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"So anyway, I guess gramps was on some sort of quest to turn me into a man that month, because a few weeks passed and I found myself in a bar drinking whiskey after hours. Whiskey at home just wasn't the same, he insisted. I smoked a cigar, and it made me feel sick, and I ended up puking for a long time outside of the bar while the old dudes inside just laughed and joked around. On the ride back to the house, I told him I didn't want to make the bets anymore, and that the way I saw it was that he had enough cash to live off of and he didn't really need any more from me. We’d already become kind of legendary locally for winning bets. People were paying us to tell them who'd win, because it got to the point where no one would bet against us, and then it got to the point where no one would even let us gamble with them. After everyone started buying information from us, we started telling the wrong answers to the guys that we didn't like, the guys that didn't pay us what we thought we deserved.
"It’s funny, how I refer to it as what 'we 'wanted, when really gramps was making all the decisions. Stupid kid, I was. So we're diving back in the truck from the bar, and I'm feeling kind of sick still, and more than a little drunk, and everything is spinning around me, and I told him that I wanted out of the gambling deals, that I wanted to just hang out with some girls and maybe go to school like a normal kid.
"He hit me, hard, right in the face. Backhanded me as he drove, without missing a beat, and then told me to shut up. I was completely shocked, since he'd never laid a hand on my before in my life. I felt hurt and betrayed, because even though I had started to resent him for forcing me into that kind of lifestyle, he was really my best friend and had taught me a lot of things. But there was something else, suddenly, and it surprised me, too. It was an anger like I’d never felt before, and that was the first time that I noticed an electricity all around me, aside from just the general kind of static shock you get when you're wearing a wool sweater or something." He paused again, closing his eyes. The flickering light of the fire cast strange shadows around the contours of his face. |