HONY Part 2
“When Gene was in fifth grade, his teacher stood him up in the front of the class. I forget what he did. Maybe he’d forgotten his homework or something. But she stood him up in front of all the other kids, and said: ‘This is what will happen if you don’t work hard.’ It was devastating. Gene took off running, and they found him several hours later wandering down the highway.
That day will always stand out in my memory as the beginning of Gene’s period of anger. Adolescence is a tough age for any child. But it was especially tough for Gene—because that’s when the world began to progress away from him. His differences became more apparent. Most kids his age were playing sports. Or talking about girls. But Gene would come into my bedroom every night and want to play with Barbies. Or dress up in our mother’s army uniforms. I didn’t have time for that anymore. I was too busy becoming a teenager: going on dates, experimenting with drinking. And Gene resented that. I started to become a symbol for all the things he’d never have.
At some point our little kid fights began to escalate. Gene is very strong in his right arm, because it’s the only one he can use. And he began to push me around. But he was always still Gene. So he’d stop the moment I began to cry. One afternoon I made him especially mad. I was a little brat back then, so I’m sure I said something horrible. Maybe I told him that he couldn’t play with me and my friends. So he began to chase me. I ran inside the house and locked the door behind me. Gene began banging on the glass window. Knowing him-- he was probably terrified I would tell on him. So he pounded the glass so hard that it shattered. I ended up with a small cut—which absolutely destroyed him. When my mother came home she found him sobbing uncontrollably on the floor. He confessed everything. The first thing my mother did was go outside and smoke a cigarette. But when she came back inside, she called us into the living room. We thought for sure we were going to get grounded, but she didn’t seem angry. She seemed worried. ‘Take a seat,’ she told us. ‘Because it’s time for you to know what happened to Gene.’”
