ALEK GRAYSON had lived a semi-normal childhood.
He learned to walk when he was eleven months old. He learned the unexplainable joy of smashing and banging his mother's favorite, and very breakable, objects against the floor at the tender age of three. The year he turned five, he attended school for the first time. He played nice with the other kids, shared his snacks during snack time like a good boy, and learned his alphabet with as much difficulty as the next child. He played in the mud with the other youngsters during recess, and ignored the girls in class just as they ignored him.
At the age of seven, he tried to set a fire cracker off on his own on the fourth of july, and that resulted in him almost blowing his hand clean off his arm. He hadn't understood that he was supposed to place the firecracker down on the ground before he decided to let freedom ring. That was also the first time he took a trip to the hospital. He figured out fairly quickly on that day that he did not enjoy hospitals.
At the age of eleven, he had faced his first racial slur. A boy who was much larger than he was had asked him if he and his family ate dogs for dinner. He didn't understand what the boy had meant then; it had been a much simpler time and he had been so native that he couldn't comprehend what the boy was talking about. It was only when he went home and asked his mother and father about it did he fully grasp what the boy meant, and the undeniable wrongness of his words. Him being of Asian decent, Korean to be exact, in a place that had little to none diversity had left him subject to prejudice thoughts and racial slurs.
At the age of thirteen, when he'd started his transition from boy to young man, he lost his father. He didn't die- although that's often how Alek wished he went. It would have caused his family less greif that way. At least then, had he died, they would have mourned him and moved on. However, his father had not been so considering. He just walked out of he and his mother and his seven year old brother's life like they were nothing. He said he felt "flustered" with them, and that he couldn't phantom settling down anymore. He wanted his freedom. He wanted a new life.
"I'm not getting any younger," he had said to his mother, Tammy, as she cried and begged for him to stay. Before he'd made such a rash decision to leave, his mother and father had been arguing. She'd accused him of having an affair with the woman next door, and had made vain empty threats at him.
She screamed that she would leave him behind and take their kids with her. This had made his father angry, and it was then and there that he decided that he'd better leave now and not risk his mother leaving him later. When Tammy heard that, she quickly tried to persuade him otherwise. She cried and pleaded, saying that she didnt mean what she had said, but his fathers mind was already made up.
He and his little brother Ty were sitting at the top of the staircase listening to everything. He held onto his crying kid brother tightly as he himself tried to hold back his own tears.
"This is whats best for us. I need to make something of myself- I need to live."
"But you have a family, Jackson!" she screeched. "You have a wife and two kids. You have made something of yourself."
He shook his head once. "Come on, Tam, Don't make this more difficult than what it has to be. We both knew that this was a long time coming... Our marriage is going nowhere."
Alek's mother paled. Her beautifully porcelain skin had suddenly took on a slightly greenish shade, as if she were about to become ill. Her large almond shaped eyes stared at Jackson, not quite believing what he was saying.
"You think I gave you my everything so that you could just throw it all away?" his mother cried. "You think that I gave you my everlasting love and vowed myself to you before God just so that you could stand here and tell me that you want to leave your family behind? To leave your kids behind? For goodness sake, Jackson, listen to yourself!"
"I am listening to myself, Tam. That's why I have to go."
He then stepped forward and gently cupped her cheek in his big palm. The gesture was almost intimate, like he was about to kiss her passionately and than sweep her off of her feet again like he had so long ago. But it was far from that. Even then, just nudging his way into slowly becoming an adult, Alek understood how all of this would end. No persuasion in the world could have kept Jackson Grayson in his home with his family. Not his kids, and not even the devotion of his wife.
With a look of pity in his dark eyes, his father gently kissed his mothers forehead and whispered something softly into her ear. She sucked in a breath, trying to keep her crying at bay, and stood as still as a statue.
