Chapter 2

When I went home, Daryl was happily fiddling with this new phone on the couch. He waved excitedly at me when he saw that I was home.

"Dustin! Come over and help me import my photos from the old phone!"

I ignored him and went up to the dining table, where ten scratch-off lottery tickets were positioned.

Dad slid five of them toward me.

"Hurry up and scratch these off. Your mother still wants to take an afternoon nap later. Stop wasting everyone's time."

I didn't take the tickets.

Mom frowned.

"What are you waiting for?"

I then took out the ticket that I had taken from the cabinet. The paper fluttered down, and Dad's face suddenly turned as dark as thunder.

"Who gave you permission to snoop through the cabinets?"

He didn't ask me why I took the ticket. He didn't ask me where I'd been. The first thing he did was to chide me for opening the cabinet.

The last bit of hope fizzled out in me.

"This is fake," I said, hearing my shaky voice for the first time. "Every single ticket was custom-made, weren't they?"

Daryl paused. Mom's face turned dark.

"You think you still have the nerve to argue with us when you were the one who stole from us in the first place?"

"I'm asking you if all the tickets have been fake all along."

Dad then slammed his hands on the table and yelled, "So what if they're fake?"

He admitted to them being fake so quickly that all of the questions I'd meant to ask them suddenly lodged in my throat and refused to come out.

Dad took the ticket from the table and glared coldly at me.

"This has always been a family game from the start. We're the ones giving you real money in the end. You still think that we lied to you?"

"But Daryl always gets a minimum of 150 dollars every week. Why do I usually only get 15 dollars?"

"Because your circumstances are different from Daryl's!" Dad replied matter-of-factly. "Daryl is bright and lively. He needs to socialize with the other classmates. Naturally, he has plenty more expenses than you.

"But all you do is just study or go to sleep. What do you even need that much money for?"

I tightened my fist.

"I need to eat."

"You're saying that ten dollars a week is not enough for your food?"

I retorted, "It costs at least five dollars per meal in the school cafeteria! And I always have to eat lunch and dinner at school five days a week! 15 dollars a week doesn't even cover it!"

Dad interrupted me impatiently and said, "The school gives out free cereal for breakfast, doesn't it? And waffles only cost a dollar each. Do you know that kids from the poorest slums in the city can't even afford to eat a plain waffle every day? How dare you still act so spoiled and pampered with us?"

I stared at him, feeling a heavy, stuffy feeling in my chest.

So, he knew. He knew that 15 dollars a week wasn't enough for me to buy a proper hot meal at school every day. He knew that I'd have to rely only on the dollar-waffle and dry cereal to pull through the whole week.

He just didn't care.

Mom then slid the five scratch-off tickets over to me again.

"This will be the end of the discussion. Scratch the tickets off now. We're sending you back to school right after this."

I looked at the five tickets that they had already pre-arranged for me on the table and scratched off the first one.

Zero.

The second one—zero.

The third one—five dollars.

The fourth one—ten dollars.

The last one—zero again.

Dad glanced at my tickets.

"You get 15 dollars this week. You'd better use them sparingly instead of splurging on things you don't need."

Meanwhile, Daryl got 300 dollars because it was his birthday week.