Chapter 1

When Leroy Blumkinstein arrived home from school, he systematically grabbed the mail from the cast-iron mailbox perched against the brick wall while unlocking the Victorian inspired white door to the foyer. As he walked inside he let nose adjust to the familiar smell of a vegetable stew roasting in the crockpot and left his backpack, jacket, keys, and mail in a pile on the kitchen table. It was 2:35 and no one would be home for another hour at least. For him, this was his free hour, his chance to relax and unwind.

He sprawled himself across the divan and reached for the remote on the marble-top coffee table. Not quite grasping it at first, it fell on the floor, making a tremendous THWAP on the cherry floors. The battery cover slipped off of the back and the batteries rolled capriciously under the legs of the couch.

“Christ!” exclaimed Leroy, showing off the maturity of his fourteen-year-old vocabulary as he stood up to get another set of batteries. He pulled out a drawer from the end table and stared at an ocean of batteries rolling around – most of them recovered from under the couch after the last time his mother had cleaned there. He found two that looked relatively new and carefully inserted them into their proper spots, making sure not to drop the apparatus a second time. He hit the power button and was greeted by a full-volume Spanish-language soap opera. The telenovela was the preferred genre of Raquel, the Cuban cleaning lady who came on Mondays and was paid by the hour. After lowering the volume, he took his spot again in the divan and found a baseball game that came in behind a lot of fuzz and white noise.

Within a few minutes, the annoying white noise and even more annoying commentary about the game got to Leroy, and he admitted defeat while he shut off the TV. He opted instead to grab a Sprite from the fridge and some Oreo cookies from the pantry before he headed upstairs to his room. In the early afternoon there was never anything particularly thrilling to do in his house, so he passed his time lying in bed hoping to find an excuse not to do his homework.

Not that Leroy was a bad student; he just didn’t much care for school. He hated reading a bunch of trite poems and letting some old quack teacher tell him what they meant. Who the hell gave the teacher authority to decide what they meant? After all, he had known how to read since he was a kid. He could decide for himself, and in his estimation, be perfectly correct. Honestly, he really wanted to write his own stories, then walk in on a high school English class and find a teacher discussing them, correcting some poor kid who tried to throw in his two cents. He’d tell the teacher that he was wrong and that the kid had it right all along.

But before he could do that, he had to face another boring and rainy afternoon. He finished his Sprite and threw the can into the trash bucket that he kept by his door, and then fell asleep into a light nap. Gray skies had that effect on him.