FOE Family First Chapter 1: Life is full of adversities
At five o'clock in the evening, Tommy Hawke took out the key, unlocked the door, and walked into the old-style apartment he rented. As soon as he pushed the door open, he saw 27-year-old Aunt Melonie sitting on the sofa in the living room, putting an ice pack on her cheek and watching TV. It was Providence TV's unchanging free program, an old-fashioned documentary.
Hearing the sound of the door opening, Melonie turned around and saw Tommy Hawke standing at the door. She immediately turned her face away, put down the ice pack in her hand, and tried to pretend that nothing had happened. She spoke in a sarcastic and old-fashioned tone:
"Shouldn't you be working part-time at the laundry? You already owe me two weeks' rent."
Tommy Hawke closed the door, walked up to Melanie, and looked at her slightly swollen cheeks:
"What happened?"
"It's nothing, just a beauty treatment. Ice compress can make the skin tighter." Melanie got up from the sofa, as if she was too lazy to continue talking about this topic with Tommy Hawke.
Tommy Hawke picked up Melonie's cheap Kimberly cigarettes from the coffee table, lit one, and looked at the TV screen, which was showing the documentary "The Great American Cowboy", which had been shown hundreds of times. "Well, I guess your ex-boyfriend used the cowboy's buffalo taming action to help you prepare for beauty treatment?"
"Hey! You can't smoke! At least not before your 18th birthday which is in half a month!" Melanie frowned when she saw Tommy lighting a cigarette.
Tommy Hawke exhaled smoke: "If you go to the school to report, I will say that the cigarettes of a minor were provided by you, an adult. Forget it, Aunt Melonie. No one in our high school cares whether minors can smoke and drink."
"So, you didn't go to work part-time, you just came back to smoke a cigarette?" Melonie stared at Tommy Hawke: "What happened?"
"I heard that a group of white bastards smashed the laundry shop where I worked part-time in the afternoon. When I rushed over after school, the poor Chinese boss Sonny had been scared so much that he ran away to Boston with his whole family. I have to find a new part-time job." Tommy Hawke said in a somewhat irritable tone.
Melonie covered her slightly swollen left face and nodded slightly after listening: "Well, compared with that Sonny, it seems that my experience is not worth mentioning."
Tommy sat on the sofa with a cigarette in his mouth. "Don't those bastards understand that Asians are not the same as Japanese! They think that Japanese people made them unemployed, so let the US military drop a few more atomic bombs on Japan."
"Knock, knock, knock~" Someone knocked on the door from outside.
Melonie tried to open the door, but Tommy Hawke stood up and said, "If it's your damn ex-boyfriend, I'll deal with it. Please, give me a chance to vent my dissatisfaction."
"You'll be in big trouble if you fight, Tommy Hawke." Melonie didn't feel grateful when she heard Tommy's words, but warned him with a cold face.
Tommy Hawke walked to the door and opened it. Outside the door was his brother Tony, who was one year older than him. Seeing Tommy opening the door, Tony smiled kindly:
"You didn't look very friendly when you opened the door, Tommy. Hi, Aunt Melonie."
"Hi, Tony." Melanie breathed a sigh of relief when she saw it was Tommy's brother, and she forced a smile in response.
Tony took the cigarette from Tommy's mouth and took a puff, then walked into the living room and said as he walked:
"haven't seen you for a long time."
"It's only been two weeks. I guess you didn't come here just to visit me. After all, I said I don't want to see you again before my SAT exam." Tommy said with a grim expression.
"I know, I know you don't want anyone to influence you to become a great scholar, Einstein, but we are a family, and you are needed at home now." Tony looked at Tommy and shrugged with a smile.
Tommy looked at Tony. "You rented your house to those bastards for an ethanol party again? You want me to be a waiter?"
"No, it's Daddy, our dear daddy. He's in the police station now. Although there's a bail bond company that can help with the guarantee, the down payment still requires two hundred dollars. I only got one hundred and ten dollars, so..." Tommy pursed his lips, put away his smile, and looked at Tommy Hawke seriously: "Ninety dollars."
