10Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue.
He doesn't take the time to curb the warmth in his heart that settles when he's walking though the hood, past the vomiting man on the corner, and the cigarette butts soft underfoot. The distant gunshot, the screaming wife on her front lawn, and the crying baby with the too-young-and-too-drunk siblings carrying it around in a shopping cart.
He appreciates the sting of his probably broken nose, the metallic taste of his own blood, mixed with the ever-present tobacco tinge on his tongue. Under the El, sitting, broken, and feeling at home, Phillip Gallagher studies himself. Then he makes a list of Reasons to stay:
1. This is comfortable.
2. This is real ( because there is only honesty here, unless you're scamming someone)
3. This is home
4. He's good at this (at being a bookie, a dealer, a mover and shaker, a candlestick maker)
5. He is no better than anyone. No better than anyone in the South Side Safari
And then, inevitably, there are the Reasons to Go:
1. This is a war zone (of hoods, gangs, drunk dads, and bad moms)
2. This will always be a struggle
3. This is home, but it's a broken one, it's unfixable
4. This hurts (and his nose drips blood as if to prove this point)
5. He owes it to Fiona. He really fucking owes it to her
Under his bed, hidden much in the way that Ian's porn is, Lip keeps several academic booklets. The golden trio of schools that his guidance counsellor demanded he apply to; MIT, Yale, and Harvard.
Yesterday it snowed for the first time, marking it officially winter, officially November, which means he has less than two months to decide where to go, and to send in the application, and to go through all the essay-writing, ass-kissing bullshit of acquiring financial aid.
It was so much easier when he thought he was having a baby. Even if the kid was going up for adoption, he would have justification to stay here in Chicago. The decision the slip into that faceless, nameless, average blue collar lifestyle would be effortless. There was nothing to it. Lip could get a job at a mill, or one of the endless department stores in the plazas. He might have ended up working on the El tracks for the city until his back gave out at 35, then settling comfortably into a local neighbourhood with a Workers Comp cheque and a budding alcohol dependency. He would have waited around for a few years until a letter showed up in the mail from that estranged son that he gave up, and maybe they'd meet, grab a few brews, become more like friends than family. He'd probably already have a new family by that point, or at least a divorced wife. He'd tell the kid about Karen. He'd tell the kid how he met Karen Jackson, and he'd tell him not to think to poorly of her (even if she deserved it) because she was really messed up back when they were 18 and it was better that he was raised by Mark and Soleste.
Not a fairytale. Not a dream, just a life that sounded more suited to his childhood than some ivy league frat boy college experience.
It's easy to do what you know, and Lip knows this. He knows how to get by.
And, sure, he may also know fucking trigonometry and physics, but he doesn't know how he will stand amongst the trust fund babies and pretend that he's never had a shotgun pointed at his face, a beat down from some guy in a fighting ring, an empty wallet and empty stomach on a fucking freezing winter night inside a heatless house, wrapped in scarves and sharing the bed with his baby brothers so that they don't freeze in the night.
So maybe he wants that blue collar life, here, in the South. Maybe he wants to be standing in a factory line up with a bunch of guys who have done the same shit he's done, or worse, all with the no-questions-asked mentality that they're the same kind of guys. They were raised the same.
But Karen really fucked him over when she popped out the kid that wasn't his. Excuses gone, setbacks gone. He has all the hands on his shoulder pushing him out the door to Harvard.
I'm not gonna be the fucking golden goose, he'd said.
But then he thinks about Fiona and her eight jobs, her deep set eyes, her abnormal 21-year old wrinkled face. Her motherhood. The fact that she stepped up. Child Services could have swept them up and carried them god-knows-fucking-where and then where would he be? All Fiona wants is the gratification of seeing that she didn't completely fuck up their lives. If he made it out of here, got to school, got a Masters or a Doctorate, then maybe he could help out with getting Carl and Debbie and Liam into school, too.
It was like he was the catalyst. If he made it, everyone else might. They might all make it.
Which made him smile, which made him come back home, and go back to school.
Which made him take out those academic books and stare at them before bed every night.
Which still made him scared because it felt like the end of an era (a pretty shitty era, but still, Lip was no good at goodbyes- just ask Monica).
Lip gets up from his spot on the cold ground, ignoring the dampness of melted snow on his pants. He makes his way through the teeming streets, all the way home to his perpetually messy kitchen. He grabs a beer from the fridge, one of the last ones, grabs one for Ian while he's at it.
He goes up the stairs and sits on Ian's bed, passing him the drink, receiving the half-smoked joint from his brother. Ian takes a long swig. There's hickeys on his neck and a black eye that he got from Frank last week.
The air smells of weed and laundry. He inhales gratefully, drinks, smokes, takes another breath. Liam's incessant toddler chatter is muffled through the walls, with the sound of Carl making explosion sound-effects while he bugs the shit out of Debbie downstairs.
"So," he starts, turning to Ian. "How hard do you think it will be to infiltrate the Ritalin market if I go to Harvard?"