One month earlier…

  “You are failing the twelfth grade, Zane. One more bad test score and you won’t be able to graduate,” said Principal Wilson, a brutish man, with a fine suit and a red bow tie. He still clung to the few streaks of hair he had atop his head.

  Zane set across from the principal with his head hunched over and his hands sliding down his face. The question, “What will Father think of this?” kept running in his mind over and over like a bad record. If he did not graduate, Zane’s father was going to kick his ass to the curb at eighteen, and with no money and no skills to his name, he would be lucky to be cleaning toilets for a living.

  Zane still stared at the floor, pensive, as the principal reached for his phone.

  “Shall I call your father—”

  “No.” Zane’s head shot up as his hand reached out to the phone, practically knocking it down. “That won’t be necessary. I will tell him.”

  The principal shook his head as he leaned back in his chair. “Listen, Zane, your father, Ken Callaway, is a reasonable man who will respond most appropriately to what has happened. You do not need to worry.”

  Zane smirked, almost laughing at the principal’s blatant naivety, but who could blame him? Zane’s father practically lived a double life—two personas split down the seam like a worn-out two-faced mask, one side calm and gentle, the other an endless rage machine. To the public, the principals, teachers, and blue-collar citizens of the outside world, he was a kind and charismatic caretaker—the smiling side of the mask—but to Zane, and to Zane’s younger sister, Cindy, he was anything but. Worst of all, Zane believed his father’s darker half, the face jaded in two, the demented scowl of the left-hand side, was his father’s true nature and that the other, more accepting, more friendly personality was nothing but a trap.

  “No offense, sir, but I take it you don’t know my father too well,” Zane said. “For when, and I mean when he finds out about this, let’s just say he won’t take it too kindly.” Him being Mr. Perfect and all, Zane thought—straight A’s, captain of the varsity football team, head of the debate squad—Zane would be nothing but a bad memory.

  Zane stood up swiftly from the principal’s integration chair as so many students called it and made his way to the exit, with his eyes still trailing the ground as he walked.

  “Wait,” principal Wilson said as he shot up from his seat and as he held out his hand. “This isn’t over. We have much more to discuss.”

  Zane stood by the doorway but did not look back as he addressed the principal. Instead, he brushed his foot back and forth against the ground.

  “What’s left to discuss? I’m getting held back, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it, and come Monday my father will likely literally kill me.” Zane paused to take a deep breath. “Case closed.”

  “Zane,” the principal said as he put his foot down. “If you walk out of that door right now, I’ll make sure to suspend you for a week.”

  Zane shrugged. “Just a week. I think I need more of a vacation.” With that phrase, Zane left with the principal still calling to him.

  “Zane, you’ll always be a slacker, you know that. No matter how much you try to skate by, you will never achieve anything. And I can guarantee with an attitude like that, you won’t get very far in life.”

  ***

  Meanwhile…

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  “—Ken, you know you are a slacker, right? I expected these reports back two months ago. And not only that, they’re far from accurate. It’s going to take another week just to sort out all of these mistakes.”

  Ken Callaway sat with his back hunched and with his hands running through his mostly gray hair. Across from him was Mr. Tubman, Ken’s boss and highest on his most despised list. Whenever Ken made a breakthrough or solved some issue that others could not, Mr. Tubman always found a way to tear Ken down.

  “I don’t understand, sir,” Ken said. “I was just put on this project a few weeks ago. And it was so far gone; you’re lucky that I shipped what I could. The software had more bugs than an ant farm. Whoever worked on it before me had no idea what they were doing.”

  Mr. Tubman did nothing but shake his head as he rolled his tongue off the bridge of his nose—tsk, tsk, tsk. “Always making excuses, aren’t we, Ken? Just one time I would like you to take responsibilities for your own actions.” Mr. Tubman got up from his desk and circled it to sit on the seat adjacent to Ken. He then put his hand on Ken’s shoulder.

  “If you don’t have the programmatic skills to get the job done, then at the very least, have the manners to admit when you are defeated.” Mr. Tubman then leaned in toward Ken with an overly goofy smile. “Maybe if you spent more time on your actual work as opposed to making excuses, then maybe we would really have something.”

  Ken did nothing but stare at the ground feverishly as his once pale face turned a somewhat bright red and as the veins on his neck convulsed. He then began to crack his knuckles but stopped when he realized he was just seconds away from bursting. Ken wanted to explode here and now so badly, but he could not do anything because if he did, then not only would his livelihood be in jeopardy, but so would that of his son and daughter, Zane and Cindy Callaway.

  “Very well, sir.” Ken lifted his head with a smile as he turned toward Mr. Tubman. “You are right. I should have been more careful. To make up for it, I will work overtime for the rest of this week free of charge.”

  Ken got off from his punishment chair (as he called it) and prepared to leave.

  “Just a moment,” Mr. Tubman said as Ken was near the exit. “That won’t be necessary because you are fired.”

  Ken let out a quick bark of laughter, not really believing what he just heard. “Good one, sir.”

  “It is not a joke.”

  Ken stood motionless, in which part of his mind told him to calm down, while the other half boiled part, energized him to spin around, tackle his boss to the ground, and beat him to a pulp until there was nothing left but mush. But again, Ken could not do that.

  “Who is going to replace me then? I am the best programmer you got.”

  Mr. Tubman laughed.

  “That is an easy one. My son will. He had been working on this project for weeks, and he just needed to take some time off to de-stress, you know. All great programs do it. Too bad you had to screw up his code the way you did. Now it will probably take him another month just to fix your mistakes.” Mr. Tubman paused to sneak in another quick laugh. “For his efforts, I will be deducting some of your pay and giving it to him.”

  Ken stood his ground, prepared to speak, but once he saw Mr. Tubman’s face, he knew that he had already made up his mind ten minutes ago. And worst of all, Mr. Tubman was as clueless as anyone because even if it were true that Ken had “messed up the code” as it was put, it would only take a few simple Git revert commands to bring things back to the way they were.

  “You can go now,” Mr. Tubman said as he waved his hand, shooing Ken away.

  And so, Ken left, with no job, no hope, and no prospects, with the void created from those three things filled with nothing but anger. He walked half hunched down the halls as the image of his boss faded in the background.

  As Ken started to exit his former facility, his phone began to ring. Normally, Ken would ignore it as he was working, but since he did not have a place to work at, he figured, why not?

  “Hello, this is the principal from Wilson High School speaking.”

  Ken blinked hard, annoyed, just trying to predict what shenanigans his son had gotten into this time.

  “Yes? What could I do for you.”

  The principal sighed before speaking. “It’s your son, Mr. Callaway, Zane. I’m afraid to have to tell you he won’t be graduating this year. Not only is he failing a class required for graduation, but he does not even have the total attendance to be considered a full-time student. With all that in mind—”

  Ken froze in his tracks, and to some onlooker peering through from afar, it would seem that the whole world stopped along with him. For his anger, his loss, and now the failure of his son could not be undone. No amount of screaming, shouting, or hitting was going to do that. And now with Ken out of the job, he had nothing to do but focus all of his rage on the biggest disappointment of his life.

  Ken slammed his phone shut, nearly breaking it at the seam.

  “I am going to kill that kid,” he shouted.