But as desperately as Adrien wanted that to be true, defying his mother felt like a complete impossibility.No matter how hard he wanted things for himself, or wished his world to be a certain way, Joyce hovered between his reality and his happiness like some dark, unmovable specter.Her presence was enough to tear him from Marcos and everything that he had promised Adrien.
It wasn’t that Adrien and Marcos loved each other any less.Marcos was overloaded with obligations to the soccer team and his sports medicine classes.Adrien had to take on a second job after his mom managed to get fired from Mervyn’s during a drunken altercation with a customer.It was getting harder to balance romance on top of everything else, and his mom was starting to get suspicious about the letters.If it weren’t for Jessica storing them beneath her mattress, his mom would have found them all.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Adrien told her when she showed him the letters’ new location.Jessica shrugged.
“You’d have done it for me.”
The breakup letter was inevitable, but it destroyed Adrien all the same.He was too bogged down by expectations to put any thought into what he wanted for himself.
1996
Before long he found himself in his second semester of college.He was in the bathroom shaving one morning when he caught the tail end of one of Jessica’s arguments with their mother.
“—because I’m not letting you out of this house dressed like a hussy, you little slut!”his mom screamed.
“Oh gag me with a spoon!”his sister shouted back.
“Stop fighting!”David cried over the din.“All you ever do is scream and fight!Ihate it here!”
“Then run away!”His mother snarled.“One less mouth for me to feed, you ungrateful shit!”
“Asif!”Jessica snapped.“All you do is sit on your ass drinking Adrien’s money away!It’salwaysbeen that way!You treat him like crap and what does he do to stop it?Nothing.I’m not letting you treat me like him!I’m better than that, Ideservebetter than that!”
Adrien flinched, setting down his razor.He cupped a handful of water out of the sink and splashed his face clean.
Was that really how his sister saw him?
He wandered out of the bathroom in a daze, not even bothering to interrupt the screaming match to say goodbye.Usually he’d at least comfort David and make sure he had something to tide him over until dinner, but Adrien would much rather avoid his mother’s wrath altogether.He was too tired.
The trip to campus was a blur.He arrived at his philosophy class, sat down close to the window, and stared down at his desk without really seeing.The professor came in and began lecturing, but his voice was all but lost to Adrien under the din of his thoughts.
Adrien looked out the window, peering over the townhouses and apartment towers at Park Merced.He had a shift delivering pizza after this, then it was right to stocking shelves at Safeway, and then who knew what time it would be before he got home and managed to get his reading done for classes tomorrow and—
The clarity of the notion struck him like a bell:
Fuck this.
At this rate, between classes and work and pleasing his mother there would never,everbe enough time forhim.There would be no art, no more friends like Erika, no love.There would be no one else in the future like Marcos.
He was an adult now.Why shouldn’t he take a little for himself?He could still go to school and work two jobs to support his siblings, but it would be for a degree he wanted, rather than the one his mom wanted for him.Ifshewanted the damn business degree she could very well go get it herself.
He didn’t give himself time to think.He stood up, left class, marched to the student registrar, and dropped out.
2002
“It wouldn’t have been like this if you’d stayed at State.”
Her words haunted him.
But his transferring to City College hadn’t killed her liver, hadn’t given her lung cancer.It wasn’t his fault that she was going through chemo while he and Jessica scrambled to pay off her medical debts on top of the ever-increasing cost of bills.It hadn’t made David drop out of high school and refuse to come out of the bedroom most days.
Adrien could have gone to Texas if his mother hadn’t tearfully begged him to stay home.Hadn’t insidiously insinuated that his teenage siblings were going to end up in the same position as him, working two jobs just to keep the family afloat—exactly as he’d feared.Don’t youlovethem Adrien?Don’t youcareabout them?
But his mother was never the perpetrator, always the victim.It washisfault she had cancer,hisfault the family was falling apart,hisfault David had “gone insane”,hisfault Jessica would never be able to afford to go to college.
A silent scream echoed through Adrien’s mind as he drowned in her endless criticisms: “Why can’tyoutake responsibility for once in your life?!”
But it was a useless question to ask a woman who was days away from going into hospice.When he got the call, he’d been taking inventory in the back room of the thrift store in the Haight-Ashbury where he worked.His boss had called him up into his office, looking grim.
