Ace in a Hole|Chemical X Trilogy (Book II)

Conflicting Loyalties

"I love you."

I smiled and maybe just a little bit sadly.

Mom kissed me before she left. She worked like a normal person, duh, but it was not her leaving that got me. It was the fact that I couldn't bring myself to hug her back.

I waved nicely enough, but I couldn't get myself to say, "I love you too." I didn't know why. It's not like it wasn't true.

Or wasn't it?

If I said I loved her, would it be a lie? If Ace was still gang leader, I wouldn't be here for her to say "I love you" to. I agreed to be good, to do my schoolwork, to clean my room, to watch the apartment, not to eat up the ice cream bars, and even to not answer the door to strangers even if I had to roll my eyes at the last one. I said a perfect "Yes, Mom," to each one without sighing, without sarcasm. Clean and simple, but "I love you too"?

I could sure tell she was bursting at the seams whenever she said it to me, and she had probably said it a million times by now. I swelled with those words. You could call it the swell of love. I didn't know. Or just the swell of emotions. Guilt was on the top of the list.

She deserved too much and went through too much to have her own son say a lie like he loved her. No woman was as tortured as she was, I felt. My heart even went out to her, and that was why I couldn't say it. It didn't feel right. Well, honestly, none of this really felt right. It was some kind of limbo or half-dream that I would wake from and not know whether it was a dream I liked or disliked, but it was worth a moment to think about before moving on.

I had been home there about two weeks now. I had to admit I sure missed having a room to myself. Food always there for me. A mom who really did care about me. Why was it I resented all those things? Sure we weren't the richest or the most confident or anything like that, but I had this. It was still weird facing this fact that I liked it here. But if I liked it, why was I unhappy?

I felt... empty once the door shut like the house had suddenly become as empty as I was.

Well, I guess I wasn't thrilled about schoolwork. But hey, my mom was awesome enough to let me do online school to catch up rather than sending me three grades behind my age group. I don't know if Ace lied about never going to school in his life. I had always kind of doubted it even at the weirdest of times, but I knew I sure lied about it. I'd been to school even if I did play hooky on and off chasing after tougher people than myself before running into Ace. I'd always been like that. Trying to prove I wasn't weak. Trying to be cool.

Though I was trying to think about algebraic baby steps and happy I wasn't in a classroom for a whole class to watch me clumsily bumble along, my mind wandered too quickly with all this nostalgic atmosphere around me day after day.

My comics. My posters. I'd had wanted to play basketball once. That happened. Not. Not enough money or time to get me to the practices and games. I played in the alleys with other kids like me. Got bored of that, especially since the best player for some reason just was annoyed by my existence. Could he have sensed my inner snake? Either way it made playing not fun. Started wandering.

#

"Hey, you're pretty good aim, kid!" said Ace.

Even then I knew he had to be the same age as me. Eleven. Twelve.

I jumped, not realizing that someone had been watching me breaking bottles on the fence with an old dog-chewed tennis ball. It wasn't my fence, you see. The bottles were from someone's recycling bin. The ball belonged to Atlas, the neighbor's dog.

Blinking at this confident, lazy, sneering figure leaning against a flowerbed parapet thing, I felt myself shrink self-consciously. I had seen him before. I had watched him and his friends climb along fences to put dead bugs into people's laundry pockets drying and popping kids' bike tires while they were actually riding them and putting boxes casually in front of old ladies pushing carts of groceries to their home. I shivered at how wrong it all was. I envied them.