People walk around pilling on their debts.
Wearing their mire like shackles and necklaces,
Talking ‘bout nothing, wasting on their breath,
Little carefree lives, not thinkin' of Death.

Do you get the significance of “contradictory”? Like when you say something and its opposite in the same phrase? It’s called dichotomy. Well, a “private social care center” is a good example of dichotomy. I just could completely hear the catching phrase:

“We take care of your kids… and your money.”

In theory, it was something one could call a boarding house. In more crude words, it was a dump for garbage-kids, and nothing more. But isn't social care a public service, you will ask? In theory yes, it is, but since all funding from the governmental budget had been cut, all together with any public administration, the only service still in function was the police and their base was literally flying 24/7 above our heads. In short, Magdad City was more or less running on a wild autopilot where people started taking advantage of the gap left to make money. So it is not like those centers were better. It is just they were the only options available.

Mainly, the children sent there had family or something close to it, but nobody could take care of them. And I say “could” because I want to stay polite. Let’s picture this closely. There is a lot of surplus offspring in Magdad – poor people rarely have a negative growth rate – but not enough hand and will to hold on to them. That’s the main reason for brats to turn bad, in the end. Stray kittens die in the street or become wild to survive. But sometimes, they land in a shelter when someone has enough money to waste. Which is why no one sent me there at first. My parents were on a run with stolen goods and my grandmother just didn’t want to squander her money on me, though she wasn’t lacking it. In fact, she never spent it on anything. If there was something she was herding with care, it was probably that. She just liked checking on her bank account to see the amount growing but she never seemed like she wanted to do something with it. She only used it for the real necessary. And, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t necessary in her life.

Oddly, being thrown away didn’t turn out to be a bad thing. I got sent to a place with a bed where I could sleep in every day, and meals that I wasn’t forced to steal. It was the first place I called “home”. Not “my” home. But it was still “home” enough for me to live carelessly.

Of course, like any social center, they sent me to school with the other kids. Surprisingly, while I had never stepped in such a building or its like before, I was the most advanced child in my class. Nothing to write home about; I was the only one that actually stayed.

School remains school, but slum school is as useful as a hairless broom. Nobody cares, not even the teachers. And my classmates were more interested in the outside life than spending hours stuck in a room, learning things that would never save them. So better learn from the street than the school. That’s another of our laws.

But for me, it went differently. My change of life structure and responsibilities forced me to find another way out.

My integration in the center went as anyone could assume: I was mostly on my own, minding my own business with no concern for anyone. I was so used to being alone that I never felt the urge to socialize. Which of course made me more noticeable to my caretakers. So, while the others already had formed small packs and learned how to twist the rules, I was, almost comically, hit by them every single time duties were on call. As if the adults decided to solely focus their efforts on my capture because the other kids had long since left the game.

I tried many times to escape and join back the street but I ended being the easy diversion for my peers to succeed in their sneaking out. So while all the kids knew how to run free, I was the only one kept proudly by our wardens and brought to school like a trophy, to prove their system wasn’t a failure.

At the beginning, I wondered why adults even bothered and spent most of my time plotting my next escape scheme instead of actually learning… Though, befriending any of the kids at the center might have been the solution to my problem. But it was a path I wasn’t willing to take as friendship was an unstable variable.

So I dreamed of freedom, tied up to my chair, until my head went numb. During those long hours, I would think of the Seagull guy and the group I used to tail, wondering if any remembered me.

One afternoon, while my math teacher was jabbering in his corner, the cold weather outside, mixed with the classroom suffocating heat, turned my after lunch coma in the worst battle against sleepiness I can remember. I dozed off so hard, my head hit my desktop. The third time it happened, so loudly he could no longer ignore it, my teacher looked at me aloof and, since I was the only one in class, asked if I wanted to do something else.

I guess it was a day “without” for him too. We went to the school library which only had its name to stand for it, seeing how the shelves were devoid of content. Still I grabbed the first book I saw and started reading. Then I took another. And unnoticeable, I stopped imagining escape plans and wondering about the Seagulls or the street.

