The Others - 2. Chapter 2: Mom is trying

“I’m so freaking tired of you always arguing with me!”

“I’m not arguing with you, young man, I don’t need to argue, I’m your mother.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly the problem. You think everything you say is right just because I once crawled out of your pussy."

“What did you say? Don’t you ever…”

I closed my door and shut out all the noise. I hate it when my brother and mom have a fight, which it pretty often since my dad left. I can still hear them with the door closed and I'd like to think that's because my room is not too well insulated. No, it's because they are loud enough that even my dad would be able to hear them. Though I think he would try to ignore it too, after all he decided to leave us. Sometimes I wish I could do the same, just run from everything and everyone. I lay down on my bed and stare at the roof. I didn’t do anything when I came home, so I might as well have stayed at school. I just sat down and looked at my laptop for four hours straight. When my mom came home I went downstairs to greet her, but I found myself in my room shortly after. Like I did the whole week, I’m just staring at pictures of a very cute boy. Tears well up in my eyes.

Okay, if someone was to walk into my room he probably would think it’s a little bit weird that a seventeen year old guy is looking at pictures of a thirteen year old. But, considering I used to look at them when I was the same age, I think it’s a bit less weird, right? God, who am I trying to fool, I should stop looking at pictures of Yuri. I have to focus on my new post, it’s been more than three days since I posted something.

I made a mental note today. It was about people always implying things. Let’s try to write an article about that.

“People never say what they want to say.”

Nah, I don’t want to start the article with a sentence that spoils the rest of the post. It has to be interesting, but it mustn't give anything away.

I always start writing by randomly stating a sentence to start with. Normally this first sentence takes me the most work and time to write. Once I have it, the whole article is done in minutes. So the first sentence, that’s the real challenge. Without being aware of it, I open the pictures of Yuri again. A warm feeling arises in my stomach. Jesus, I’m still in love with someone I never met. Love is not made for you, a voice says. You will never be happy.

I know it! I know how to start my next post.

“They say we only communicate 20 percent through language, the other 80 percent is with our body. However, that doesn’t mean we can just leave this 20 percent, fill that section of communication with nonsense and expect someone else to just focus on the body language. You can’t just say yes to someone and hope they see that your body is screaming no at the same time. But that’s exactly what everyone is doing.

I’m sure I do it too and there is nothing wrong with it, as long as it works. However, when someone doesn't succeed in reading what you meant to say, but didn't actually say, you can't blame them. That’s where we all go wrong.

People are implying almost everything. I’m willing to accept it, I’m willing to adjust my way of thinking to the mainstream. My posts are only to provoke discussion, I like to think about things and I’m sure all of you do that too. But the essence of a discussion is come to an agreement. I think that’s something we all forget.

So, if we continue to imply a lot. If we are going to expect others to read our body language, which is less absolute than our spoken language of course, we should always do it that way. The language we use with our body is easily misinterpreted, easier than words are. We should accept that, and when someone misinterprets our body language, don’t blame them! Stop hiding in a discussion, don’t say: ‘but I never said you should jump off that bridge’. No, maybe your body said so, or maybe it didn’t but the other person read it that way. Accept the haziness of our body. It’s all up to you.”

Oh god, this is boring, isn’t it? I can imagine people skipping most of it, just looking for a sentence in which I make a point. For some reason my thoughts wander to Seth. What would he think if he read this? He read my post about the bible and homosexuality. I scroll to the post. I see 1,312 comments and maybe one of those is his. Shall I read them all (which I already did, I always read every comment I get) in order to find a response that could be his? Chances are he never responded to it, the article was read over 50,000 times and only 1,312 of those readers took the time to respond.

I hear my mom coming upstairs. I quickly close everything on my PC: the blog and Yuri. Both are secrets. She opens my door and just stands there, trying to figure out what to say. I know she is sad, I can feel it. I turn around to face her. Her eyes are wet.

“Hey Adam, what do you think we should have to eat today? I’m flat out of inspiration.”

I didn’t expect that. I expected her to ask for feedback on how she is doing as a single mother, I expected her to ask for my help. I think I expected everything but a simple conversation about dinner.

“We’re alone tonight, your brother left.”

Ah, there it is. “Oh!” Is all I managed to say. I want to ask why he left, but I think there is no real answer to that. They fight a lot and that’s probably normal for a twenty year old boy living with a single parent. Still I think in normal situations those fights are about something; the fights between my mother and my brother are about totally nothing. I can’t even remember what started the fight today and I’m sure they forgot the reason as well. “We can watch a movie together?”

She smiles, but I know it’s fake. She always wants the best for us, but for some reason my brother always finds a way to blame her for something she didn’t really pay attention to. I think my brother believes a single parent has to be able to do the work two parents normally do. I know that is due to his disability, an autistic person is not able to see those things in perspective.

As if she is able to read my thoughts, she says: “You can’t blame him Adam, by tomorrow it will all be fine again”

“I don’t blame him,” I say. That’s true, I blame my father instead. He's the one who left us, he wasn’t able to handle his son and abandoned his obligations totally. He left us all and I hate him for that “He is off to look for dad again?”

She nods.

“He fucking hates dad. Why does he want to find him?”

“He hates me too. He even hates you, though you make it a point to always avoid him. He hates everyone, because he thinks they are out of the ordinary. We don’t think in the same way as he does, so we are weird. Still, he loves us though. Even dad.”

“What movie do you want to see? I will download it.”

She manages to smile again. “I believe you’ll choose a film we’ll both enjoy,” she says and with that, she leaves.

I open my post again. I didn’t post it yet, but I’m sure I’m too tired right now to write another one. So even though I’m reading it over and over, telling myself I will write something else, that this is boring and will lose me subscribers, I know I’m lying. In the end, this will be the post that finds its way to the world wide web.

