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"I’ve always had a thing for numbers, I guess. I have this uncanny ability at understanding odds and probability, and I can see numerical patterns in everything. Growing up, I made and won a lot of bets, on whatever kind of game you could ever think of. I’d make sports bets with my friends in the school cafeteria and win dessert, or chocolate milk, and every now and then someone's milk money, but it wasn't really anything that I ever abused as a kid.
"My math teachers always thought I cheated, because I aced every test and quiz that they threw at me. I was doing advanced calculus and trigonometry in the second grade, much to the pride of my school system, which sent me to all sorts of competitions. I won certificates and trophies and medals, competing all the time with kids twice my age, even older... sometimes with college kids or professors. I never lost, I'm always right with my equations and my bets. I probably still have all of the trophies and awards in a box up in the attic at home, somewhere. I don't remember throwing them away, anyway.
"It wasn't really long into my career as the best math student prodigy to come out of
Nowheresville, Dakota when my grandfather decided that he could cash in using me for bets on horse races, games, that sort of thing." He paused for a moment, flicking the butt of his cigarette into the fire.
"I lived with my grandfather and my mom, and my grandmother, she died when I was too little to remember her. My mom was always working, or so she said, and my grandfather didn't seem to eager to have her at home, anyway, so I spent a lot of my free time hanging out with him working on stuff around the house, doing chores and that sort of thing. He was always big on me earning my keep there, and since it was all I ever knew, it didn't seem too unusual to me. Of course, you talk to kids these days and they're lazy little shits who play too many video games and listen to way too much corporate radio for their own good." He made a kind of sour face, as if he tasted something bad that he wanted to spit out. |