Driving the Demon

DRIVING THE DEMON

LORCA DAMON

Copyright © 2013 Lorca Damon

Smashwords edition

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system—except by a reviewer for the purposes of a book review only—without permission from the author.

For my kids, who still have to read Catcher in the Rye but who hopefully don’t ever have to discover who they are the hard way.

CHAPTER 1

Three huge things happened all on the same day: my grandfather died, my parents split up, and I got suspended from school for five days for being a terrorist. There’s a whole lot of explanations missing, but that’s basically what happened.

I was at school during all of this, so probably around the same time that my dad came home and found out my mom had been having an affair for ages with some random neighbor who lived next door to my grandfather, that was right about the time my science project exploded in my locker.

Since it was almost Halloween and since I really do care about my grades and stuff even though my parents don’t think I do, I decided to carve a pumpkin for my science project. The only problem is carving a pumpkin isn’t all that amazing because anybody older than a kindergartner can do it. And it wouldn’t really be considered a science project, it’d be more like an art project or something. I needed to get a really good grade on it because if I didn’t have a super great presentation I wouldn’t get at least a B, and without at least a B on my project I wasn’t going to pass science.

I completely get it that people wouldn’t believe I care that much about my grades if I’m stuck trying to explode a pumpkin in front of the whole class to make a good impression on the teacher in order to even get a passing grade in her stupid course. Ordinarily, I would think any guy who needed to do that much work on one project after blowing off everything that whole semester would be kind of a loser. It’s just that I have trouble focusing in class and being quiet and generally holding still sometimes so I don’t always hear the homework assignments and then I get a zero the next day when I don’t bring it with me. I’ve always had this problem.

But to be fair to me, it’s not just at school. You hear about those kids who can play video games for hours at a time but can’t sit through a fifty-five minute history class without causing all kinds of disruptions or getting in trouble. I swear, that’s not me. I do want to get good grades but as soon as the teacher starts talking, she’ll say something about Lewis and Clark, which will make me remember that our neighbor Mr. Clark still has my dad’s rake, which will make me remember that I didn’t rake the yard like he told me to last weekend, which makes me remember that I also didn’t clean out the back of the car like he told me to last weekend, which makes me remember that he told me I’m not getting a car for my birthday because my grades are bad and I keep getting detention. By the time I’ve thought about all fourteen things associated with Lewis and Clark, I’m in a whole other world and the teacher isn’t even making noise in my head any more.

Then she’ll call on me to answer a question, just to see if I zoned out again, and when I don’t know what she’s talking about the other kids laugh so I make some stupid joke to cover up the fact that this wench knows I wasn’t paying attention but she’s gonna ask me if I was anyway.

Teachers don’t like jokes. Ever. So that’s usually when the detention slips start flying. Stupid Lewis and Clark.

But I really did want to pass chemistry and our final project counted for a certain huge percentage of our grade, so I looked all over the internet for a really cool science project that I could do at school and that I didn’t have to be a genius to pull off. That’s when I found the self-carving pumpkin project. Even though I don’t get really good grades sometimes, I am pretty smart or at least that’s what those tests that we have to take at the end of every school year where we have to bubble in the little circles for days say, so when the guy on the website explained exactly how he made this pumpkin carve its own face in front of everybody I knew exactly what he meant.

Mrs. Hudson, my chemistry teacher, isn’t really a hateful person. I think she kind of even wanted to help me pass her class, but I used up every chance she was willing to give me during the first half of the semester. Or maybe she didn’t want to fail me because then she’d have to have me in her class again. Either way, I don’t care why she was trying to be helpful, the point is, she even offered to help me find some possible projects I could do. Maybe she thinks I’m hot. I don’t know, you hear about those teachers once in a while.

So when I told her I already had a project in mind, she was completely thrilled. I gave her the list of stuff I needed from her, which was mostly just the chemical. She kind of looked at me funny and she asked me if I had already tested out my project at home, but I had to tell her I hadn’t personally done it because I don’t have any calcium carbide, but that I had practiced all the rest of the steps and that I had watched it happen on YouTube.

The only problem is my project was supposed to blow the eyes, nose, and mouth off a pumpkin sometime during fourth period, and even that part was supposed to be outside. I had all the stuff in my locker and somehow the pumpkin kind of sweated in there, probably because I put it on the porch last night so I wouldn’t forget it and then I brought it in to school and the heat’s on in here. When the pumpkin warmed up I guess it caused a bunch of little water droplets to fall down in the can of calcium carbide, and when the whole pumpkin got warm from being in my metal locker, the gas it gave off kind of exploded the whole thing out into the hallway. Pieces of my locker were all over the floor, and pumpkin chunks were stuck to the foam ceiling tiles all the way down to the end of the wing.

What the hell, Caid? my best friend Doug yelled between really loud laughs. He has a crazy laugh, but you kind of get used to it since this guy is always laughing about something.

It’s nothing, I fired back at him, trying to scoop up strands of pumpkin off the floor in front of my locker and shove them back in the bottom chunk of the pumpkin since that was all that was left of it. I really didn’t process it at the time that my locker didn’t have a door anymore, my instinct was just to try to hide the evidence.

What do you mean it’s nothing? Look at this place! Tell me you did this on purpose! Doug kept on laughing, even as he bent down to help me with the squash removal.

Of course not! Now help me pick it up! I barked back.

You can’t pick this up! Your locker just puked a pumpkin! Doug was still laughing so hard that he wasn’t even really trying to get the oozing pumpkin slime off the floor. All I could think about was how I was going to fail chemistry now since I didn’t have a project anymore and how my dad was going to lose it when he got my report card.