His father grabbed for the suitcase he packed and opened the door. To Alek, he looked like a dark angel. The mid-morning sunlight streamed over his whole body in one dazzling moment. It illuminated his still youthful face, and reflected off of his shiny black leather jacket. He was dark and light at the same time- And he was abandoning them.
The realization of what her husband was about to do slammed into his mother like a truck. Alek saw it in her face the instant the door opened. She understood what he was doing. It was in that moment that his mother fluttered back to life. She wailed- it was still the worst sound that Alek had ever known. The agony and absolute desperation and sadness within it made his blood run cold just to think about it. In a final attempt to get him to stay She flung herself at her departing husband.
"Jackson, Please! Stop it right now. Don't go, don't go."
She clawed onto his bicep, trying to get him to stay put. But his mother was a small woman in both height and weight. Yet even if she wasn't,it wouldn't have mattered. He would have paid her no mind. It was as if he didn't hear or feel her. He just walked and continued walking.
The sound of his mother's cries didn't stop him. The sound of he and his brother running down the stairs, both crying vehemently and trying to reach him did not stop him. The confused tone of his brother calling out for their dad to come back made Jackson glimpse over his shoulder once- Only once, damn the bastard, before looking away with something like shame etched on his face and continued off.
It was the last time Alek saw his father.
And from then on, life had never been the same. He had fallen into an almost numb state for the years passing. During that time, he somehow managed to get caught in the wrong crowd. It was like he was straight out of those cheesy "what could go wrong" documentaries that got played at his school. He was in the wrong place at the right time, when he was most vulnerable, which was immediately after his dad left.
The new friends he made introduced him to a way of life that made him forget about his past troubles- about his now shell of a mother who was either always working, or always terribly drunk. About his poor little brother, who would lock himself in his room as soon as he got home from school and stare at his blank white walls for hours until he fell asleep. About the horrible lonliness that the house always seemed to hold, reminding them that their father was gone and would not be coming back. They introduced him to an escape.
To drugs.
Drugs that made him feel more alive than what he had felt in a long time. Drugs that made him see the world like a Mario Kart game, or like he was drifting on clouds, or like he was riding a jetpack through the frigid artic waters with a polar bear in sunglasses as his companion. Drugs that made him feel weightless and... Happy.
He dabbled in a little of everything he could get his hands on; LSD, GHB, or commonly referred to as Georgia Home Boy, for when he would consistently have sleep attacks, weed-anything he and his friends could grab. Anything that could make him forget the fastest.
It was only last year, at the age of sixteen, that he had a real eye opener about just how much the drugs were starting to not only affect him, but his brother as well. At first, he didn't really notice anything was happening. His brother, only ten years old at the time, had began to become curious of what it was that he was doing with the strange substances he kept stashed in his room. He'd waited until Alek had left the house one faithful day before he decided to creep into his room and have a look around. However, Alek had forgotten his favorite lighter on his dresser in his haste to meet up with his friends. He had raced home angrily, mad at himself for forgetting his brand new favorite lighter. His younger brother didn't count on him coming back.
Therefore, since he didnt know he would return so soon, Ty didn't think about him walking back into his room just as he curiously downed a handful of the strange white pills that Alek had stashed under his pillow in a little plastic baggie.
Alek had stood in his doorway stunned. He remembered a white noise filling his ears, like sirens clashing through the night had been brought to his head. He remembered his brothers inital shock at seeing him-the wide look of surprise in his innocent eyes before it was replaced with something else. Something far worse.
Alek couldn't reach him fast enough.
Ty twitched once before he dropped like a stone to the floor, shaking and spazing uncontrollably like a fish out of water. Spit flew at rapid fire out of his mouth, and his head unwillingly lulled to his side. Alek cried as he curled his big hands through his brothers short hair. With the most gentleness he had ever used in his life, he lifted Ty's head up and cradled the back of his small, fragile skull. With the other hand, he quickly reached into his pocket for his phone, and dialed 911.
Downstairs, his Mother lay passed out drunk.
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