Chapter 1 The Parents Who Learned Too Late

As I watched the flood of comments drifting past my vision, I couldn't help but feel my eyes burn with tears.

In a normal family, parents were towering trees, shielding their children from every storm. However, my parents were just two battered souls clinging to each other for warmth.

My father's name was Frankie Cheney.

Both of his parents passed away when he was 14. His relatives threw him out so they could keep the compensation money. So, he ended up a street rat, making a living as a bouncer of sorts at shady clubs.

My mother's name was Tanya Jones. She never knew her parents.

When she was 15, her relatives kicked her out because they viewed girls as useless. So, she became a homeless teenage delinquent.

More than a decade ago, the two of them got into a fight over the last available computer at a dingy internet cafe one freezing winter day.

Afterward, they sat on the curb together and shared a cup of the cheapest instant noodles despite the fact that they were both famished.

That was how they ended up together, becoming each other's only family in the world.

They were flat broke when my mother became pregnant with me.

They were so broke that they couldn't even scrape together 200 dollars of rent for their basement apartment the following month.

In other words, they did not have enough money to go to a regular hospital for prenatal care.

They didn't want me to be born into that kind of life, so they had no choice but to drop by an unlicensed clinic hidden deep in an alley. That place was so illegal that it didn't even have a sign up, lest the people working there got arrested.

They planned to abort me.

That day, it was raining cats and dogs in the city as thunder shook the air while lightning streaked across the skies.

The clinic reeked of harsh, low-quality disinfectant.

My mother couldn't stop herself from shaking as she lay on a crude operating table, her face ghostly pale in fear.

My father was left alone in the dark hallway, crouching as he waited for it to be over. He gripped his hair with both hands and slapped himself over and over until the corner of his mouth split open and bled.

The cold, rusty scalpel had just been taken out by the unlicensed practitioner. It hadn't even touched my mother's stomach when a deafening crash echoed through the clinic.

Apparently, my father had kicked the operating room door open, his eyes bloodshot. He looked as if he had gone mad during the time he'd spent out in the dingy hallway. He rushed over, scooped my mother off the freezing table, and carried her away from the illegal clinic.

Rain poured down in sheets.

The two teenagers clung to each other in the storm, soaked to the bone as they sobbed.

Frankie wrapped both arms around my mother's stomach as if protecting me with his own body. His tears mixed with the rain as they streamed down his face.

Then, he blubbered, "We're having this baby. I'll sell my blood if I have to. I'll even haul bricks on construction sites just to provide for both of you."

He kept his promise.

The two of them fought with everything they had to bring me into the world.

Still, they didn't exactly know how to be good parents themselves after having spent their lives scraping by at the very bottom of society.

When I was three, they saw no problem bringing me to the smoky pool hall where they spent their days lounging about.

My father, with his bleached blond hair, was playing pool while my mother, with her face caked with makeup, sat nearby cracking sunflower seeds.

Meanwhile, I stood there with a lollipop in my mouth, bouncing my leg like the adults around me.

Then, I pointed at a young punk walking by and snarled in my childish voice, "What are you looking at, huh? Keep staring, and I'll beat your ass."

The entire pool hall fell silent.

The cue stick slipped from my father's hand and clattered onto the floor.

My mother was so stunned that the sunflower seeds fell right out of her mouth.

One guy with bright green hair wandered over, blew out a ring of smoke, and teased me. "Well, well. What a handsome little gangster we've got over here. I bet you'll be running the show someday."

The moment my parents heard the words "little gangster," all color drained from their cheeks.