A Broken Kind of Life by Jamie Mayfield Read Free Book Online

Computers didn’t stare at your scars or give you looks of pity and disgust. They couldn’t burn you or destroy your soul. He read through the rest of the description and decided it sounded just as good to him as anything else would. With grim determination, he clicked the Apply Now button and filled in the form.
    When he received the response, he read through it briefly, feeling the sweat bead on the back of his neck. They would be sending him a brochure for the college and wanted to schedule a campus tour. They’d be calling to talk to him. They wanted to meet with him. Forwarding the e-mail to his mother, he slammed the computer closed and all but threw it onto his desk. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t. His breathing came in sharp, pained gasps as he rolled to his side and pulled his knees up. Curled like a baby, he stared at the wall and tried not to think about what would come next.
    Just because he applied, that didn’t mean he had to go.
    Until it did.
    Just as she took care of everything else in his life, Aaron’s mother handled everything with ITM. She met with the dean to explain about Aaron’s issues. She met with his instructor to give him an idea of what having him in class would mean. She didn’t accept the dean’s recommendation that maybe Aaron should wait before attending college. His class was scheduled, paperwork was completed, tuition was paid, and throughout the process, Aaron sat idly by and watched his life being lived without him.
    As Aaron sat ordering his textbooks for the new semester, the one thing his mother let him do alone, he wondered why he couldn’t just take classes online. He could register online, buy his books online, even turn in homework online—it was a computer degree, and yet he couldn’t take classes online. He’d signed up for only one of the recommended four courses. Baby steps. After talking it over with his mother, they decided to wait on taking English and public speaking. English frustrated the hell out of Aaron, and his mother planned to talk to the dean about public speaking. They were sure when they explained the magnitude of Aaron’s discomfort, the school would let him take a different elective. It would take him much longer than two years to graduate at that rate, but degree or no degree, he doubted he would ever be high-functioning enough to hold down a job. Most of the time, he was barely able to make it to dinner.
    Entering the credit card number his mother had given him for the books, Aaron set the pickup date for the Friday before classes started. His mom could take him over to the college. Even in his diminished capacity, he should still be able to walk into the bookstore and pick up a bag. Vaguely, as he clicked the order button on the badly designed bookstore site, he wondered if he would be the only student on campus whose mother chauffeured him to and from school. After a moment of deliberation, he printed the receipt and decided he probably would.
     
     
    S PENCER stood watching his father sleep, sprawled out in the recliner with a leather-bound edition of Tolkien’s trilogy cracked open on his chest, the binding stretched beyond reasonable limits. He didn’t take the book from his father’s hands but simply watched as it rose and fell with each rumbling snore. Henry Thomas wasn’t a violent drunk, or even an angry one, but it broke Spencer’s heart to see him in pain. It had been just the two of them for so long, relying on each other, and he felt like they just weren’t the same anymore. He didn’t know how to get their closeness back. He didn’t know how to help.
    Shivering lightly in the late-night breeze, he closed and locked the sliding glass door and grabbed one of the throws from the back of the couch. Carefully, he laid it across his father’s legs and brought it up over the man’s chest. His father merely grunted and slept on. With a heavy sigh, Spencer went up to his room and pulled out his new laptop. Memories from one of