Prologue
Who I Am In The Dark
I get a lot of funny looks from the other kids at school, but I don’t really care anymore. It’s not like I can help it that my mom has a reputation. We’ve all got a past, you know? I just wish her past wasn’t such a big part of the present.
They make fun of me because I don’t know who my dad is, which isn’t my fault--or my mom’s, if you wanna get down to it. I’ve heard it all, ‘bastard’, of course, and even ‘child of sin’ from a priest; that one threw me off for a minute, because I had never heard the word ‘sin’ before. As far as I can tell, it’s only used by religious people, which is one thing my mom definitely is not. She says that religion is something for people who live with their heads up their asses; but then, she’s kind of bitter and even a little mean, especially when she’s drunk.
Sometimes I think she misses her old life, because she had a lot of money and stuff. My mom is pretty materialistic, she’s more likely to give me a twenty dollar bill than a hug. When I told my friend Chelsea that, she told me that it was a miracle I turned out so normal, all things considered; and she’s probably right--most people with no dad and an ex-prostitute mom probably end up pretty fucked up.
These are the kind of thoughts that sit in my head when I hide in a dark room.; I don’t know what exactly I’m hiding from, I just know that I feel more comfortable being wrapped in the silence and knowing that nobody can find me. Today, it’s my bedroom closet, but tomorrow, it might be the den or the laundry room. It never really matters, so long as it’s dark and the door locks, or Mom isn’t home. Soon, I’ll have to get up and turn on the light, and then I won’t think about these things; I’ll be Benny the good boy, Benny the straight-A student who tries too hard to be perfect. But right now, in a dark room, I can be just plain Benny.

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I might extend this someday, right now it looks horrifically like what my Uncle the English/Creative Writing teacher calls a "short-short" story. I wish I knew why so many of my characters have problems with their parents... That should probably say something about me, but to be completely honest, my parents are two of my best friends and the coolest people I know.