THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: HOMEWORK

When we moved to the old house, that's when I found out there were ghosts, but not like scary ghosts. Mom said this was it, the end of the line buddy before I was packed off somewhere just like dad used to threaten. Back before he didn't say anything anymore. If you're unlucky, sometimes people get sick, was all mom usually said about him. When she was drunk she'd say it different, she'd say: If you're lucky sometimes people die.  

We weren't lucky. The first rule about being unlucky is it's expensive. It was me, baby Tom, and mom, and that was it. We never went to visit dad anymore. It was better to pretend he was already gone.

Before all that I was the problem. I didn't have it in me to follow the rules. Everything everyone told me seemed stupid and pointless. Like a big dance everyone was going on and on about for no reason. I just couldn't do it. Two weeks before dad got sick, after Yardley called me a loser, I picked up a hard clay mug in arts and bounced it off his head. I spilt his head open and there was a lot of blood, but I didn't care. Then I told Ms. Crawfey to go fuck herself. And I told Father Ron to go fuck himself. And I told my mom to go fuck herself.

I got kicked out of school and it looked like I was going to be sent away, and then this reset happened. You know those things you wish might happen. A wish to fix some thing. Well then, dad went into the hospital. Mom got a job, and we moved out of our house and downtown to the apartment. This all just seemed to happen around me. I didn't do anything. I just went from place to place like people said to do. 

We were shoved upstairs in what they called an apartment, which was only the upstairs den, a bedroom, the turret and the bathroom. Adelaide, the woman that lived downstairs was kind enough not to talk to us at all. And so we lived like that. Quiet and asleep. School and the house and the supermarket. Homework and keeping baby Tom while mom worked and chat rooms.

I set up my computer in the garret, which mom called my "office" and that's where I'd go when mom got home and after dinner, because she drank then and said shitty stuff. Anyway, it was the only place I could be alone. Or...mostly alone. Sometimes it felt like someone was up there with me, but it wasn't a bad feeling. Not really. It felt like someone watching me. A teacher. Someone glancing over my shoulder ready to help me if I needed it.

And that's how I found I could leave my homework up there in the garret and return to find it done the next day. Done strange. But done. I found this out only out of laziness. My surprise wasn't that big a deal. Instead, I just went along with it. I got a couple of looks from my teachers, and a few strange comments. But I just went along with it.

There was a rat that lived in the garret, too. A big one. I saw it three or four times, but it stayed out of the light and seemed to have a way into the wall.     

And sometimes I thought I heard a voice.

Once, it said "boy," and another time, "a clever machine." It was a little voice. A quiet one. One that came and went so fast that I was almost always not sure I'd heard it at all.

But I still went up there to chat on AOL. It didn't bother me, really. It wasn't scary.  

And it was like, a year or something of doing that, with mom drinking downstairs and the TV on, and me up in the garret that I heard the voice clear for the first time. It was high, and uneven, and winded, but it said, clear:

"This machine that works sums. Can you show me the truth of it?"

I didn't care who it was up there with me, really. I'd been doing this for a year or more, right? Ghosts didn't kill people. Ghosts don't have to be scary.  

Sure, I said, whatever, man.