Bobby grabbed his favourite stool so he could get to work. He was only eight, so some things were just beyond his reach. Today's menu was something slight, mac and cheese chicken and boiled vegetables. Walking home after school was the norm in these parts. The school was practically in the neighbourhood. What wasn’t quite the norm was a boy of eight cooking a full-scale meal. But it was survival. And, more importantly, his normal. Being so young he had a deep-seated fear that his parents would starve to death if he didn’t feed them.
They were social drunks. They somehow managed to be perfectly sober during working hours then after that just plunge into madness. They only beat on each other. Their friends were enablers, found it funny how they went at each other. It was all their fault. Bobby hated every minute of it, but he wasn’t stupid. Even at his age, he realised his parents weren’t paying rent. They had good jobs, and even being who they were, were steadily climbing the ranks at their company.
And, surprisingly enough, they never did anything bad to him that perfectly normal parents do to their children. So if he had to cook and pretend his family was perfect, he could do that. He could clean the house and do homework by himself and maybe one day also have a good enough job to help them get better. The only problem was the noise.
They would destroy the house; argue at such levels that he found it hard to concentrate but somehow not loud enough for the neighbours to care. He did what most kids would do. Take it all and stuff it inside. He’d turn up his music and pretend it wasn’t going on. Hide in his room and go to school and be a normal child. He tried to block out the noise by cooking and doing well in school and finding calm in cleaning up after them. This was his life. His normal.
So he concentrated on the task at hand, getting the food cooked and ready and then doing his school work in his room. The easiest way to block out the sounds of mouths, punches thrown and sexual pleasures. His family wasn’t perfect but was any family truly perfect? He didn’t know. What he did know was that his pasta was looking ready to be strained.
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