All of them became obsolete because I had found another way to be free, hiding behind the cover of my book.

Honestly, I never thought I was any different than any other kids. It was true that I felt myself riding in a different wavelength than the rest of the people and didn’t really get along with anyone. Even during my time with the Seagull gang, I was barely interacting with them: we were both evolving in a mutual tolerance of one another. So in view of this, reading was my best option. Don’t get me wrong. I like reading and always have. Even when I was still living with my grandmother. She never taught me, of course. It was the old ladies from the beauty salon across the street.

Unfortunately, once I had read the few books of the living room, my literature was reduced to a collection of used magazines and smut prints, which is why I never thoroughly explored this option until then. But the pornos being boringly repetitive, I had a great time with the sexo-psychological articles. It gave me another view of women kind. Not that I was that much interested in it. Thanks to that I was a master in makeup, breastfeeding and period management… which wasn’t really helpful for a young boy.

Thus, I found myself relatively glad to go to school. I had access to enough books to keep me occupied but it never occurred to me that I could use it to improve my situation. I just kept on reading because the feeling of liberation I got from it was more satisfying than anything I experienced before. Thus, I went back every day, sat somewhere and read, even if the teacher wasn’t there, which happened to be more common than having class.

Sometimes my classmates showed up. When it was raining, when gangs were at it or when they had nothing else to do. Mostly, they played games, smoked, chatted about this and that and were noisy. I was in the middle of them, reading and letting my ears capture the daily concern of a normal slum kid. It didn’t really hit the score; but listening to them, every event seemed to be the most important thing ever. Mostly the topics turned around parental abuse, drugs, fights, crushes, sports and other trifles. I’m sure that anyone from outside of Magdad City would have found it sad. I did too. But dully sad because this was our “daily”, our “normal”. It was miserable, yet, every single time, I caught myself thinking: “This is boring”. I bet my attitude didn’t help them to talk to me…

But none of them really hated me. Like for my grandmother or the Seagull guys, it was more of a mutual respectful ignorance of each other’s life. I never messed with them as much as they stayed away from me. However, once in a while, one of them would ask me to read something or tell them what we were supposed to study at the moment, and I would carry out the request, without thinking. I would tell them and for a few minutes, they would be listening to me. Those moments weren’t bad, I think. That didn’t make them my friends.

And I was fine with it.

Outlandishly, I managed to stay out of any kind of trouble or gang stuff all this time, while most of the kids started to deal and be active members at my age. Even as a teenager, my little world was reduced to my room, my class and my books that the school enjoyed to reload because finally someone was reading them.

Yet, sometimes when I stepped out of my world, pulling my eyes off my book, I was finding people by my side. At the beginning, only one or two, then four and after more. They kept on ignoring me, as if I was part of the furniture, but... I was inside their world and that simple fact was rather odd.

At that time, I was thirteen, still a bit short and skinny, with an old pair of glasses. I got them from my History teacher when he discovered that we were sharing the same sight. People easily said that I was gloomy; with my loose clothes and my brown thin hair, just long enough to bother me when I was reading.

The other boys were certainly manlier than me. When I was on duty at the center, I would often check them out while they were playing in the courtyard. In comparison to their bigger shoulders and taller shape, I seemed frail with my pale undersized body and my long sharp nose. And every now and then, I looked in the mirror, thinking that even if I never knew what my mother looked like, I had undoubtedly inherited her demeanor.

It wasn’t a bad look, I guess, when I freed my face from my hair. But where boys my age were dreaming of square jaws and thick cheek bones, I was more trending on the delicate and slender feature.

Hopefully I found nothing in common between me and my grandmother. Except maybe the dark almond eyes. A creepy reminder of her glimmering dismissal glare. I was so glad to hide them behind my glasses.

