Promise Kept

          I was that kid. You know the one, the little fat fuck with the thick glasses. The one that always dressed funny, and everyone picked on him for it, the last kid to be picked for kickball at recess. Yeah, that kid. The first conversation, actual conversation that I ever had with a girl, I was 15. I had just gotten out of Juvie, and I was just starting my fourth new school. My dad was a drunk, and couldn’t hold a job for more than a month. Either he would be fired for coming to work drunk, or just wouldn’t show up for a week. So when he exhausted the supply of jobs in one small town we would move on to another. If not for my mother, we surely would have starved to death. Or at least been eating out of trashcans. While my dad was out getting drunk, she was working menial jobs for minimum wage, and making sure I went to school. She didn’t want me to have to live like that forever. School was the only answer. She hoped that my grades in high school, when I got there, would be good enough to help me get a scholarship to a good college. At that time, I was actually dreaming of being a doctor.

          As I got older, I began to hate my father. Sometimes I would lie awake at night and wonder what it would be like to kill him. I even knew how I would do it too. I would catch him on one of his particularly bad drinking binges. When he passed out, I would tie his hands and feet up. When he woke up, I would yell at him, “Who is the stupid Fuck now?” When he screamed for me to let him go, I would just laugh in his face. My dad was a smoker, he smoked about 2 packs of Cigarettes a day. I would light up a cigarette and stick it to his skin, savoring the screams. When I was tired of burning him. I would simply put the cigarette out in his eye. Tell him “This is for all the years of fucking me up, you stupid son-of-a-bitch”. After that, I would simply take the .45 he keeps in his night table, and paint the walls of whatever apartment we happened to be living in, with his brains. When it came down to it, it wasn’t exactly like that, but hey I was young.

          My Father didn’t raise so much as a finger to either my mother or me at first, but they say verbal abuse is worse. “Why cant you do anything right you stupid little fuck?” was something I would hear at least once a day. There was also a time I can remember, one of the rare occasions he bought my mother chocolate. I had been helping her eat the box of chocolates, and I offered him one. Do you know what he said to me? You’ll love this, “well it looks like you just about polished the whole box off, no wonder you're so fat.” You know, I had forgotten about that one until just now. I never quite forgave him for that.

          I have been told that if you hear something often enough then you will eventually start to believe it. I guess it is true, because after a while my grades started to suffer. The work was just too hard. That was my excuse anyway. That landed me in slower classes. It was just something else for the “better” kids to pick on me about. Being in the slower classes caused me to become severely bored with school very quickly. That was when I started getting in trouble.

          When I was 12 I got suspended from school for the first time. I had been cheating from a particularly stupid kid, and got caught. I got a failing grade on the test, and three days out of school. Also the first beating I ever received. From that time on I was getting into trouble almost everyday. I kind of enjoyed it I think. I had a teacher once that told me I was only doing it for attention. Maybe he was right, after all negative attention is still attention. Right? I think I was doing it, maybe because I thought it proved I was tough and not scared of anything. I tried to prove that point during my first run in with the cops.

          I was thirteen, and I ended up spending the weekend in jail because my mom just didn’t have the money to bail me out. My dad, well he wouldn’t have gotten me out even if he did have the money. You see by that time he hated me, and wanted me out of the house. Mom was the only reason I stayed. He had been getting steadily worse about his drinking and his temper. I vowed to him if he ever touched her in anger I would kill him and not think twice about it. Promise made. Anyway back to what I was saying I got picked up by the cops I resisted arrest. I was caught shoplifting in a department store. I was trying to get a watch for my mother, not one of the expensive ones they keep locked up, but one of the ones they keep out on the floor that sometimes look expensive. I had no more than gotten the watch in my pocket when I felt a hand fall on my shoulder. It was the security guard. He had been watching me with the cameras that are hidden in the ceiling. He saw what I was doing and came to keep a personal eye on me I guess. When the police arrived and tried to put me in handcuffs, I started throwing punches. I hit the first cop in the mouth and made his lip bleed. The second one I kneed in the balls, mainly because I had always wanted to do that to a cop. Then I tried to run. Turns out the security guard could run a lot faster than me. So in addition to being arrested, I was banned from ever going back into that store. I didn’t get sent up to Juvie that time. I got off with something like 100 hours community service, and a warning. I managed to stay away from the cops for a while after that.

