Free I Swear I'll Make It Up to You by Mishka Shubaly Page A

Drenched to the bone, I grimly forced down the rest of the warm beer, watching the rain rattling off the tarps and folding tables, the last yard sale slowly dying on the lawn in front of me.
    It hadn’t been any of our crap that had bankrupted us at all, I realized. The hammock chairs, the cross-country skis, the mini pool table, the weight bench I had never used . . . they were all innocent. It was Simon’s Rock. It was my fancy overpriced college for “sensitive” kids who couldn’t hack it in high school—$23,000 a year my parents hadn’t prepared for. It was the kid who’d never been able to manage a night’s sleep on his own, who’d depended on his parents even to go to school to get away from them. It was me.
    Tears came, but I choked them back down. I had cried enough. Tears wouldn’t help. I had to be strong.
    I stared out at the rain falling on the shrapnel of our exploded family and made a solemn vow: I swear to you, Mom, I will take your revenge. I will make it up to you, I will make this right. Not justice, because how fucking naive can you be? This couldn’t be undone. But you will get the good things you deserve. And our traitorous father, he will get what he deserves. I will make a mark on this world. I will take the pain you put on the person I loveabove all others, magnify it a thousand times, and then turn it back on you motherfuckers.

    At the end of the school year, spending the last night in our old house was like crawling into bed with a corpse. Tatyana had stayed in Boulder for the entire, drawn-out death rattle of the last six months. Tashina was staying the night at a friend’s house. Without ever discussing it, Tatyana, my mother, and I did our best to shield her from the worst as the poor kid had seemed lost even before the divorce. My father was long gone, in California with his sports car and his secretary, but then, he’d been gone for years, hadn’t he?
    Mom and I slept on the floor of my bedroom because it was carpeted. The beds had been packed or sold or just given away. We drank whiskey out of a plastic bottle, covered ourselves with our coats, and cuddled up with Katie for warmth. In the morning, my mother would drop Katie at her new home, then head to Colorado to join Tatyana. Tashina and I would catch a Greyhound bus to Saskatchewan, where she would crash with family and I would pump gas at our uncle’s general store.
    â€œThink of it as one grand adventure,” Mom had told us.
    Even Tashina knew that was bullshit. Adults were so full of shit. We knew adventures—hiking the Grand Canyon, descending to the bottom of Carlsbad Caverns, and, the queen mother of them all, driving from New Mexico to Alaska with Mom one summer. This wasn’t an adventure. This was exile.
    When the sun rose, my family scattered to the winds. The bank took our house. Everything else was already gone.

CHAPTER 3
    Working-Class Zero
    F ive days before graduation from Simon’s Rock, I got an alcohol infraction. As the entire student body was underage (some as young as fourteen), Simon’s Rock had a strict alcohol policy. One infraction landed you on social probation; two infractions in a year were grounds for expulsion. This was my third alcohol violation of the semester. I was summoned before the Judicial Committee, our disciplinary panel composed of fellow students, nearly every one of whom had seen me wasted, high, or visibly hungover.
    I just wanted out of Simon’s Rock’s affluent, self-congratulatory freak show. Many of my friends had elected to stay for all four years. Even if we could have afforded it, nothing could have made me stay.
    I had testified at Wayne Lo’s trial. I’d answered a few mundane questions and related the story about him trying to get a gun. When they asked me to identify the defendant, I made eye contact with Wayne, pointed straight at him, and said, “There. The short guy in the cheap