“Do you have your listening ears on?”
“Don’t get smart with me, little boy.”
I held my hands up in surrender, but I was beyond frustrated with her antics. “I just want to talk like normal, Mom. No more yelling. No antics.”
“Okay,” she said crossing her arms. “I’m listening.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“I am,” she insisted.
“Why don’t you want me working on this? Why don’t you want me working onanyof this? Because you think I can’t do it?”
She looked at me down her nose for a long steady beat before turning it up and away from me. “I never said that. I know what you can do.”
“You do?”
“Unlike what that annoying little Fernandez girl said, I know how hard it is to do what you do.”
“What then? You just don’t want me to do it?”
She looked at me and I realized then that was exactly it. She just doesn’t want me to do it. And all of a sudden I was irrationally angry.
I laughed, the sound coming out deranged and annoyed. “So what would you have me do, then? In your perfect world?”
She pressed her lips even further into that line. “I want you here at Ferguson doing something bigger. Something worth your name.”
“The only worth on my name is the worth I grant it, Mom. Me and the people who love me. What you’re saying right now is that without the title thatyouallow, I’m worthless. Do you understand how that hurts?”
“You're putting words in my mouth.”
“Damn right I’m putting words in your mouth,” I said roughly. “I’m putting the words that you never say out loud, but you’ve beenthinkingfor years out in the open.”
She blinked as my voice rose, seeming to pause for the first time in what seemed likeever. Finally. But I already made my decision. I would help my brother, and then I would start helping myself. This had to be the first step. I couldn’t keep holding back or pulling up short or minimizing myself. Not with her, not with anyone.
I had to stop worrying what would happen if I expended all of myself and it still wasn’t enough. Because all I was doing now was giving half of me and it definitely wasn’t enough. I had almost let Clint go tojail, for Christ sake.
I needed to start being enough for myself, and letting people decide if they wanted to take that or leave it. But I wouldn’t be compromising myself to accommodate other’s versions of me in my head.
Just then, an image of Ceci flickered through my mind and my heart squeezed.
I winced internally. I didn’t have to change all at once. I could always start small and work my way up. Right now, I would start with my career.
“What words do you think I’m thinking, Connor?” my mom asked, pulling me back.
I scoffed. “You mean what words do Iknowyou’re thinking? You think I don’t know that you wish I was more like Clint or Clay or literally anyone other than myself. That you don’t believe in me so much that you have been shoving this idea of something I don’t and have never wanted down my throat for almost my entire life. That the second I shared that I wanted to be the slightest bit like you, you started tapering my dreams and forcing me into a box you thought was more suitable for me. Do you think I’m blind, Mom? That I’m stupid?”
She swallowed. “Never, Connor. I never—”
“I know what I want mom. And no amount of bullshit business degrees or executive positions or all the goddamn pressure in the world is going to change that. I know what I want, I’ve known it since I was nine years old, and you have too.”
Because she had.
A vision of a boy who’d just disassembled and reassembled a computer all by himself came to my mind. He had begged his father to sign him up for the‘Kids Love Coding’classes he saw on TV and had begged his mom to get him some books on analytics. He had just spent a whole summer indoors rather than playing outside like the rest of the kids because he’d found a passion. Something so consuming, he could hardly breathe when he wasn’t around it. And on a day at the end of that summer he had looked to his mother—his mother who seemed like she ran the world sometimes with the way she commanded her own life—and he told her, “Mom, one day I’m going to run my own big building with computers everywhere. Just like you!”
And she got the weirdest look on her face. She looked down at what she was doing, handing over some cash for yet another advanced coding book she was buying me, and then she looked over at me…and her eyes were different. Her eyebrows were pinched, her lips gray like she felt sick. Her eyes seemed to mist and her neck gained color it never held before. And when she swallowed, and cleared her throat, she looked down on me and said, “We’ll see.”
And that was it.
