Page 5 of 10,000 Hours With A Rich Menace

The only reason I had gotten a passport was because my mother forced me to. For her fiftieth birthday, we went to Mexico and had the time of our lives. By the end of the trip neither of us wanted to go home. We even joked about abandoning our life back in the states, opening a smoothie stand on the beach and living out the rest of our life in Mexico as ex-pats. I missed her so much that these memories never felt good.

“Girl, we are going on a trip that you’re never going to forget. Pay your rent and go on and load your Shein cart with some clothes because we’re going to the Bahamas.” She jumped out of her chair and did a little dance. “I will book our flights soon… we’re going to have a ball.”

The thought of leaving behind all the stress and depression in New York sounded like a dream. If she had thirty thousand to wire to me from her suga daddy’s account, then surely she could afford a trip and to cover me.

“Okay,” I agreed, hoping that my mother would show up this time and give me a sign I needed to make a decision like this.

I guess no sign was a sign to go and enjoy my life for once.

Maverick Menace Caselli

I didn’t talkuntil I was five years old.

My mother always said I was different, and because I refused to use my words she worried. I was always the kid she worried about the most, even though I was the oldest. When Kora came, she had to split her time between a new baby and her nonverbal son.

Since the age of two, I had been to every therapist or enrolled in every therapy that money could buy. My father was the kind of nigga that didn’t feel the need to worry.He’ll talk when he got something to fucking say… don’t seem like he got much to say, Constance.I would hear them arguing because I wasn’t verbal.

The worry lines always appeared when she rubbed my head and kissed my cheek. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to talk, I knew how to talk. I just didn’t want to talk, and I would always stop myself when I felt like it.

In school, they picked on me because I didn’t say shit, and the teachers paid me extra attention. When it came to my schoolwork, nobody could touch me because I knew my work. It wasn’t that I didn’t know anything – I knew plenty. I just didn’t talk and never felt moved to say anything. Every grade, test, assignment I passed without ever saying a fucking word.

I went to private school, and there wasn’t a bunch of kids that looked like me in that bitch. I was an easy target being the Black boy, and then not speaking, they just knew they hit the jackpot. Until I cornered the biggest one in the bathroom during recess and beat his ass with the cover from the back of the toilet.

The teacher was horrified when she went into the bathroom and found him on the floor barely hanging onto life. She screamed while shaking me and asked why I would do such a thing, as if she hadn’t witnessed these pink bitches bully me since the school year started. I smiled in her face and told her, “Bitch tried me, and I showed him.”

No matter how much time had passed, the look on her face as she shuttered while looking at me was something I would never forget. I wished I could have taken a picture and showed her ass what she looked like, then printed it on a T-shirt.

My father paid off that boy’s family and it was never spoken about. They graciously accepted the money because they could have been burned to death in their home instead. The Eaton family wasn’t anything to fuck with, and my uncle, Nash Eaton, ran a tight ship. Nothing happened without him or my father knowing.

After I spoke to my teacher, it was a wrap after that because I never shut up. I ran that school like my name was on the sign outside of it. Always correcting them when they were wrong and talking out of turn. There was no way they could control me or stop me from doing whatever I wanted.

The teachers spoke with my parents and told them that I was different. I learned early on that beingdifferentin that school was bad. They might as well have branded me with a scarlet letter.

It was in seventh grade that I met my best friend. Corleon D. Bruster walked into the school, another Black boy. He came in like he knew he was the shit, and he was smart, which mademe feel better. I hated a stupid person, and the fact that he was another Black boy and smart piqued my interest.

Baked chicken, white rice and corn – had to be fresh corn. That was my lunch every day. Every time I opened my lunch box; it was like I was having it for the first time. Corleon sat at the table with me and watched me every day for a week before he decided to ask what the fuck was wrong with me.

“You hate looking at people in the eyes, huh?” he broke the silence between us as I cut into my chicken breast and peered up at him for five seconds before returning back to my food.

I counted.

He respected my silence before I decided to speak to him. “I don’t like when people stare at me.”

“Or touch you,” he noted.

“Yeah.”

“We can sit in silence, and you don’t have to worry about me touching you… shit weird anyway.”

I looked up at him and smirked as he continued on eating his school lunch and I continued with mine.

Corleon was heavily into technology. Loved the shit and would be a computer if that was an option when he was born. Our friendship was organic, he was patient with me and never pushed me. He understood that I moved differently, and that I wasn’t like everyone else. He became my right hand in everything.

Core was like a second brother. His loyalty to me and my family was something that I could never overlook. He didn’t give a fuck what the last name Eaton meant; he was just there because of who I was.

Maverick.

In high school, I was picked up from school early by my uncle’s driver and brought to his mansion. I hardly ever spenttime with my uncle because he was always so busy, and truthfully, I never really liked his ass.

---