Thanks to my appearance, it was very easy for me to disappear and blend into the background. Me who, a few years before, was frightened at the idea of being mistaken for a piece of furniture, had then become an expert in doing so. At the same time, due to that, I was surprised the first time a girl asked me out. I mean, I tried my best to not be noticed by anyone and so far the world had established it would be my daily life, so I didn’t see any reason why I was suddenly noticed.

The girl seemed nice. Even pretty? But I was nowhere near interested, by nature, plus she smelled like trouble. And danger. I don’t know. My instilled “woman’s intuition”, maybe? Of course, I refused.

During the following year, two other girls approached me with the same intention. I said: “No, thanks” each time and went back to my reading, just eager to be left alone and barely aware of how rude I sounded. I guess we always pay back for our mistakes because all of this ended with me being asked one day:

“Bastian, are you gay?”

I admit: it surprises me when someone knows my name. But that time, I couldn’t really define what, from my name or the question, startled me the most. So, once again with my usual composure, I left my book and found, in front of me, ten people staring at me like if I was the new attraction of the year… or a piñata. I suddenly remembered the time I peed myself and, strangely, felt as comfortable as I was in my pants back then.

It was an afternoon during the month of May, a short while after my 14th supposed birthday. I was on the school rooftop, taking advantage of the coming summer sunlight and the rising warmth. The air was densely moist from a long morning rain. It smelled of wet bitumen and fresh dirt. May is a period of the year that I appreciate. I mean, starting from the 11th. The weather is nice and the light is not too bright to read outside. When it’s raining, the world seems to be falling apart. Afterwards, everything remains calm and quiet for a moment while the sky becomes clear blue.

The rooftop was the best scenic spot for the show. From this high, I could see the edge of the other buildings spreading all around me like a sea of metal sheets, filled with cables, antennas and posts. A human jungle. Each time I was looking at it, I almost managed to forget that this distorted ocean used to be a town.

But that time, my perfect paradise didn’t show up because of some intruders. The girl who asked me that rude question, I never talked to her before, but I heard her name was Dorothy.

She was blonde, with long curly hair and curious green eyes. She was wearing one of those loose t-shirts that let people imagine a lot of things. Surely, anyone would have labeled her as attractive as she had everything required to catch the attention. Nevertheless, the only thing that I found interesting about her was how her freckles contrasted with her tanned skin. Well, I know the expected thing here is to think she was hot. Unfortunately for me, I can’t… because her suggestion actually hit the bull’s eye.

Not that I was ever fully aware of it. It more occurred to me because of her stupid question as I never bothered myself with the topic. However I knew that I felt no attraction toward girls as far as I remembered while I would certainly have my eyes wander on my male inmates at the center. But it was so natural for me that I never wondered why. It was just how I was. No trivia, no fuss. Just a fact I assimilated. Although, being asked it, out loud, was a different matter to deal with. For the first time in my life, my nature became so clear that, at the same time, I got the question and the answer.

Still, I couldn’t let her go away with that. I looked at her cute little eyes and said with no less care and manners: “Yes, ma’am, I am.” And I served myself adding: “If you know anyone interested, let them know… I see my clients by appointments.”

Oh, I knew this prank was discourteous of me and what kind of effect it had produced on them. But their speechless faces were… priceless!

Only one person in the assistance didn’t react the same way. A Latino guy, two heads taller than me who was Dorothy’s boyfriend. I guessed it by her lying down on his arm, too clingy to be just friendly. He was staring at me, with a stoic face while blowing out his cigarette smoke; like if my diatribe was as much surprising as if I had said “Hey, it rained this morning!”

I thought he was stone but in his haze, I noticed a slight smirk. He got my provocation as it was; and certainly was the only one.

Proud of myself, I stood up, took my book and my bag, telling with a pompous voice, like a magician leaving his stage: “On that, gentle people, if you excuse me, I will take my leave!”

I turned away and left my flabbergasted public, knowing that in the middle of them, one was laughing as much as I was in my head.

I didn’t laugh long after that, though.