Free Life From Scratch by Sasha Martin

there on the kitchen floor if we waited another second.
    As Toni carried the tray upstairs, Michael flashed me a dimpled smile. I glanced nervously out the window: The sky was still inky, and there was no sign of sun. Toni knocked on Patricia and Pierre’s door with Michael close behind her. I hung back several feet, waiting.
    After they disappeared into the room, there was a moment of silence: I held my breath. I couldn’t wait to hear Patricia and Pierre’s reaction to our labors. Suddenly, a jumble of words slapped through the air, too indistinct to comprehend.
    Seconds later, Toni and Michael emerged ashen faced. Toni still held the tray, untouched. She set it on the floor outside of the room and mumbled, “We better get to bed. They’re pretty mad.”
    Michael had tears in his eyes. When I opened my mouth to speak, he brushed past me and disappeared into his room. Toni slipped into hers. I stood there a moment and stared down at the breakfast tray before retreating with my blanket and teddy bear into my closet.
    In the morning, I woke certain that Patricia and Pierre would see we’d meant well. I waited for them to tell us how good the breakfast was, or to thank us for thinking of them, or to hug us and say it’d be OK. No such luck. Patricia was stony faced, and Pierre was already at the office.
    No one ever mentioned it again.

    Michael’s best grades were D’s. One fall day as we walked home from the bus stop, he confided that he didn’t want to show Patricia and Pierre his report card. He was 14, in eighth grade. I was 12, in seventh grade.
    “You’re lucky,” he said, kicking a few stones into the gutter, “Yours is probably covered with A’s and B’s.”
    It usually was. I slid my card farther into my coat pocket, not wanting him to find out that this time I’d managed straight A’s. Gingerly, I reached for his card and looked over the markings, the red ink laid out like hundreds of small knife cuts.
    “But you got a C in English class,” I said, smiling up at him. “That’s way better than last—”
    “It’s not going to matter. You’ll see.”
    “They’ll see it—they will,” I assured him, even as a sick feeling lurched in my stomach. The Dumonts had high expectations. “You have to make the most of your education,” Pierre often said. “No one’s going to do it for you.”
    Michael slowed his walk to a near crawl, dragging out the inevitable as long as possible. By the time we climbed the steep drive, he was primed for a fight. Pierre came from around the side of the house and asked about our report cards. I looked up in time to see Michael take a real swing at Pierre, then a high kick, the kind he’d learned in karate. The scuffle ended up in the dirt, Michael’s balled-up report card blowing down the drive.
    Michael didn’t come out of his room for dinner. The tension boiled over again at bedtime. Michael was right: Going from a D to a C wasn’t good enough. After all, Patricia and Pierre had raised a Ph.D. and a soon-to-be doctor.
    I thought about sneaking over to Michael’s room after bedtime, but when he retreated, he’d slammed his door so hard it shook the walls in my room.
    After his 14th birthday, Michael’s physical outbursts and quick-trigger temper increased. It was a perfect storm, fed as much by his raging hormones as by our unique family situation. He got in fights at home, at school, with me. He was a volcano, molten emotion always trembling below the surface.
    Things went from bad to worse when Michael started stealing again. Instead of swiping morsels of candy, as he had in Jamaica Plain, he went on bigger heists, taking department store jewelry for his girlfriend or bags of chips he’d later sell out of his locker. He even sneaked out at night, despite my desperate pleas for him to stay home.
    In the spring, he brought a cemented-up gun to school, got suspended, and was scheduled for his first trial in juvenile court. He hardly looked me in the eye