or just, Outside

Larry had been abused at the tender age of eleven. He tried telling his loved ones about it. They did not care.

So he ran away. Into the abyss of his mind, to begin with.

In school he kept to himself. Look at that lonely boy, his classmates would say, he must be a loser. Larry knew the answer to that chemistry problem, chemistry was simple. No point in answering, though. Much simpler than life.

His classmates played basketball, a nice sport without too much contact. And girls liked basketball.

Life at home was worse than the abuse.

Popa worked in an office. Larry was told by Ma that Popa wrote things on paper because these things needed to be written. Just what this was, and how Popa came about this expertise, Larry knew not. Ma, though, wanted to believe that there was something in this and that was good enough for Larry, it had to be.

Ma said the Economy was bad: this was something Larry could not wrap his mind around. Someone or other had said: It's the economy, Stupid! and Popa made a point of this on a regular basis and he, Larry, was not stupid. But for the life of him Larry could not understand how this economy decided things.

Popa was always very serious - when times are hard men must be serious and when times are easy men must be serious, life will be hard again.

Maybe the economy had been abused.

Sometimes - when Larry sat on the carpet in his room and he watched wind move leaves on the tree outside - he felt normal.

Ma worked on a headset connected to a computer. She called so many people every day that people would often stop talking to her before she finished her first sentence, and this increased the number of people she called, because she had to call people without stopping. Ma said she had to be happy with every single person, even the really bad ones (because they were customers) but the upside was that it developed her character. Much later in life, when Larry was old and Ma died, Larry learned that Ma had been intensely medicated throughout most of her life. Maybe she had been abused. On the day of her funeral Earl told him Ma ingested, is the term Earl used, twelve pills every day when she worked on a computer.

Work was as important to Larry's parents as Larry's abuse at a tender age, and the secrecy of this unexplainable matter, were to Larry.

Earl was a party animal. He was Larry's older half-brother by two-and-a-half years. Earl was high a lot.

Every morning Larry woke with euphoria on his mind, a yearning for possibility, a new day, to discover that the maze ended things.