FOE Family First Chapter 2 Good Omens
Early in the morning, the old electronic alarm clock on the bedside tried to play a rhythmic tune after the last second of 6:59.
It was just that, perhaps because the battery was about to run out, the ringtone became distorted and weird. It didn't sound like an energetic wake-up call, but more like an elderly priest's vague chanting to comfort the soul.
Tommy Hawke opened his eyes, reached out to turn off the button of the electronic alarm clock, then jumped out of bed, walked to the simple clothes hanger next to him, took out a T-shirt from it, sniffed it, and put it on after making sure it could still be worn for another day.
The landlord, Aunt Melonie, has gotten up early to go out and make money. As a substitute teacher who is still looking for a stable teaching job, today she is going to teach for a fee at a primary school 40 kilometers away.
On the coffee table in the living room was a cup of warm espresso and a croissant, and next to it was half a pack of Kimberly cigarettes that Melonie had left for him.
He went to the bathroom to quickly wash up, then Tommy sat on the sofa, lit a cigarette and lost in thought.
He is a time traveler . For some unknown reason, Hawke, a 27-year-old Chinese student studying business at Boston University in 2022, traveled to the United States in 1982 two months ago and became the 17-year-old American high school student named Tommy Hawke today.
Hawke only remembered that he was shopping with his girlfriend near Boston's Chinatown that day when they happened to encounter two black robbers robbing a nearby convenience store. They were arrested by the police who rushed to the scene. The two sides opened fire on each other. As a result, the police and the robbers were fine, but Hawke was hit by a stray bullet.
Then he closed his eyes and opened them again, and he changed from the rich second-generation Chinese student Hawke to the current American high school student Tommy Hawke.
Now he has the memories and emotions of two people combined, and has to face the bleak reality.
That was his life now, poor and desperate.
He lives in Rhode Island, the smallest state in the United States. Specifically, he lives in Warwick, Kent County, Rhode Island. It is a city with a population of 80,000 and the second largest city in the state, but it is only slightly larger than a prosperous town in his hometown in China.
You can ride a bicycle around the entire city in an hour, and still have enough time to ride to Providence, the state capital, which is 17 kilometers away.
Moreover, the timing of his time travel was very unfortunate. His family had just gone from having enough food and clothing to being in a mess because his father lost his job.
This prevented him from enjoying the comfortable life of blue-collar workers under capitalism, and he only witnessed the misery and sadness of the lower-class people in the United States.
Tommy Hawke's father, Colin Hawke, is of German descent. He used to work at General Motors' parts factory in Rhode Island. He lost his job five months ago when General Motors cut production lines. He currently works as a temporary worker in small shipbreaking yards and shipyards to make a living.
Alida, the mother, was of Italian descent and died in a car accident in 1981. A pair of young white scumbags who were high on cannabis were driving a stolen family car on the street and hit and killed her as she was opening the mailbox to collect the family bills on the street. They were a poor couple and in the end no compensation was paid or apologized. They were charged with hit-and-run and manslaughter. According to state law, they should have been sentenced to four years in prison. However, because the white scumbag couple were of Irish descent, and the Irish make up 70% of the total population of Rhode Island, the jury, based on racial and vote considerations, the Rhode Island State Court ultimately only sentenced the two to six months in prison and three years of probation. As for the total compensation of $5,000 for the two, it is obvious that they could not afford it.
His elder brother Tony Leone is one year older than Tommy. Originally, he should have been named Tony Hawk, but Italy passed a law in 1980 allowing children to take their mother's surname. Although his mother was a third-generation Italian immigrant born in the United States and had never been to Italy, the women's rights movement has been popular in the northern states of the United States in recent years. In order to respond to the Italian law and to show support for the women's rights movement, his mother discussed with his father and changed his brother Tony Hawk's name to Tony Leon, a typical small town white boy. After his father lost his job, he decisively dropped out of high school and tried to be a man and earn money to support his family. He is currently an apprentice in a car repair shop, making $80 a week. It is said that he will soon graduate and may earn more then.