"What did that idiot do?" Tommy Hawke let out a frustrated sigh, closed his eyes, turned around and faced the wall, not wanting to face the question.
Tony exhaled a puff of cigarette and said, "Nothing. He brought a dozen poor workers who were angry about losing their jobs like him and smashed a laundry shop owned by a Japanese. After the smash, they were told that the owner was not a Japanese."
"Bullsh!t! This is the best news I've heard today. A father smashed his son's part-time store and needed his son, who was under 18 years old, to pay for his bail. There is no better news than this." Tommy Hawke laughed.
"I left home a month ago and came to live in a small bedroom at Aunt Melonie's house. I have to work part-time for four hours a day and only make less than thirteen dollars. My bedroom rents thirty dollars a week, and my living expenses are reduced to twenty dollars a week. The registration fee for five AP exams is one hundred dollars, and the registration fee for the SAT is twenty dollars. I also want to save money because I need to wait for the summer vacation to pay for some summer camps and complete some extracurricular activities so that my application materials will look better when I apply for college. Do you know how much money I saved this month? No, not a cent."
He walked into his small bedroom, took out a stack of loose banknotes and handed them to Tony. "No need to count, it's exactly ninety-three dollars. You took away the two weeks' rent that I should have paid to Aunt Melonie, as well as the registration fee that I saved."
Tony took the money and said to Tommy in confusion, "Can't you just drop out of school like me? Find a decent job. What can you learn from college? Besides paying high tuition fees and taking on loans that will take decades to pay off? What can you learn? You can learn a lesson. Teach your children not to be deceived by the US government and take on high college loans. I can introduce you to a job with a good weekly salary..."
"Getting into a good enough university will prevent me from becoming a low-level trash like my father and you. That's a prerequisite for me to change my destiny!" Tommy Hawke raised his voice and whispered to Tony.
The voice was so fierce that Melonie, who was in the far corner, couldn't help but shrink her shoulders slightly.
"Sorry, brother." Tony saw Tommy's angry expression and nodded in understanding. "No problem, of course no problem. Don't become a piece of trash like us. I wish you excellent results in Lincoln High School in Rhode Island, which ranks 7,431st out of 21,000 high schools in the United States."
He pushed Tommy hard, his face instantly filled with anger. "You should show some respect to your father and me, boy!"
"If you two wouldn't just take away his pitiful savings from his brother or son, maybe he would respect you a little more." Tommy smiled sarcastically at Tony.
Tony's facial muscles twitched a few times. He nodded slightly, opened his arms and stepped back. "OK, you can laugh at me and my father, but you have to remember that if you fail one day, I will only comfort you and not laugh at you, because you are my brother and we are family. Also, the reason I smashed the RB's laundry is not because my father is a jerk. Of course, he is a jerk in your eyes , but the union will reward him with 500 dollars for this. When he gets the money, I will ask him to return it to you."
After saying that, Tony walked out of the room clutching the stack of change and slammed the door shut from the outside.
The force was so great that it knocked off the Protestant Bible calendar hanging on the door.
Tommy leaned against the wall, punched it hard with his fist, and cursed in frustration: "Fuck! Fuck you America!"
"If you need the exam registration fee, I... I may be able to receive some substitute teaching fees in a few days." Melanie stood in the corner of the living room, looking at Tommy Hawke with his eyes closed and a fierce look on his face, and spoke in a cold voice.
Before she could finish, Tommy opened his eyes and shook his head: "I can handle it. I can definitely figure out this shitty life."
He stood up, looked at the calendar that had fallen on the ground, reached out to pick it up, hung it back on the door, and stared at today's page in silence.
"What are you thinking about?" Melonie noticed that Tommy had been silent for a long time, so she asked from behind.
Tommy looked away and gave Melonie a gentle smile. "Nothing. Can you call the school tomorrow and ask for a day off? I want to solve the problem of food and clothing before I focus on preparing for the college entrance exam."
Melonie took a few steps forward curiously and looked in the direction Tommy was looking.
On the calendar page is written today's date, May 6, 1982, and a proverb from the Bible:
Yet man is born to trouble, As the sparks fly upward.
(Life is full of adversities, just like the flying of sparks)
