Kyle’s Story 2: Problems with Similes and Smiles

Yet, money, privilege, and his mansion, that was Kyle’s life. It was all he knew. He’d grown up in a mansion with marble floors polished to the sheen of a frozen lake. He’d grown up eating catered meals. He’d grown up sprinting, feet pumping through infinite, winding hallways, climbing up and down double staircases. He’d grown up in a house that had an elevator, and a private elevator, too, for anyone who didn’t feel like walking up the stairs.

He’d swim whenever he wanted, in the indoor or outdoor pools, and he’d played hide and seek with his sister in the multitude of rooms.

Some of his favorite memories were zipping around in his red mini-Lambo, the little electric car that he’d ride around the house and estate grounds.

It was paradise for a kid, having that much space to play, that much space for his imagination to run wild.

He couldn’t remember a Christmas when he didn’t get exactly the gifts he wanted. It really was all he knew, that sort of life.

But it’s not that way anymore ... It would probably never be that way again, and he wasn’t sure what to think about it, aside from guilt about his anger and anger about his guilt. His ugly paradox of lost privilege.

And recently he’d been ruminating, raging with an increasingly disturbing frequency.

Sitting into a mauve lounge chair in the lobby, his lips quiver. He’s silently fuming, telepathically violent. He wonders why his parents can’t be normal. Why he couldn’t have been a normal kid. Why couldn’t his dad just have worked in an office? His dad was never around when he was growing up. He was always off playing football. Football, football, football. Everything orbited around football. His dad’s schedule, his dad’s diet, his dad’s mood. It was football. Football and football.

And it was football that made his dad look and walk like Frankenstein. Why did his dad have to be Frankenstein? Why?

And why couldn’t his mom look, well, more, like, maybe a mom, instead of an aging Playboy playmate, or something from a MILF porn video ... He couldn’t even count how many jabs he’d heard from classmates, growing up, about his “red-hot” mom. Really, although practically every kid in his school had a pretty mom, and there were plenty of trophy wives in his neighborhood, his mom rose above them all.

Maybe this was because she actually WAS a Playboy Playmate, his mom. Yuck!!! Why?! Why couldn’t millions of creepy guys NOT have seen his mom naked. Yuck! Yuck! And triple yuck!

Truth be told, Kyle has always secretly hated his mother. He despises her as a person. She pays him scant attention. Despite everything, everything he’s done for her, such as fixing her computers, fixing her phones, helping her friends with every tech need, despite all of that, Kyle never feels truly appreciated. He’s just her IT Boy. He’s not even a person. He’s a tool. A thing to be used and discarded. That’s what he thinks of his mother. She’s a taker. She’s a user.

His mother is vapid. She’s an empty, soulless bitch, and he hates everything about her. He detests her sickening, shrill voice, a voice that reminds him of a sharp object being pulled over glass.

He hates her appearance, too, and thinks she looks like a blowup sex doll. He hates how she walks, how she arches her body, with her breasts thrown forward and butt held high, and her inappropriate, downright slutty clothes. He hates how waxy and artificial she looks in her heavy whore makeup and he hates her whorish perfume. Its pungency makes him sick. She makes him sick. But he’d never say any of this to anyone IRL. He and his friends online all hate their mothers. Kyle hates anyone who doesn’t hate their mother.

Kyle doesn’t voice too many opinions. He keeps things bottled up. He keeps quiet. He’s nondescript. He’s not very noticeable. He’s got one of those faces that look like a million other faces. He’s a generic White person. He’s not ugly or handsome. He’s bland as the background of a restaurant scene in a movie. He just looks like an extra.

The only thing that was ever noticeable about him is his head. He’s got a small head for his body. His neck is long too. A bit too long. The kids in elementary school would joke that he looks like a bird, with his long neck and small head. Or like one of those long neck village people in Asia somewhere. Or they’d joke that a witch doctor had shrunk his head. So later he’d grown his hair long, to his shoulders, to hide his head and neck. And it’d worked. Nowadays he is normal looking. He’s so normal that he’s practically invisible.