Tommy also has a younger sister, Bethia, who just turned seven this year. Earlier this year, the Child Protection Agency forced her to temporarily live in a foster home on the grounds that domestic abuse triggered the protection mechanism. The reason was simply that her father was busy working as a part-time worker to make money after he lost his job, which led to Bethia wearing dirty clothes to school for several consecutive days and was noticed by the teacher. When the teacher visited her home, he happened to find several copies of "Penthouse" magazine within Bethia's reach. This made the Rhode Island Child Protection Agency, which had just received the newly introduced "Adoption Funding and Child Welfare Act" as a sword, feel like they had found a treasure. They finally had the opportunity to test their edge. Today, Bethea is fostered in a middle-class family in Providence, the state capital, and they live a wealthy life. Her father's greatest obsession is to bring his daughter home, but it is easy to be taken away but difficult to bring her back. Even if Bethea agrees and the foster family agrees, the cold provisions of the bill disagree. That is, according to the provisions of the bill, children must have a large enough independent bedroom, the family's minimum monthly income must reach US$850, the monthly expenditure on the child's growth and education must be no less than US$70, and the child and the foster family must agree, and only after confirmation by the protection agency can the court open a hearing and rule that the child return to the family.
If Tommy's father had not lost his job, it would have been easy for him to meet the conditions for regaining custody. However, because RB Motors quickly seized the American market, local automobile factories cut production lines one after another, causing a large number of blue-collar workers who used to earn two to three hundred dollars a week and could easily support their families to quickly become the bottom of society. For example, his father's weekly salary at the Ford factory was up to $275, but now he works at a shipbreaking yard on an hourly basis, which is less than four dollars an hour. He works eight hours a day, five days a week, and can only earn about $170. Moreover, because the shipbreaking yard is a high-intensity physical labor, basically at the end of the day, he has no energy to work part-time. And $170 is barely enough to support a family's water and electricity bills, car loans, various insurance expenses, and daily expenses with just credit cards. He won't starve to death, but he can't expect to save a penny.
When Tommy traveled through time, his father and brother were trying to persuade him to drop out of school and find a job so that he could meet the income requirements as soon as possible and bring Bethia home. In the eyes of his family, there was no difference between graduating from high school and dropping out of school, and going to college had never appeared in the family's options.
But Tommy, who traveled through time, knew clearly that going to college was the only chance to change his fate. If he did not go to college, his life would be the same as his father's, finding a job in a factory in Rhode Island, or being an apprentice in a leather store or auto repair shop, and then spending the rest of his life in a small border town on the northeastern coast of the United States, marrying a woman with a similar background, having children, and supporting his family until his death.
If you want to change this fate and break through class stratification, your only chance is to be admitted to a good enough university. Only then may you have a chance to barely get in touch with another completely different America.
Because Tony often lent his house to his friends to hold parties and make some money, Tommy, who traveled through time and space and was determined to get into college, couldn't bear the annoyance and chose to move out of the house. He rented a bedroom in an old British-style apartment in Warwick Harbor and studied hard. The landlord Melonie was a distant cousin of his mother's family relationship who was unknown how far she was related. Moved by Tommy's attitude of studying hard, she rented the small bedroom in her own apartment to him for thirty US dollars a week.
In the month since he moved out, he has been studying hard for AP courses, preparing for the STA exam, and at the same time, he has squeezed out four hours of part-time work to earn money. But unfortunately, because of his family, Tommy has not been able to save a single coin so far.
If he wanted to concentrate on his studies, he had to solve the money problem first. Tommy Hawke finished his cigarette, picked up the extremely bitter espresso, drank it mouthful by mouthful, then put away the cigarette on the table, stood up, and walked out the door.
In the corridor outside the door, a white office worker wearing a felt hat and a suit was walking and reading with a briefcase in his left hand and today's newspaper in his right hand.
The front page of the Boston Globe in his hand had a picture of President Ronald Reagan and a bold headline:
"President Reagan: When facing the Soviet Union, we need to do whatever it takes and break all the rules!"
"It's a good sign. I finally have a reason to convince myself to make some money. If I have to blame someone, I should blame our president. He told me that we need to break all the rules." Tommy Hawke glanced at the cover of the newspaper in the other's hand, smacked his lips, and said softly:
"play hard."
