Because That's How Jack Chose It — Chapter 3 — Uncle and Aunt
He'll call them Uncle and Aunt. Jack threw the real names away on purpose.
Nobody ever asked. So he never told. Now he tells it — laughing, the only way he'll do it.
I'll call them Uncle and Aunt. The real names I threw out on purpose and I'm not going to dig them out of the trash now just to make the telling pretty.
I lived in that house from two to five. Three years. In a kid's head, three years is a whole lifetime.
The first thing that hit me was the noise.
Kids. Lots of kids. That wasn't a house — it was an old two-story pile, full of rooms, with a hallway that creaked and a staircase nobody trusted. Almost an orphanage, except with nobody even pretending they were going to take care of you. I don't know how many kids lived there. More than you could count in your head, and the number kept changing.
I was the youngest when I got there. I grew up in the middle of it.
It took me a while to figure out the scheme, because I was too little. But it got clear.
Every kid in that house was money at the end of the month. Every head was worth a cut of aid, of benefits, of help for a "large family". Uncle and Aunt had set up a little livestock operation of small humans, and we were the herd.
The money that was supposed to feed us came in and evaporated. Went into their pockets, into booze, into whatever. We got the bare minimum to stay on our feet — because a kid who's too skinny draws attention, and drawing attention was bad for business.
Food there was rationed like it was controlled medication.
There was a time, a portion, an owner. Going without was normal. I learned things at that empty table that I still carry: that water fools hunger for about forty minutes, that you can sleep with your stomach hurting if you curl up the right way, that the trash from certain places has usable stuff if you get there before the others.
Heavy curriculum for someone who couldn't count to ten yet.
And there was the beating.
I won't give details, because beating details are boring to read, and you've already seen me take a beating from Brock in that annex (main story, ch. 3). Take that, remove the crowd, remove the comeback, shrink it down to a three-, four-year-old, and multiply by the number of days. There. You've got the picture without me drawing it.
The worst part wasn't even the pain. It was that you couldn't predict it. A good day and a bad day wore the same clothes, and you only found out which was which when it was already too late. That messes with your head in a way the pain alone doesn't.
We weren't kids in that house. We were numbers.
Nobody knew my birthday. Nobody knew what I liked. I was a line on a spreadsheet, and my job was to keep breathing so I wouldn't ruin the count on the day the caseworker showed up — then, sure, there was decent food on the table, and Aunt talked in a soap-opera voice, and everybody smiled for the photo.
The caseworker left and the food left with them.
And there was the basement.
By day we were numbers for the photo. By night there was the basement, with a door that stayed locked while the sun was up. When it got dark, it opened, and the older kids went down. Over time the younger ones went down too. I went down.