meet me there. I even paid for her ticket, but she never showed up.

It was one of my favorite bands performing at the Wiltern. I’d never been there before. My seat was on the balcony, and the band played far down in front of the pit. I usually don’t go to concerts because I fear crowds, but I was alone way up there. It was like I had my own private suite. Some may have said that it was well worth the price of admission, but my ex still ditched me for whatever reason.

And the acoustics were abrasive on top of that. That was the problem I had with concerts. The bands usually always sounded off-key through the speakers. The other musicians would sometimes drown out the singer. Or he would not sing at all. He would hold the microphone out to the crowd and make them sing along. We would spend hundreds of dollars to do the job for him. It didn’t make sense.

They did perform their classics, and they sounded similar to what I’d played on their studio album through my headphones, except there was feedback, and the drummer drummed offbeat.

I left the concert early, about halfway through, having quit on my ex-girlfriend. I wouldn’t talk to her again, and I wouldn’t go to another concert. I was better off single and listening to the studio albums.

Fiction

The Principal’s Office

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We’ve all been there, I hope. I remember eighth grade. I brought a book of dirty jokes to school to try to impress the other kids and make them think I was funny.

The book itself was racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic—anything phobic. But this was in the early nineties when such jokes were acceptable, I guess. I won’t get into them for the sake of this story.

During recess, I called a bunch of boys to gather around me while I read the jokes out loud. They all laughed until one of the boys yelled, “Hey, come here. He’s got a book of dirty jokes.”

The principal, whose name escapes me, must’ve been patrolling the schoolyard during my presentation because he broke the circle and snatched the book out of my hands. I watched him flip through the pages. My throat was stuck in my chest. The other boys scattered like flies.

After reading just one joke, the principal nodded his head and said, “Come to my office after seventh period.”

He delayed the visit on purpose so I could dwell on my anxiety for that long. It was torture, sitting in fifth, sixth, and seventh period. The students knew about the trouble I was in, so they all looked at me. All I wanted was to be funny and grab their attention, but obviously, it backfired.

When the school bell after the seventh period rang, I jumped in my seat.

The students rushed out of the classroom like bulls.

I sat in Principal _______ office across from his desk.

He watched me for a long time without saying a word, while I just stared at my thumbs in my lap.

He skimmed through the pages of the dirty joke book some more and shook his head. “Why would you bring this to my school?”

“I don’t know, sir,” I said. “I just wanted to be funny.”

“You really think these jokes are funny?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Well, you know what would be real funny is if I called your parents. Wouldn’t it?”

If my father had found out, Principal _______ wouldn’t have felt like such a threat because my father was the devil of all devils.

The principal picked up the phone slowly and watched me shake in my chair.

“Please don’t do it,” I said. “I won’t bring that book ever again.”

“I’ll make sure of that,” he said.

“I’ll do detention for the rest of the year. Just don’t call them.”

But he did. He dialed the number, but my parents were at work. This was the age of the answering machine.

Principal ______ left a message to call him back at his number and hung up the phone. “I hope this teaches you a valuable lesson. Do you know where this book belongs?”

I knew the answer to that, too, just like I knew Mr. Tomato’s joke.

Principal ______ held the book over his trash can and let it drop right inside like a basketball through a hoop. There went the ten dollars I’d spent buying it. He didn’t have the right to do that.

“Now get out, and I better not have to see you here again.”

When I left, I felt like the worst criminal on earth. My parents would soon find out the truth about me: that I was a filthy kid who didn’t deserve nice things.

Somehow, I didn’t miss the bus ride home. It was a slow burn. Everyone asked me what happened in the principal’s office, but to be honest, I felt as if I’d blacked out through the whole visit. I couldn’t tell anyone.

When Mom came home from her job at the county, she was so bedraggled that when she checked the message from Principal ______, she asked, “What the hell did he want?”

I played dumb and shrugged.

“I don’t have time for this,” she said, and then she began to cook dinner for Dad and me.

I got away with that one, and I would never have to see the principal at junior high again.