Dark denim, cheap, too stiff at first, then too thin at the knees. My mother was supposed to wash them. She was supposed to wash a lot of things. Dishes. Clothes. Herself when she stopped caring enough to get out of bed before noon. Some days she was too busy crying. Some days too busy watching TV. Some days too busy staring at herself in a cracked bathroom mirror like beauty was a debt the world had failed to pay her back.
So I started washing my jeans in the bathtub.
Hand soap. Cold water. Scrubbing the knees until my fingers hurt. Wringing them out as hard as I could and hanging them over the shower rod. Half the time they were still damp in the morning, but damp was better than smelling like sweat and school and shame.
I went to class wet more than once.
Nobody noticed the first time.
Then they did.
Kids always noticed eventually.
Poor made you angry in ways rich people never understood. Not sad. Not humble. Not grateful for small things like inspirational posters wanted it to be.
Angry.
Angry because every day was proof the world had already decided what you deserved. Angry because your shoes talked before you did. Angry because teachers said potential like it was a compliment, then looked disappointed when you didn’t magically turn hunger and humiliation into straight A’s. Angry because other kids threw away things you would have bled for.
Sneakers were the worst.
A boy could survive a lot at school, but bad shoes were a death sentence.
So I learned Goodwill schedules.
I learned when people dropped off bags after closing. Learned which donation boxes had loose hinges. Learned how to climb in without getting stuck and how to move fast when headlights turned into the lot. I dug through other people’s charity in the dark looking for sneakers that weren’t split at the sole.
Sometimes I found them.
Sometimes they fit.
Sometimes I wore two pairs of socks and pretended they did.
The tequila blurred the lights on the water.
I took another drink.
I pissed away school after that.
Smokes behind the gym. Fights in the parking lot. Trying to be cool because cool was cheaper than hope. Cool didn’t require clean clothes or application fees or guidance counselors whoknew your name for reasons other than trouble. Cool let you act like you didn’t want the things you couldn’t have anyway.
Scholarships?
College?
A future?
I burned those before they had a chance to disappoint me.
Not because I was stupid.
Because wanting things made you vulnerable, and I had been vulnerable enough.
But I knew one thing.
I was not going to be my old man.
I wasn’t going to work some dead-end job fixing cars while men in offices made the real money off my labor. I wasn’t going to come home exhausted and drunk, swinging bitterness around like it was the only inheritance I had to give. I wasn’t going to spend my life begging the world for scraps and calling it honest work because that made poverty sound noble.