          Later that year I was hanging around in an old abandoned building after school because I didn’t want to go home, and I had no real friends to hang out with. I heard a noise, and went to check it out. I saw two older boys, maybe seventeen or eighteen smoking marijuana. One of them noticed me and alerted his friend. They called me over, and asked me what I was doing in there, I told them that I hang out there everyday, because I don’t want to go home. They asked me if I had ever had “weed,” I told them no, and they offered it to me. Presented with the possibility of making some friends, I took it and put it to my lips. “Suck it into you lungs and hold it,” they told me. I drew some of the smoke into my mouth, and breathed it in. I nearly threw up from coughing so hard, I dropped the joint, and the boys picked it up while almost peeing themselves from laughing at me. I fell to my knees and continued to cough for about five minutes. When I stopped they asked me if I wanted more. To prove that was tough, and cool, and worthy of being their friend I took it again. And this time managed somewhat to stifle the coughs. In about ten minutes, I began to get kind of dizzy, and it became hard to concentrate. Every thing they said and everything around me was so funny, I couldn’t stop giggling. Immediately I was in love with this thing that would eventually get me into big trouble. Every day after school I would go to that building and smoke out with those guys, and every day I was getting more and more hooked on it. I started stealing money from my parents, and sometimes the kids at school. To buy weed with.

          Within six months they had hooked me up with a supplier, and I started selling it to kids at school. It was awesome. I had money to buy whatever I wanted, and all the weed I could smoke. One day about three months after I started selling it, I was behind the school building just about to close a transaction, when a hand fell on my shoulder. “Just what do you think you are doing.” I heard, and my heart dropped to my feet, I was horrified. I knew how illegal weed was, and I also understood that it was worse in a school zone. I could see them standing me up in front of a wall, a line of teachers and parents standing there with M16’s waiting to shoot me for bringing the drugs to their school and children. The principal took me and the kid I was selling to into his office, he called the cops, and our parents. I think I was more worried about what my dad was going to do than cops. I just knew he was going to kill me, just walk into the principal’s office, and blow my head off. Luckily the cops got there first. They questioned me about where I got the drugs from, but I wasn’t going to tell them. Those people that allowed me to sell the drugs for them were the only friends I had, and I wasn’t about to damage that by ratting on them. Since I wouldn’t tell where I was getting the stuff from, I was tried, and convicted of possession with intent to distribute, in a school zone. I got sent to Juvie for a year, and then probation for two years after that. It was kind of a harsh punishment for a 14 year old, don’t you think?

          Juvenile Detention was not a fun place for me. I hated it there, most of the older kids where horrible to me. They picked on me. They got together and beat me up almost every day. Once they beat me so bad I was in the hospital for a week. After that I started to work out and trying to loose weight. I wanted to be able to defend my self. One of the older kids that didn’t beat on me, took me under his wing. He would run with me, and taught me how to fight. I started to fight back effectively, and with in a few months I was one of them.

          If it weren’t for my mom writing to me I wouldn’t have known where they were when I got out. They had moved to another town because my dad couldn’t find work in the town where I was sent up. So I talked to my probation officer, and he allowed me to go live with them, he got me assigned to an officer there. I started school that year about three months late. That is where, as I said earlier, I had my first real conversation with a girl. I had lost a lot of weight while I was away, and since no one from this school knew me when I was fat, it was like starting completely over. Like starting a new life. So I tried to be good and make good grades.

          My first week there was awesome. I made friends, and I met the first girl I ever loved. Her name was Sandra Sims. She was absolutely gorgeous. One of the most popular girls in school, she was on the cheerleading team. Even though I was thin, and moderately well liked that girl wouldn’t even look at me. I was completely smitten with her. She was tall for a girl, about 5’10”, and dark skinned. She had long perfectly shaped legs, topped off with the most perfect heart shaped ass I have ever seen. Her stomach was flat and firm, her breasts weren’t huge, but nice. Her eyes were the deepest blue, and she had high cheekbones. Her strawberry blonde hair always down, hung around her shoulders. Sometimes I could imagine that her hair was actually a halo that she wore for all to see.

          After about three weeks I worked up the courage to go up and ask her for a date. She was standing in a group of her friends when I walked up. They all turned to look at me with expressions that seemed to say “how dare you walk up to us like you are good enough.” I nervously stumbled through my question. She looked at me with pity, and something that resembled disgust. And said “ I wouldn’t go out with you if you were the last man on earth” then they all laugh at me and turned away. I took that hard. I spent the rest of the day wondering just what in the hell I had thought I was doing, I didn’t even go to school the next day. When I did go back to school, I could feel all of the other kids there watching me walk by and laughing when I passed. I tried to become as small as I could that week, and avoid large groups of people. The situation went away almost as quickly as it started. Two months later a new girl started. Carley was pretty, not like Sandra by any stretch of the imagination, but pretty. I bumped into her in the hall, and she asked me how to get to her history class, I walked her to it. I introduced myself, and I told her I understood what she felt like I had only started a few months earlier. She and I hit it off right away, and immediately started talking. We started getting together after school, and studying. We always went to her house though, because I didn’t want to subject her to my father.

