“How can he be a bag of shit if he buys you stuff?”

I snort. “Kid, you have a lot to learn about life. Just because someone buys you stuff doesn’t mean they actually care. Let’s use my parents for example—they give me things so I won’t bother them.” I shoot him a frown. “You know, I’m kind of like you in a way; I was shuffled around when I was young while my parents worked. They worked night and day, starting their business and inventing stuff. Stuff that made them a lot of money. I had tons of babysitters, all that shit, just like you. Sometimes I think they forgot they even had a son.”

“My mom doesn’t forget about me,” Kyle says with pride in his voice.

“No. She doesn’t. She’s working hard to keep a roof over your head. She’s a good mom.”

“Do your parents work a lot?”

“Kind of. They used to work day and night. Now my dad just works and my mom plays.”

Why the fuck am I telling this to an eleven-year-old?

“Where do they go?”

I have no idea. No longer care. “Anywhere they want.”

Any time. Any place. Any cost.

“Even on your birthday?”

“Yeah,” I say gruffly. Quietly now, “Even on my birthday.”

Birthdays. Christmas. Easter. Graduation. Move-in day my freshman year of college.

“But if they travel so much, where were you?”

“Nowhere, really.”

Here.

There.

Wherever they stuck me.

Wherever they weren’t.

Really, the only time I ever saw my parents was when their backsides were leaving while I cried. My mom used to hate when I cried. “It grates on my nerves,” she’d say in an even tone. I think my clingy behavior made it easy for her to climb into the car without a backward glance or a wave goodbye.

No kiss. No hug.

Obviously I didn’t realize when I was little that they were just fucking assholes, didn’t realize it was nothing personal.

All I knew was that it crushed me.

My mother didn’t do affection, even before success hit. She was too hurried for it. Always in motion, always on the go. Always moving a different direction. If I begged to be picked up as a toddler, I remember being shooed away, a burden.

I don’t know why they bothered having me; my mother had no business having kids.

When my parents started making money—serious money—the DVDs they’d play to keep me out of their way became nannies and caregivers. Aunts and uncles and people they paid to watch over me that really didn’t give a shit.

They were only in it for the money, too.

Then it really started rolling in, a windfall they earned when my father sold his first program to Microsoft. Bought stock in multiple dotcoms. Invested in several startups. This was back when I was very young, but I remember standing at the edge of the small kitchen listening to my mother cry with relief and joy. She cried about hard work and sacrifice. The long hours. The endless work days. The scrimping and saving, all on a bet that my father’s ideas would pay off.

And they did, twenty-fold.

But of all the sacrifices they’d made—cheap dinners, shithole rentals with a garage my dad could use as an office, walking everywhere because the car had to be sold to buy computer parts…

None were real sacrifices.

I was.

I was the real sacrifice.

Afterthought, burden—whatever you want to fucking call it, I was left behind after the big payday came.

My mom had always yearned to travel, even long before they had a pot to piss in. Exotic places. Dubai. Morocco. Iceland. China. She wanted pictures by the Taj Mahal and the great pyramids of Egypt.

Dad?

He couldn’t have cared less.

His passion was inventing and creating. Making something out of nothing. Technology out of thin air. His brain? Sharp and insightful.

Not insightful enough, it seems, because when it came to my beautiful mother, he was spineless. When she wanted to hit the road, charter private jets, and see the world?

He carried her purse and pulled her matching, newly minted designer luggage—only the best that her new money would buy.

“Who took care of you?” Kyle persists, his voice breaking into my thoughts.

“Some relatives.” I don’t tell Kyle they were paid to take care of me and only did it for the money. “Sometimes my parents’ friends.”

“That sucks.”

Yeah. It did suck.

I was shuffled off to my grandparents the first time my folks jetted off. It was only going to be a week, so no harm in that, right? One week turned into several, several turned into weeks on end, and soon my grandparents had thrown their hands up and cried defeat. They implored their daughter to take her son along. “Ezekiel cannot miss school,” my mother would say in this prissy, holier than thou voice, using any excuse to leave me at home.

The real reason: who could jet set with a young son desperate for their attention?

My mother has zero fucking maternal instincts.

My grandparents were older, retired, and not looking to raise a freaking kid. They’d done that already with my mom, who lived at home until she was twenty-two and had never been an easy child. My grandparents were tired.

In middle school I’d ended up with my Aunt Susan, her husband Vic, and their son Randall. I wish I could say things got better when I moved in with them, that I’d found a family unit who finally gave a shit, but that wasn’t the case with them either.