They Charged Me Rent to Breathe, So I Cut Them Off

1: 1

The SATs were over, and my mother gave my brother a new phone.

She hugged him tight, her eyes red:

"My precious boy, you finally made it through."

My father gave him a motorcycle and said grandly,

"Once you're at college, go wherever you want, have fun anywhere you like."

Then it was my turn, dragging my heavy luggage inside, and my mother held out a QR code like she was ringing up a stranger:

"Luggage-moving fee, five hundred. Storage fee for your things, five hundred."

"From now until you leave for college, a room fee for staying here, two thousand."

"Three thousand total. Are you scanning to pay, or signing an IOU?"

...

I lowered my head, took out my phone, and scanned it, the way I always did.

For as long as I could remember, my parents had raised me and my brother as a control group.

My brother got the lifting-up kind of parenting.

New clothes he never ran out of, pocket money he never spent to the end.

Private prep schools his whole life.

I got independence education.

For as long as I had memories, I'd been signing IOUs every single day.

Room and board while I lived at home, food, water, electricity...

Every day my mother would total up every expense tied to me and hand me the bill.

Then she'd make me collect trash and sell it to pay off the debt.

"If the day's charges aren't settled, you sign an IOU, and interest accrues at the bank rate."

"If the debt goes past due, your right to live here and your meals are cut off."

At five I couldn't haul enough trash and fell thirty dollars behind.

My mother smashed my rice bowl and dumped my food into the trash in front of me.

Then she threw me out of the house while I screamed and cried.

I slept under a bridge that night.

And watched my parents drop a million dollars to rent out an entire arcade.

For my brother's birthday.

At seven, to scrape together tuition, I went to school and collected bottles like my life depended on it.

Until I got so hungry my blood sugar crashed and I passed out in the street.

But when my mother showed up, all I got was that cold face:

"Sign the IOU for the medical bill first, then you can get in the ambulance."

At nine, the school held a parents' meeting.

My mother and father crowded around my brother.

And I stood there with my head down, holding back tears, while my classmates sneered that I was a nobody bastard no one wanted.

"Me showing up to your parents' meeting is a service contract. It's billed by the minute."

I cried and knelt in front of my classmates, begging money from every direction.

All I wanted was for my mother to sit with me in class for one minute.

But she took the loose change I'd gathered up in my hands and bought my brother an ice cream bar.

And then she rounded on me, furious:

"Cecil Simmons's sweating from the heat, can't you see that? What kind of brother are you?"

"All you care about is your own vanity. You don't even care whether your own family lives or dies. You're nothing but an ungrateful animal."

Then her tone went flat and businesslike.

"There isn't enough commission here. I can't accept your booking."

After that day.

I never argued back against my classmates' jeering again.

All these years, whenever I cried out about how unfair it was.

My parents would round on me like I was a hopeless disappointment:

"You ungrateful thing. Who do you think all this hard bookkeeping, every single day, is for?"

"It's to raise you to stand on your own two feet! Learn now how hard money is to earn, and you'll take fewer wrong turns later."

"Otherwise, out in the real world, who's going to coddle you?"

I heard it enough times that I stopped expecting anything.

And just as I was numbly pulling out my phone to pay.

My mother changed course.

"If you give up your spot at the elite university and go to community college with your brother, you don't have to pay today's charges."

She scooped my brother up, doting, her voice gone soft:

"Cecil is the treasure we spoiled and raised with our own hands. He's not some thick-skinned dirt-poor mule like you."

"Studying somewhere far off, in a place he doesn't know, he'll need someone to look after him."

"Go to community college with him, and I'll give you three hundred a month in living money, plus another two hundred as a nanny's fee."

My brother laughed, smug, off to the side.

"William Simmons, you'd better appreciate a chance like this."

"Five hundred bucks. That's more than you could earn collecting bottles for a whole month."

My eyes dropped, and the bitterness rose in me:

"But I scored a 1590. I'm the top scorer."

"I don't want to go to community college."

My father's face darkened, and his voice went hard:

"A high score doesn't mean good character."

"So young and already so competitive and vain. What's that going to make of you?"

"Go to community college and taste how hard life is for people at the bottom. It'll temper your will! That's how you'll go further once you're out in the world."

I looked at them, and something inside me went cold all the way through.

I was their son too, their own flesh and blood.

Why could everyone only ever see Cecil?

While I could be sacrificed, all of it, anytime they pleased.

My mother met my dead, empty stare, and for a second something guilty flickered across her face.

Then she pushed on, hard:

"Who's that long face for? What's wrong with an older brother looking after his younger one?"

"This is what you should be doing anyway, and now there's even money in it for you. What have you got to be unhappy about?"

"Change your application right now. Don't take the deal and still act sour, or hand me the three thousand."

My brother laughed harder, faking envy:

"You've got it made, big brother. You change a few words and it turns straight into cash."

"Not like me. Once I graduate, I still have to go find a job and earn my own way."

The moment she heard that, my mother's whole face melted with tenderness.

"Silly boy, this family could support you your entire life even if you never lifted a finger."

My father transferred him fifty thousand dollars on the spot.

"Take it and spend it. If it's not enough, just tell Dad."

"The biggest security a boy can have is being raised rich and knowing he's covered. Only mules and workhorses have to go looking for grass to eat."

Something in my chest ached.

So it turned out they weren't incapable of loving a child. They just didn't love me.

"Hurry up and change it. We're taking your brother shopping. Don't waste our time."

My mother pushed me along, impatient.

"Dragging your feet over everything, making the whole family wait on you alone. You really are a lost cause."

But the next second, my fingers moved.

Her phone chimed with a transfer notification.

【Ding! $3,000 received.】

I won't be changing my application. And I don't want this family anymore.