“Jack,” Dad stated, fingers poised on the keyboard. “Your class schedule, please.”
My brother remained silent for ten excruciating seconds, pretending to examine his fingernails. My skin itched, and I gripped my bag with white knuckles.
Dad peered over his glasses and repeated in the exact same tone, “Your schedule, please.”
“Oh, right.” Jack made a show of patting himself down and pulled out a crumpled ball of orange paper from the front pocket of his jeans. He tossed it onto the desk. “Here you go.”
Dad stared a moment before picking up the paper and unfolding it. He let out a small sigh through his nose.
“This is a tardy slip from today.” He placed it in the trash can under his desk. “So soon, Jack? It’s only the first day of school, but you’re already determined to be a fuckup.”
Our father said all this without raising his voice or changing his tone in the slightest. It was exactly that quiet inflexibility that made him so frightening to everyone on the planet. Even to Jack, though Jack was the only one who fought back.
“I stopped to get a coffee and a blowjob from a guy on the pier.” He held up his hands. “Guess I lost track of time.”
Dad stiffened. I held my breath.
I didn’t think Jack was telling the truth. Or maybe he was; it would be a cold day in hell before he confided in me anything about his personal life. But he liked saying or doing shocking things to get a rise out of our parents. Like a few weeks ago, when he celebrated his nineteenth birthday by stealing a credit card from Mom’s purse and charging $2,800 worth of drinks at a gay club in Providence with a fake ID. I thought Dad would kick him out of the house for sure—not for being gay but for defying him. To my dad, there was no greater crime than insubordination. Everything else—who we were or what we wanted—was irrelevant.
“You think your education is a joke,” Dad said to Jack in his mild-mannered tone. “You, who are already behind an entire year. You won’t think it’s quite so funny when you’re pumping gas at the local Sunoco or flipping burgers at Cassidy’s.”
Jack shrugged. “Honest work.”
My father stared him down. Jack stared back, but I noticed his Adam’s apple hitch in his throat.
Then Dad muttered just loud enough for us to hear, “Degenerate.”
Jack flinched, and his eyes grew shiny. Our father glanced up, studying my brother’s unshed tears and my stricken face.
“Oh, am I making your life hard for you? For either of you? Hm?”
I felt pinned to my chair. Beside me, Jack swallowed hard.
Dad folded his hands. “Is it difficult that I have given you everything you could ever possibly want? Clothes? Cars? A first-class education at the Academy? Is it a tremendous hardship that I’m invested in your education and success?”
“No, Daddy,” I whispered.
Jack shot me a hard, fast look.
“Because I can make it all disappear as easily as I’ve made it happen. You can have everything, or you can have nothing. The choice is yours.”
The air felt tight and thick, the entire world narrowing until there was nothing left but my dad’s cold blue stare.
Finally, Jack tilted his chin, his voice quavering as he asked, “Are we done here?”
Our father nodded his head. Once. Jack tore out of the chair, out of the study, and slammed the door.
Unbothered, Dad turned to me. “Your schedule, please.”
I dug into my bag for the printout of my classes and handed it over. He set it on the desk and copied it into his spreadsheet. Since Jack and I were in middle school, he kept track of every grade, every test score, every average. Anything less than an A-minus, and there were consequences.
I cleared my throat. “Dad, we need to talk about calculus—”
“It will look good on your application to Brown,” he said, the digital green of his spreadsheet reflected in his glasses.
“Only if I pass,” I said. “Daddy, I’m just not good at math. I barely survived last year. And I don’t need calculus to graduate anyway. I’ve completed all the math requirements. If I take calculus and fail, it’s going to bring my whole average down.”
“Then you had better not fail.”
