Free The Haters by Jesse Andrews

own house without at least a twenty-minute interrogation by one or both of his parents. I have been present for a lot of these interrogations. They don’t vary a lot in substance or tone. I can reproduce the beginning of one here basically verbatim from memory.
[COREY’S MOM,
appearing from nowhere as Corey opens the front door en route to trying to leave his house
] 
[COREY’S DAD,
yelling from other room
]
—Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where are you headed off to? 
 
 
—Close the door!
—Slow it down. Slow-w-w-w it down. Tell me
where
you’re going. 
—Corey! Close the front door! Cold air is entering the house.
—I
see
that you’re going somewhere with Wesley. Hello, Wesley. It’s very nice to see you. 
—I can
feel
the cold air coming into the house,
up here
.
—Okay. You’re going to be at the Oh Yeah Ice Cream store for
how long
? 
—
Close the door
. CLOSE. THE DOOR.
    [
Corey’s dad appears at top of stairs
]
—An hour and a half? It takes that long to eat ice cream? 
—COREY. CLOSE THE DOOR.
—Corey, don’t slam the door.
    â€”You
did
slam it, but it’s fine. 
—Not “slam the door.” “Close the door.” I asked you to close it a number of times. Hello, Wes. How are you.
—An hour and a half is how long it takes to eat ice cream? Isn’t it kind of cold for ice cream anyway?
    â€”Fine. Fine, fine. Don’t get mad. Listen. Make sure they
wash absolutely everything
before serving you. Okay? Everything. Are you coming home after? 
—Wes, it’s funny—last month’s gas bill came out to
precisely the same dollar amount
as Corey’s entire college savings. What do you think of that?
    â€”I know! It
is
a coincidence. It is
quite the coincidence indeed
.
—Then what are you doing? 
[
Corey’s dad pauses to stare at Corey in exaggerated alarm
]
—Are you going to at least call me and tell me
when
you know? 
—My God, Corey. Are you planning to go out in public like that?
—If I don’t hear from you in an hour, I’m going to call. So pick up. I don’t care. Pick up or I’m going to come find you. Do you have your EpiPen? 
—Your T-shirt is decrepit. In fact, to the naked eye, you appear to be wearing the Shroud of Turin.
—Is your phone charged all the way? 
—And your jacket looks like a Sex Pistol died in it.
—That’ll run out. Here’s a charger. Use one of the outlets. I am sure they’ll let you use one if you ask. Now let’s just go over your homework situati—hey. Don’t get mad at
me
. 
—Wait here. Let’s see if we can find you some clothes that weren’t foraged from a landfill. By raccoons.
    â€”Diseased, sightless raccoons.
    So you can’t really blame Corey if sometimes he gets kind of surly and dickish with authority figures and people trying to make him do stuff. He has basically spent his entire life under constant assault.
    My home life is a little different. If you’re Corey, Corey’s parents constantly want to hang out with you in this state of half love, half panic. So they’re a lot like dogs. Mine are more like cats. If you’re me, my parents are happy to have you around,but they also seem perfectly happy to have you not around. Plus, like cats, they themselves are mysteriously not around a lot of the time. I mean, I guess it’s not that mysterious. They’re at work.
    My mom and dad are first- and second-grade teachers at Mellon Elementary, a public school in South Oakland. And together they do this very effective two-year bilingual thing that wins awards every year and gets the school a ton of federal grant money and clearly has major impacts on kids’ lives.
    But it means they have to be at the school kind of a lot, like from 7 A.M. until 8 or 9 P.M. during the week, and then on the weekends