Malcolm in the Middle: one-shots

Where Are They Now?: Francis

I finally let Mom find out that I had that good job at Amerisys Industries, because I couldn't let her stay mad at me for the rest of my life. I decided to stop holding a grudge against how Mom treated me growing up, because her anger towards me was all my fault.

I enjoyed getting into trouble and making my parents angry because it was the only way I felt like I could win at life because I disliked people having power over me, and my impulsivity led me to ride in cars when I was well underage (I locked Mom out of a car when I was five), set my mom's friend Jenny's car on fire just because I could, leaving her to get engulfed in the flames herself (and I defended myself by saying that it wasn't even our car), and then get sent to military school to help me learn about responsibility, which didn't help me improve at all.

I hated military school because though I had friends there, Commandant Spangler was even stricter than Mom ever was, which made me realize that I didn't have it so bad after all, as much as I liked to tell my classmates that I did, and because of him, I looked for every excuse to try to get back home, cause mischief, or go somewhere else where I could be on my own. However, when my best friend at the school, Eric, told me he was going off to Alaska to work at a logging camp that, according to him, paid a lot of money, more than any other job I could possibly get as a high school dropout, I was intrigued and decided to go up there, hitchhiking most of the way. Of course, Mom and Dad didn't take well to the news, because they predicted that I would be disappointed, and I was so mad at their disapproval that I legally emancipated myself so I wouldn't have to deal with their nagging and then live my life the way I wanted to.

I realized that my parents were right soon enough, because though Eric was there and so was a beautiful woman named Piama, who I ended up marrying in a ceremony I didn't tell my parents about, I had a very strict boss named Lavernia who kept taking money out of my limited pay for pointless reasons and the work got tedious after a while. After the logging camp closed because there were no trees left, me and Piama drove across the country to look for something new, and eventually, we found a ranch in New Mexico where my boss, Otto, was very patient with me and I started to turn my life around and be more responsible.

It was a great experience with good pay and people who actually cared about me and forgave my mistakes, but after a misunderstanding involving an ATM, I was fired from the ranch and I started to regress into the careless person that I was just as I was about to get sent to military school. I didn't have a job, or at least not one that stuck, and I lived in a very dingy apartment with noisy neighbors for those few years.

However, when Malcolm and Reese were about to graduate high school, I had been working at Amerisys for two months and loved it, but I didn't want Mom to get proud of me, so I spent several months afterwards lying that I was a free spirit who was still looking for a job when I had lots of money that I didn't waste, a much nicer apartment, and a beautiful wife who was pregnant with our first child.

Eventually, I told Mom the truth (Dad already knew because he saw my employee badge fall on the floor), and after she apologized for how often she had lost her patience with me growing up, I decided to buck up and apologize myself for everything I had done to make her lose her patience. She was trying her best to make me stay out of trouble, but all those years, I took her for granted because I thought she was just being an all-out bully since she always yelled and made threats, so I kept trying to make her more and more angry to show her that I could control my own life. I was the one who brought this on, and I don't know why it took me over twenty years to see it.

In 2007, me and Piama had our first child, a daughter named Mackenzie. Mom wasn't happy about becoming a grandmother at first, but got used to it, while Dad responded by crying because not only was this good news, but because he felt like he was getting old and he and Mom had just welcomed another baby themselves. I felt proud to have a child that was my own, and it was the same feeling of pride that I had with my job and the time when I helped Mom deliver Jamie (the paramedics couldn't come and I already had practice in giving birth with the animals at the ranch).

Piama stayed at home to raise Mackenzie while I worked, but in 2008, the recession happened and I reluctantly got fired from my job, so it was difficult for us to get food on the table and pay the bills for a little bit, though we spent all our time that wasn't taken up with Mackenzie's care looking for jobs, though there were very few positions to fill, let alone job ads. Eventually, Piama found a job and I found one not long after that allowed me to work from home so I could take care of Mackenzie without having to pay someone else, so we were able to overcome this, but still, those few months were very hard for us.

We had our second child, a son named Hal, in 2009, and by this time, Mackenzie was two years old and was a very destructive child, much like I was at that age. Our attempt at childproofing the house didn't work because some of the child locks were faulty anyway, but I tried (and am still trying) my very best to make sure she and Hal wouldn't turn out like I did, though they like to slip under the radar sometimes when we're not looking.

Currently, I am still working in data entry, but at another firm that pays much better, and Mackenzie and Hal are fifteen and thirteen, respectively, so they're always looking for ways to sneak out and get out of doing chores, which I don't tolerate and Piama, who has as much of a temper as Mom sometimes, tolerates even less. Being a father, especially to teenagers, is hard sometimes, and to be honest, I still don't know how Mom and Dad did it without sending all of us to military school.