I walk into my house and drop my backpack by the front door, sighing as I flip the lights on. "Dad?" I yell. No reply. Either he's at work, or out. I walk into the kitchen and grab an apple off the counter. I go out the back door and stand in the backyard, crunching into the sweet red fruit. My yard is the smallest in the town, suitable for a family in a suburban area, not the country. I go back inside and turn on the tiny little TV. There's nothing on the few channels that we get. I turn it back off and walk up to my room. With so little do, it's a struggle being a slacker. "Thomas?" my dad yells as the front door slams closed. I run downstairs. "Hi, dad." My dad looks at me, "Oh, good, you're home. I'm going out for the night. You want me to call a friend so you can stay with them?" I sigh, "No."
"Alright then, you can stay home by yourself, right? Of course you can, you're seventeen." He waves as he walks back toward the front door, "See ya, son!" The front door slams for the second time in that minute. Angry, I grab my car keys from the counter and go out in the driveway, where I can already see my dad speeding away. I get into my beat up old pick-up truck and pull out of the driveway. If only I had friends to stay with.
My dad and I live alone in our small house and my dad is never home. He didn't used to be gone so often. He used to care about me...about where I went, what I ate, who I hung out with, my grades. Not anymore. Not since my mom died. I pull into the school parking lot after driving around the town for quite a while, listening to music and doing absolutely nothing else. I get out of my car, locking it and walking with my hands in my pockets toward the locked gate. I stare at it, into the school, and wonder how it came to this: the most entertaining thing to do being visiting my school at 8 PM, in the pitch black. I kick the gate, anger swelling up inside me, and fall onto the ground, leaning against the gate and using every ounce of my strength to persist myself from screaming. Everyone seems to think life is so easy for me. They thin that every day, I go home, hang out with some random partiers from out of town, and don't have a care in the world because I have a wagonload of money to fall back on. This story spread when I was in about eighth grade, and nobody got it out of their head, not even Venice Taily, the only person who seems to at least tolerate me. Where they came up with it, I'll never know. All I know is that it's as far from the truth as a story could possibly be.
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