Lib Novel Page 77
With each day that passed during their training, which had then turned into weeks, he’d had to talk himself out of throwing in the towel multiple times, and the decision to continue was never the same:
He needed to do this to redeem himself in his mother’s eyes.
The money.
Although Sayeda was safe at the villa, he wanted to move her out of the country once the boys were safe.
The money.
He’d already put considerable effort into acclimating onto this “team,” and it would be foolish to back out now.
The money.
Those who had never experienced poverty usually had a difficult time understanding the grip it could have on someone’s psyche. The things someone might find themselves doing to escape it.
People from the outside looking in had probably pointed the finger at his mother, asking themselves why she chose to have a child when she could barely support herself.
Those people didn’t understand humans.
They didn’t understand the lack of sex education or the fact that, in those circumstances, the relationships between men and women were often reduced to predator versus injured prey.
They didn’t understand that people existed who never thought about living a different life. For some people, poverty was all they knew. It was a culture, a thread that connected generations of their lineage. Those people, if given a million dollars, were more than likely to wind up right where they began because poverty affected more than just wallets.
To get him into his private Catholic school, his mother had worked until she sometimes fell asleep against the front door. She’d believed that the underfunded schools in their neighborhood would have only continued to churn out adults who would eventually settle within five miles of its location. The textbooks came rife with misinformation, if there were textbooks at all. Also, there were no “Fome Zero” Zero Hunger programs back then, so the only good thing that had come out of his first school was the two meals he received every day.
Sometimes, he did wonder whether they would have made it had his mother lived. If it wasn’t Europe, he wondered whether they might have found a better life outside of Rio in Salvador or Recife. Even Central America or the United States.
Quickly, however, he’d realized that no matter how hard he’d worked or how gifted he’d been, success would have remained weighed down by the circumstances he was born into.
No one would have ever come to save him.
The scenery around them returned, and as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but red-orange soil. They’d pitched tents, six white domes staked in the ground, Spettro and Barnes holed up inside theirs. Hannah had set hers up for show; every night, she warmed the space beside him, but she respected that all he wanted to do was shiver until they fell asleep. Most nights, she quizzed him about Sayeda, but he had no intention of hurting Sayeda.
“Hey, you.” She sat next to him on the ground, and the hair strands she’d braided roughly two weeks ago were now loose and slightly puffy crimps with dark roots and crimson ends. “Got a lot on your mind?”