Like everybody else in the hallway wasn’t already just standing around pointing and laughing at the spewed pumpkin everywhere, when all the teachers came running out to find out what blew up they saw several of the lockers on either side of mine had their doors blown off, too, and it just so happened that one of the scariest guys in the entire school was now staring into his own doorless locker at the eight bags of pot he was planning on selling that afternoon. All the teachers were staring at the pot, too, at least the ones that weren’t picking pieces of pumpkin out of their hair from where it was dripping off the ceiling. I don’t think they were impressed with him or with me.

My theory is the principal was just looking for an excuse to boot me from school because after my locker blew up I got called to the office to explain myself, only he had already had the suspension slip written out and my parents were already on the way there.

Sadly, it started out okay, with him saying stuff like, What exactly were you trying to accomplish? and, So you intended the pumpkin to explode? He even nodded his head while I talked, looking all understanding and stuff. But then I looked on his desk and there was a suspension notice, already filled out and everything.

So even though he lets me run my mouth like an idiot trying to explain why a whole section of lockers was blown to pieces in the hallway, and even though my explosion actually helped them nail a high school drug dealer, he knew all along he was going to suspend me. That’s cold.

The look on my parents’ faces when they got to the school was enough to scare me onto the straight and narrow for the rest of my life. Of course, I couldn’t know right then why my mom’s eyes were puffy from crying and my dad’s face was totally white, or why neither of them was talking. I thought all of this was from the shame of their only child getting himself suspended and probably arrested on top of it.

When the principal had us all sit down for a minute and he started running his mouth about how I tried to burn down the school, how I’d brought a bomb into the building, how I must be seriously disturbed and was my medication dosage maybe not high enough, my parents just sat there. They didn’t speak up for me or anything. I’ve never been in trouble like that before, other than maybe a handful of detentions over the years for talking in class when I shouldn’t be, but I’ve never skipped school or pulled any kind of stupid pranks or anything serious like that. But they just let me take the fall.

It wasn’t until we got home that they told me about Grandpa. At the time they left out the part where my mom has been cheating on my dad and my dad has already packed a couple of suitcases and was going to stay in a hotel. I didn’t find that out until the next morning, Day One Of My Official Suspension, and I only learned that part because me and Mom were at Grandpa’s house getting some stuff for him to wear in his casket when the neighbor-guy-slash-boyfriend comes in and starts hugging all over my mom because he wasn’t expecting me to be there. I found the two of them standing right there in the living room practically making out when I came walking in with the shoes my mom sent me to get from Grandpa’s closet.

Seriously? He has to wear shoes in the coffin? That’ll be the first thing to go when I die. And I really don’t think he even wanted to wear them, even when was alive.

Grandpa was a hippie. Not just a peace-lover or an environmentalist, but an actual Flower Child, from the 60’s. Only he wasn’t the kind of hippie you see in pictures who is dancing around a campfire smoking pot with flowers in his hair while somebody else played the guitar. He was the angry kind. The kind who went to anti-war protests and who marched in Selma, Alabama. He lived in some crazy part of San Francisco for a while and he was at Woodstock and he even started telling me all about it once only my dad made him change the subject.

I think that right there might have been one of the biggest problems with Mom and Dad. Mom grew up with this guy as her dad, so she spent her whole childhood hearing about how the establishment was trying to kill the free thinkers and how the government was letting the big corporations rape the planet, then she went off to college to major in literature to become a writer someday, but instead ended up meeting my dad, who even back then was just destined to become the vice president of the bank where he works.

They were probably doomed from the start.

Sometime really early that morning my Grandpa died in his sleep, or at least that’s what we think happened. The real problem is the neighbor guy who checks on Grandpa once in a while noticed that his newspaper was still just sitting there at the end of his driveway and since it was really cold he thought maybe it was too cold for an old man to go out to get it. The thing is, the neighbor is about forty-eight years old or something and Grandpa was like seventy, so they’re both kind of old. Anyway, he was nice enough to pick up the paper and take it to the door. But when he got to the side door that comes in from the garage, the one Grandpa uses because he doesn’t go through his living room to the front door, this neighbor noticed that Grandpa’s car was still there but he wasn’t answering the door.

Long story short, the neighbor guy called my mom, who gave him permission to go break into Grandpa’s house to see if he was okay, and then of course, he wasn’t okay. He was still in his bed, and he had died sometime during the night.

Well, the neighbor guy is such a giver that he decided he should go tell my mom in person, instead of calling her on the phone to tell her the bad news about her dad. And I guess that’s pretty decent of him. Except, am I the only one who is curious about how this guy not only knew my mom’s phone number but also knew where we lived so he could drive over there?

Turns out, this wasn’t the first time he’d talked to my mom. Or been to my house. Since he’s my Grandpa’s neighbor and everything he sees my mom all the time. And they’d struck up a nice little friendship, the kind that my dad didn’t know anything about.

So when he’s at my house consoling my mom while she cries, the people at the hospital ended up calling my dad since his cell phone number was in Grandpa’s file from back when he threw his back out a couple of years ago and they told him the whole story about his father-in-law. Dad went flying home to be with my mom and found her crying and practically sitting in her boyfriend’s lap. That didn’t go over well.

Of course, I’m imagining that’s how all this happened because I was at school when it all took place. All I know about that day came from overhearing bits and pieces of screaming and door slamming and my mom on the phone crying some more while she talked to God-knows-who.

I wonder who she does talk to. It used to be her mom because they’d spend hours on the phone even though they lived in the same town and saw each other all the time, but my Grandma died three or four years ago. I don’t even know who she talks to when I’m at school. I mean, she’s not a loser, so she must have friends. I just don’t know who they are.

But anyway, when I went to grab those ridiculous shoes and Mom and the neighbor guy stopped kissing