Life was hard when my stepmother treated me like a slave. Life got considerably worse when I no longer had a stepmother to order me around. I was 13, my dad was out looking for a job and I had to figure out how to cook dinner. Sure, I had helped my stepmother cook dinner before, but I didn't know how to cook a whole meal on my own! My dad would just give me money, send me to the supermarket and get whatever. Being raised a snob, I didn't just want to get frozen shit or toast. I bought fresh meat and vegetables and pasta. I tried to cook real food!
My first meals barely qualified as edible. But when you're the only one in the house who cooks and your only other option is starving to death, you'll turn into a really quick learner! My brother and I did everything. Clean the dishes, clean the house, take care of the shopping, do the laundry, iron our clothes and so on and so forth. And our house was massive. Three floors, a basement, four bathrooms. I'm not making this up. The guest bathroom was on the bottom floor, the floor above had two bathrooms, one with a tub, the other one with a shower. The top floor was basically a massive bedroom with its own bar, counter, stools and everything, as well as a luxurious bathroom. I think the house used to belong to some rich dentist or something and he really liked bathrooms. I don't understand what the three of us wanted with such a place, but maybe my dad was hoping for my stepmother to move back in. She never did.
I spent the following year in a new school and it scarred me for life. First of all, we moved to an entirely new province, whole different part of Germany, where kids were taught different things in school at a different pace. I fucking sucked. I had no idea what the hell they were teaching. I may as well have attended school in China. What's worse, I was constantly tired, because I had to cook, shop, clean the house and do the laundry. I simply didn't have the energy to catch up on all the new crap I had to learn in my new school. And since I was the new kid, the other kids would mock me relentlessly. If you think getting bullied by one kid in school is bad, imagine being mocked by everyone you go to school with, including your teachers. My English teacher would fail me because of my shitty handwriting. I handed in perfect vocabulary tests and she'd highlight mistakes which weren't any. And it's not like I could have talked to anybody. What was I supposed to say? "I didn't do my homework, because I had to run to the shops, buy food, cook for my dad and my brother, iron his shirts for work and then I fell asleep, because I was exhausted?" Yeah, right.
I had exactly one friend back then. He was the kid they used to beat up before I showed up. He took pity on me and I spent as much time over at his place as I could after school. We played Street Fighter II: Turbo. All the damn time. I'm fucking awesome at Street Fighter until this day and it's all thanks to him. All we did was try to beat the game on the default difficulty setting, which was hard as balls at the time. We sucked. We lost. Sometimes we'd lose a fight 20 times in a row. But we didn't quit, we didn't start over on easy mode. We kept losing, kept sucking it up, kept getting better until we managed to get all the way to the end. Nowadays I can beat that game in a few minutes I spend on the shitter. I bet most people who enjoy fighting games can.
Too bad being good at Street Fighter doesn't teach you any real fighting skills. I was pale, I was chubby and if I had low self-esteem and crappy social skills before, then my year in that school has ruined me for life. I remember when one girl got up after class, walked up to me out of nowhere and tried to slap me in the face. Just like that. I had never seen anything like that before. I caught her hand and there's a whole lot of stuff I would have loved to do to her at the time, but what was the point? It didn't help that even my own father would make fun of me for being fat. Yeah well, turns out that all of this "clean your plate or there'll be no sunshine tomorrow" and "if you don't eat your dinner, then you can't have ice cream" nonsense is the perfect way to raise somebody into developing an eating disorder. I can't throw away leftovers until this day and I'm fucking 35!
I was terrified of school. I tried to make myself throw up, so my dad would let me stay at home. I tried to skip class, but my brother went to the same school on the same bus, so there was nothing I could do. Strangely enough, he transitioned into the new school just fine and never had any problems making friends or dividing his time between school and chores. I just couldn't fucking cope. And at that point, not even my beloved videogames seemed to help much. I knew I had to go back to school and face the mobbing. I knew I hadn't done my homework. I knew I was too stupid to even understand half of the shit they were teaching in class. I just didn't want to be there.
Of course the people looking for my dad didn't stop showing up. By then I was so used to telling them my dad wasn't there, I wasn't even nervous anymore. Friends and family had to ring three or four times and hang up again to signalize they weren't debt collectors. My dad said he didn't really know what to do about the situation and that he might apply for social benefits. The fucking snob. How about going to a job center, signing up for unemployment support and, I dunno, actually looking for a job? He was out most of the day saying he was looking for work or whatever, but I honestly don't know what he did or where he went. All I knew was that I couldn't open the door or answer the phone or talk to anyone about how school was completely destroying me.
And that's when the guy next door died of cancer. They were a family of four. Mom, dad, a girl about my age and a boy, bit younger than my brother. Their dad had been in the final stages of his cancer, they looked after him and eventually he passed away. During his lifetime, he was a lying, cheating, violent bastard, who fucked around, got hammered and threatened his family with a gun. How and why the mom decided to look after him when he was terminally ill, I'll never understand. She said he remained an asshole till the very end, only asking for forgiveness a few moments before it was all over. Suffice to say, the kids were even more fucked up than my brother and I. Compared to what they had to go through, my life was a total cakewalk!
I really liked the girl next door, Mona. She thought my brother and I were weirdos for playing videogames all day and she was right. But I liked talking to her. She asked me if I thought her breasts were too small. We were teenagers. I'm male. I have a pulse. I like breasts. I had female friends before, but none of them had breasts. Because we were kids. So that was nice and new. Looking back, I think we're very different and things never would have worked out. Also, she ultimately made out with my brother, years later. But whatever may or may not have happened all came to an end, when the widow next door made a move on my dad. Of all things.
They were both on a rebound, so naturally, my dad spent lots of time over at their house. He turned into a complete stranger. I saw him fucking cook dinner! He has never done that when he was with my mom or my stepmother! He sucked in his gut. He spent time with her kids and listened to her shit when he couldn't even stand to listen to my problems in school. He listened to Mona's stupid Kelly Family albums! I had been incredibly near-sighted for over a year and begged him to buy me some glasses, because I couldn't read the blackboard in school and he fucking ignored me!
It didn't take long and my dad informed us that we'd all move in together. All of us living together in their house. Good thing her late husband was filthy rich, because the day my dad hooked up with the neighbour was also the day the debt collectors stopped showing up.
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