Hall & Oates [NaNoWriMo Fail]

Adult Education

prompt 2: in which a character has to introduce themselves to a large group of people

Oates/Four Years Before

I have five moms, count 'em, five.

Mom Numero Uno was a bus driver or a waitress or some other job that's dire but insignificant. She worked a lot, so I was always at the next door neighbors' house or the across the street neighbors' house. The one thing that I remember about her is her hair, it was red and chopped off at her shoulders and I would always wonder how any color could be so bright. She died in a fire when I was three, but I still say that she is my mom. Using present tense takes a bit of the guilt away.

When I turned seven Mom Two and Mom Three came into the picture. I'm pretty sure that my social worker described them to me as an "awesome lesbian couple" and that statement turned out to be perfectly valid. Mom Two spoke three languages and had lived in six countries throughout her lifetime. Our house was always decorated with cool trinkets and keepsakes and it made us all seem cultured (though it only pertained to her). Mom Three made all of her own clothes (and some of mine), they looked even better than those sold in stores. But we would always go to the park on Saturdays and watch cartoons together, and I think that's what I remember most about the three of us.

They broke up when I turned 11; then Mom Two met a lady named Paula and Mom Three met a lady named Jessie and I had enough moms to start a basketball team (ya know, as long as ghosts were allowed to join the team).

Being a foster child has taught me one very important lesson: stay out of the way, people like you more when you're not in the way. So I was always the quiet kid, the kid that kept to himself and read books and never bothered anyone. In the last foster home (the final one before I met the Awesome Lesbian Couple), another kid named Terry asked why I always did what everyone told me to do. I told him that I didn't want to bother anyone, and his solution was to take the Superman action figure that my first mom got me for my second birthday. So I hit him so many times in the face that I broke my hand. This taught me that even when you stay out of people's way, you sometimes end up in their way which might lead to breaking your hand on their face, which leads to anger management groups.

Anger wasn't my only problem. Somewhere between breaking my hand and middle school, I'd become an asshole.

We sat in an oblong circle of groaning foldable chairs, waiting impatiently for Phil to get things started. Some people were there because they'd been instructed by their schools, or by a judge, or by their parents and some were there to testify about Phil's "amazing instruction" and what it had done for them. Phil had been instructing me for six years and I still hadn't passed, so he definitely wasn't that great.

The meetings were held in the basement of some community center on the other side of town. The basement smelled like mildew and the paint on the walls chipped at a tremendous rate. Aside from the circle of angry adolescents, it looked like an old, abandoned room

He finally stood and clasped his hands together, smiling at everyone in the room. "Welcome to Anger Management, I'm Phil Collins your instructor. Let's begin by stating why we're all here today."

It started on the right side of the circle and people explained how they'd thrown chairs across classrooms and thrown butcher knives at walls and leveled three bedroom apartments and whatnot. I always found it a little weird that the people with the shortest fuses always look just like everyone else. Like, you'd never know that the kid with the pocket protector is the same kid that punches walls.

When it came time for me to introduce myself I said, "I'm Gabriel and I'm here because I broke my hand on someone's face. It was actually pretty cool in hindsight, so I regret nothing." And then everyone stared at my very un-broken hand.