Deciding what movie to watch isn’t difficult. I choose a movie from Monty Python, because I think my mom needs a good laugh. I don’t even have to download it, I already have everything they ever made on my hard disk. I post the blog and go downstairs.

“You still haven't told me what you want for dinner tonight,” my mother says when I reach her.

“Something we can make together,” I respond with a smile.

“I know I’m not supposed to say this, but I wished Tyde was as homy as you are.”

That evening was pretty enjoyable after all. We made wraps, watched 'The life of Brian' and went to bed early. I couldn’t fall asleep, I was tossing and turning in bed for hours. I remember thinking to myself ‘Not being able to fall asleep is a good excuse to skip the first lessons tomorrow.' I didn’t set an alarm, it was10 AM when I woke up.

I’m looking at the roof. There are little spots on it and for some reason they fascinate me. I’m trying to find patterns between them and I wonder what caused them to appear in the first place. I put on some music and am just enjoying the freedom. Of course I have classes right now and they will probably miss me, but I’ll worry about that in a few minutes. Right now I’m living in the present, school is out of the picture.

Then my mother appears at my door again. “Don’t you have to be in school right now?” she asks.

“I could ask you the same thing,” I say smiling.

“I’ve had a terrible night.” She sits down on the edge of my bed. “I kept wondering where Tyde went. I called in sick this morning.”

“Me too, though I didn’t call in sick. That’s like lying, mom.”

She laughs. “So are you telling me right now that you won’t make up a lie to explain why you are late today? Are you going to accept the sanctions for skipping classes? I know you better than that, Adam.”

“Mom, I’m innocence itself, you know that, right?”

“You’re too good at lying, just like your dad,” she says, forcing a smile. “Don’t abuse that ability, it’ll turn against you sometime. Do you want me to write a letter for school to explain your absence?”

“Yeah, that would be great!”

She leaves me again, so I turn the music up a little louder and try to relax. I spend another half an hour in bed, enjoying the music. I don’t want to get up, I don’t want to go to school. I hate it there. It’s too easy, there's no challenge in the subjects they try to teach me. At least, that’s my excuse for not doing my homework and not going to school. My grades aren’t that good either, but they’re sufficient. Keeping in mind that I’m almost never at school it’s an achievement in itself. Or not? It’s what I keep telling myself anyway.

I walk downstairs and make some breakfast. I don’t know where my mother is at the moment, but I don’t really care. I notice a letter on the counter. It says:

Dear Sir,

Adam will be late for school today (June 9th) due to some family problems. If there is anything else you may need to know after reading this letter, please call me on: 03141592

Thank you for your understanding,

Catherina Rills.

She had signed the letter. After having breakfast I take the letter with me upstairs and rip it apart. I take a piece of paper and a pen and write the exact same letter again, but this time with my own signature. I still make sure I put my mother’s name on it, but this time the signature is mine. At a young age I discovered that my school was trying to find frauds by comparing letters they got from parents with older letters. When the handwriting differed, they would call your parents to check whether the letters were actually written by one of them. So, I decided to write all the letters myself. Whether my mom wrote a letter first or if she doesn’t know about me being absent, the signature will always be mine; it will never differ from older letters. After 5 years doing the same trick over and over, they still haven’t found out.

I make sure the old letter from my mother is completely destroyed and leave the house to go to school. When I attend classes, I find out I didn’t miss a lot. I don’t even bother to ask my friends what I might have missed out on, because it doesn’t matter to me. I’ll think of an excuse if it turns out that I didn’t do the homework I had to.

Luckily my friends didn’t ask me why I wasn’t at school for the first three classes. They didn’t even go on about me leaving early yesterday. So right now I’m in my mathematics class, sitting next to Marc. He is concentrating hard, this subject is his worst. He failed his previous exams and last year the school almost forced him to do a year over. But he scraped through and now he wants to get better grades for math. I don’t blame him and to be honest, I don’t really mind. When he has got his head down like now, I can carefully write some posts for the blog. Of course I’m always anxious when I write in school, I don’t want anyone to find out about it and it goes against all my principles, but this way I do get some posts done. Normally I always keep a backup of posts for when I don’t feel like writing, but that has been happening a lot lately. I posted everything from my backup and now I’m out of ideas.

I missed the first break skipping through all those classes, but I'm here for the second one. For some reason I get the feeling my friends are happy I’m with them. It manages to cheer me up. I’m sitting across from Seth. This wouldn’t have bothered me other days, but after finding out he likes my post and after his concerned looks when I skipped school, I find myself being a little bit nervous around him.

“Samantha is still not in school?” I ask.

“I am,” I hear her saying. I turn around to face her.

“Haven’t seen you this morning, Addy!”

“Yeah, I kinda overslept…”

I see Todd shooting me a quick glance. That's enough for me to know he is going to spoil my excuse. “So Adam, why did I see you handing in a paper this morning at the principal’s office?”

See, just as I foresaw. “That’s none of your business. Were you spying on me?” I smile at him.

“Of course I was. I like seeing you handing in notes, why wouldn’t I?” he responds sarcastically.

I turn back to Samantha. “So Sam, there are two sides to this story, your task is to choose one.”

“I don’t like taking sides and you know that.”

“Alright, but you gotta know I probably won’t show up here tomorrow.” Before she could ask me why, I add: “Appointment at the hospital. Nothing serious, just a check-up.”

This time Todd doesn’t say anything. I’m glad he doesn’t. The rest of the day goes by very quickly and before I’m aware of it, I’m home, sitting behind my desk, scrolling through old posts. I check the email address I created for readers' emails and I see one that immediately gets my attention.

“Anonymous blogger. I need your help to explain to my friends and family why I like reading your posts.”