          One night when I came home from Carley’s house I found my mother lying in the living room floor. She was still breathing, but barely. Her left eye was swollen shut, blood clotted in her nostrils and on her lips, and it looked as if her right arm was broken. I was filled with a rage I had never known before, or since. I found him passed out naked on their bed, with her blood still drying on his bare chest, and knuckles. His day had finally come. I cut the power cords off of the two lamps in the living room, which were useless now anyway because they had been broken in the struggle. I tied his hands and feet to the posts of the bed. I wasn’t worried about him waking so I tied them as tight as I could. Then I waited.

          While I was waiting for him to wake up and discover he couldn’t move, I got things prepared. I got a sharp knife from the kitchen, a washcloth, and a roll of duct tape. I also checked to be sure that the pistol had bullets in it. I knew it would, but I had to be sure. With these few supplies gathered, I turned my attention to my mom. I picked her up, carried her out to the car, and laid her in the back seat. I took her to the emergency room. The doctors asked what happened, and I told them my dad had beaten her. They wanted us to file a police report. They called the cops. When the cops arrived I told them that I came home from my girlfriends and found her in the living room floor, but that he was nowhere around. The truth mixed with a little lie, it served my purpose. The doctors wanted to admit my mother for the night for observation, so I went back home without her.

          The house was just as dead quiet when I got there as it was when I left. I didn’t really expect him to be awake yet, but I had hoped maybe he would be. I was content to wait for him to stir though. Around 2 o’clock in the morning he came around. Groggily he tried to get up, and discovered he couldn’t. He suddenly came more awake and noticed me sitting in a chair watching him.
“What the fuck do you think you're doing?” he asked. “Why'd you tie me up you, little shit?”
“What did you do it for?” I asked him calmly.
“Do what?” he replied.
“Why did you beat mom?”
“Oh that,” he said with a ghost of a smile flitting across his lips, “did the bitch die?” My rage flared to a new, more frightening level. I briefly thought I never even knew I could get this angry. I jumped from the chair I had been sitting in and slammed my fist into his mouth. He looked up at me with a bloody grin and said, “You’re big now huh? Just untie me, and we will settle this like men.”
“ I don’t think so, you are now going to pay for all you have put us though, you son-of-a-bitch!” I hissed through clenched teeth. With that I picked up the washcloth and the duct tape. I forced his mouth open, and shoved the cloth in. Then wrapped the duct tape around his head twice to hold it in. The games had begun.

         I stood beside him looking down, and thought for an instant I saw fear in his still drunken eyes. But it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. I set to work. I took the knife, and started on his stomach just above his hips, and cut just deep enough to lay the skin open but not disturb the soft organs underneath. I cut all the way up his chest, when I got to his rib cage, I cut to the left, and right just like the pericardial incision a coroner uses. He fought the cords binding his hands to the bed, pulling and kicking trying to free himself. I could hear him screaming, but with the gag in his mouth it was more like a muffled hum than a scream. Suddenly the struggle stopped I looked up from what I was doing, he had passed out. I stopped, and went to sit in the chair waiting for him to wake up, I had all night if need be.

         Over the next couple of hours I made incisions all over his body. I patiently waited for him to wake each time he passed out from the pain. I was enjoying the screams as much as I thought I would when I was younger. I moved to the bottom of the bed, and surveyed the scene, Blood was everywhere. The bed was a solid mass of red. It was all over my face and upper body. He had lost a lot of blood, and his screams were getting weaker, and weaker. I was quite surprised, and pleased that he had only passed out three of four times. I picked up the .45 caliber pistol, and aimed it at his face. There was no mistaking the terror in his eyes now. It showed naked and unrestricted. As weak as he was, his screams got a little louder for a brief moment just before I pulled the trigger, the report was deafening. Promise kept.

         Finished with my work, I went and called Carley even though it was almost 5 o’clock in the morning. I had to tell her that I wouldn’t be able to see her anymore. When she asked why all I said was to watch the news, and she would know. Finished with my phone call I went to sit in the living room and wait for the cops. I was certain that one of the neighbors, or maybe all of them had called the cops after hearing the shot.

         My trial was quick, I pled guilty, and they sent me to a psychiatrist to determine if I needed to be locked in a hospital. The answer came back no that I was as stable as anyone, minus that one incident. So given my criminal history I was sentenced to 15 years. The first part of the sentence was to be served in Juvenile detention, until I turned 21, and then be transferred to a state penitentiary. So here I am. I am to be released tomorrow; it will be good to be out.