Kyle’s Story 2: Problems with Similes and Smiles
Yet, money, privilege, and his mansion, that was Kyle’s life. It was all he knew. He’d grown up in a mansion with marble floors polished to the sheen of a frozen lake. He’d grown up eating catered meals. He’d grown up sprinting, feet pumping through infinite, winding hallways, climbing up and down double staircases. He’d grown up in a house that had an elevator, and a private elevator, too, for anyone who didn’t feel like walking up the stairs.
He’d swim whenever he wanted, in the indoor or outdoor pools, and he’d played hide and seek with his sister in the multitude of rooms.
Some of his favorite memories were zipping around in his red mini-Lambo, the little electric car that he’d ride around the house and estate grounds.
It was paradise for a kid, having that much space to play, that much space for his imagination to run wild.
He couldn’t remember a Christmas when he didn’t get exactly the gifts he wanted. It really was all he knew, that sort of life.
But it’s not that way anymore… It would probably never be that way again, and he wasn’t sure what to think about it, aside from guilt about his anger and anger about his guilt. His ugly paradox of lost privilege.
And recently he’d been ruminating, raging with an increasingly disturbing frequency.
Sitting into a mauve lounge chair in the lobby, his lips quiver. He’s silently fuming, telepathically violent. He wonders why his parents can’t be normal. Why he couldn’t have been a normal kid. Why couldn’t his dad just have worked in an office? His dad was never around when he was growing up. He was always off playing football. Football, football, football. Everything orbited around football. His dad’s schedule, his dad’s diet, his dad’s mood. It was football. Football and football.
And it was football that made his dad look and walk like Frankenstein. Why did his dad have to be Frankenstein? Why?
And why couldn’t his mom look, well, more, like, maybe a mom, instead of an aging Playboy playmate, or something from a MILF porn video… He couldn’t even count how many jabs he’d heard from classmates, growing up, about his “red-hot” mom. Really, although practically every kid in his school had a pretty mom, and there were plenty of trophy wives in his neighborhood, his mom rose above them all.
Maybe this was because she actually WAS a Playboy Playmate, his mom. Yuck!!! Why?! Why couldn’t millions of creepy guys NOT have seen his mom naked. Yuck! Yuck! And triple yuck!
Truth be told, Kyle has always secretly hated his mother. He despises her as a person. She pays him scant attention. Despite everything, everything he’s done for her, such as fixing her computers, fixing her phones, helping her friends with every tech need, despite all of that, Kyle never feels truly appreciated. He’s just her IT Boy. He’s not even a person. He’s a tool. A thing to be used and discarded. That’s what he thinks of his mother. She’s a taker. She’s a user.
His mother is vapid. She’s an empty, soulless bitch, and he hates everything about her. He detests her sickening, shrill voice, a voice that reminds him of a sharp object being pulled over glass.
He hates her appearance, too, and thinks she looks like a blowup sex doll. He hates how she walks, how she arches her body, with her breasts thrown forward and butt held high, and her inappropriate, downright slutty clothes. He hates how waxy and artificial she looks in her heavy whore makeup and he hates her whorish perfume. Its pungency makes him sick. She makes him sick. But he’d never say any of this to anyone IRL. He and his friends online all hate their mothers. Kyle hates anyone who doesn’t hate their mother.
Kyle doesn’t voice too many opinions. He keeps things bottled up. He keeps quiet. He’s nondescript. He’s not very noticeable. He’s got one of those faces that look like a million other faces. He’s a generic White person. He’s not ugly or handsome. He’s bland as the background of a restaurant scene in a movie. He just looks like an extra.
The only thing that was ever noticeable about him is his head. He’s got a small head for his body. His neck is long too. A bit too long. The kids in elementary school would joke that he looks like a bird, with his long neck and small head. Or like one of those long neck village people in Asia somewhere. Or they’d joke that a witch doctor had shrunk his head. So later he’d grown his hair long, to his shoulders, to hide his head and neck. And it’d worked. Nowadays he is normal looking. He’s so normal that he’s practically invisible.
Kyle only wears black shirts and black jeans. He hates any shirt, jacket, hat, or any article of clothing with a logo. He hates advertisements and doesn’t want to be a walking advertisement for anyone.
Kyle’s a quiet man. He hates complainers, whiners. He’s forward-thinking. He’s a computer nerd. He’s entering his senior year of high school. He’s planning to major in computer science. He spends his time coding and building a website that builds websites. He spends his time online, chatting with other nerds, and gaming. He enjoys violent video games like horror video games and shoot-em-up games most.
He has a morbid fascination with horror films, slasher films, serial killers and mass killers. He’s a member of a “Columbiner” group, dedicated to all things Columbine massacre…
Though he likes horror movies and murderers, he hates martial arts and he especially detests football…
He finds it annoying to move, switch schools, particularly in his senior year, but since most of his activities are online, geography doesn’t concern him too much…
Perhaps he’ll be moving more and more often. He’s joined an e-sports league and dreams of gaming professionally. One day, he could be a famous gamer, like Ninja, touring the world.
He’d then wear clothes with logos, but only for brands he likes, and only if they pay him lots of cash.
He wants to make tons of cash playing e-sports and then give away most of it, fly to India and throw wads of money to those people living in slums. That’s what he’d do if he becomes a famous gamer.
He doesn’t know what his dad thinks about his e-sports aspirations. He doesn’t know how his dad, a retired professional athlete, thinks about gamers.
Truth is, he doesn’t know his dad. But he doesn’t hate his dad, like he hates his mom. Really, he doesn’t quite know what to think of his dad. He and his dad never talked much. Like him, his dad is a quiet man. Two quiet men don’t often share many thoughts.
But Kyle does wonder how his dad feels about him… as a person… and about him never having a girlfriend. About him having thoughts about boys that are… different…
He’s afraid to speak with his dad, in a way, because of his dad’s imposing height and stature. He grew tall but never grew to be the height or size of his dad, neither did his brother or sister. To Kyle, his dad has always been a tad scary.
He doesn’t speak much with his mom or siblings either. He doesn’t care to speak with anyone, at all, face to face. He prefers to speak through machines. He enjoys the buttons, filters, and sounds, the images and videos. He likes memes, creating and sharing them.
He dreams of implanting a chip in his head, becoming a machine. He wants to be a cyborg. He doesn’t think his parents would like that. But he doesn’t really care. He won’t tell them. He’ll just become a cyborg and that’ll be that.
One of his projects is a freeware brain chip he’s developing…
He is afraid of ghosts. He knows his dad doesn’t believe in it, but his mom does. And he does. He’s built software, an app that he hopes to use to trap a spirit, like in the old classic Ghostbusters movies (not the crappy remake, DO NOT GET HIM STARTED. He wrote the highest-rated takedown EVER of that movie on Rotten Tomatoes.)
His ghostbusting app is sort of a vacuum. It’s an app on your phone that emits a white noise frequency used by ghosthunters. The frequency can attract the ghosts and then draw them forth and snare them in a storage box that looks like a video player. It has an option to upload captured ghosts to the cloud or share them on social media.
Once the ghosts are trapped inside the video box, which looks like a YouTube video, he’s planned several different backdrops and environments for the spirits- oceans, forests, prison cells, everything, depending on the personality and background of the ghost…
If a spirit is nice, he thinks of trying to find a way to send it to the afterlife. Perhaps he could email, forward the spirit to a medium or priest.
His software is untested, though. And he’s not sure if it will work.
