Chapter 2: Three Months to Go

Terry

Just three more months! Three more months of snubs, three more months of derisive remarks behind my back, but loud enough for me to hear. I know, I shouldn’t care. Next fall I’ll be attending Penn, and Adam Quonsett Academy will lie in my past, soon to be forgotten. Penn doesn’t hand out scholarships, but I won’t need them. My sperm donor left me enough, and my grades are good enough to get in. My social activity record is a bit thin, but I was a junior volunteer firefighter in my hometown, and that must have helped.

Well, first things first: I am Terence Weaver. My mom, Lydia Weaver, was a young nurse trainee in my sperm donor’s office when he got her drunk and took her cherry. He was sloshed, too, and forgot to put on a rubber or at least pull out, and nine months later, yours truly entered the world as the illegitimate son of Dr. Jerome Hamilton, MD, PhD. Good old Jerry was quite loaded, making his money with knee and hip replacements, and he had to pay mom maintenance and support. Mom was a good one, but when I was seven, we had a minor collision at a downtown intersection. I was securely ensconced in a kiddie seat, but Mom, ever in a rush, had not buckled up for the half mile to another store, and she suffered a fatal head injury. My memory of her is getting hazy already, but I have a few photographs to refresh it once in a while. The child support money was then managed by mom’s attorney, the trustee for her estate, and I was placed in foster care.

The Williams, my foster parents, were thrifty, and they socked away a large part of the payments coming from Jerry Hamilton, making me live frugally instead and making me wear the clothes left by their former foster kids. They also made me the laughing stock in school with my hand-me-down clothes. For nine years, I had not a single piece of new clothing. I had never even been in a clothing store of any kind. What they had was a shitload of books on any subject under the sun and from all genres, all bought in bulk at estate yard sales, often together with my “new clothes”. You could say that I became a bookworm because of that.

Gary Williams, my foster father, also gave me fighting lessons after I turned ten, first wrestling grapples, then graduating to hand-to-hand combat strikes. He did it well, being a retired Army drill sergeant and Desert Storm vet, but he also taught me judgement, when to use what level of force and such. Very valuable.

Since the Williams were living off their three foster kids and Gary’s pension, he was at home a lot, making sure I did my homework and reading assignments. He was also a handyman extraordinaire, and I learned many useful skills apart from making the jerks who gave me grief cry.

When I turned sixteen, two things happened. First, Gary was fixing a leak in the roof when he slipped and fell. He had a bad landing in the junk which he kept in the yard and snapped his neck. It was horrible. Janice, his wife, went off the rails after that. We hadn’t known that Gary had kept her from boozing, but now she was out of control. As the oldest in the household, I found the youth services office after school and gave them the beef.

I also collected my courage and visited to the offices of Mister James Wheeler, Esq., mom’s attorney, who in turn alerted Dr. Hamilton of my situation. Since Jerry’s other son had gone off the rails, too, and joined Club Fed for a nickel on a possession with intent charge, Old Jerry had the brain wave to take custody of the other male fruit of his loins and had me enrolled in his old prep school, Quonsett, as a boarder. Gee, thanks, Dad!

As quickly as he started to notice me, he forgot me again, and here I was, with the clothing sense my foster parents had instilled in me. They had not raised me to attend a private boarding school, either. In the first days, I naively told another student about my family situation, and before that day was over, I was the Bastard to everybody.

Then, a year ago, good old Jerry had one too many drams of 12-year-old Bunnahabhain, his favourite, and keeled over, smack-dab in the middle of a surgeons convention, and not even a dining hall full of sawbones could resuscitate him. Of course, the bastard son was not invited by his real family to the big funeral, which included his convict oldest son, out on parole, but Mister Wheeler filed the requisite claims, and I got what was my due, inflating my trust fund inordinately. I have a healthy allowance now, but still no clothing sense, and I am still standing on the bottom rung of Quonsett’s social ladder, not that I give a shit anymore, with a little over three months left in senior class.

Mister Wheeler, the attorney, also got me emancipated, and that allowed me to become a day student at Quonsett, living off-campus in an efficiency apartment during my senior year and escaping my fellow students after the last bell every day. This made things a little easier for me, but my social life is still non-existent. Hell, even the fire department here didn’t want me, with my qualifications from out of state. You might think that with an apartment of my own close to school, I would be included a little more. Not so. The A-listers in my class had decreed me to be an untouchable, scorned and ostracised, and things remained as they were at school.

Edwin Pennington (the third, of course) is my main bane, constantly harping on my bastard epithet, and being the son of a shady but apparently well-heeled developer, he’s surrounded by enough sycophants to make it stick. Mary-Rose Carpenter is another nemesis, jealously defending her position as the valedictorian-to-be, and putting me down at every turn. Elroy Warden, another privileged prick, had found it funny once to kick me in the knees from behind when I was carrying my lunch tray. That I had used him for wiping up the mess from the cafeteria floor secured his hatred against me and also made Sarah Wilcox my enemy. The girl had an unrequited crush on Elroy. Of course, Elroy and I both got detentions, a week for Elroy and two for me, showing me exactly where I stood with the principal.