My name is Black Ice, you know, the opposite of Snow White. She was innocent and pure, easily loved by all the animals in the forest, especially loved by the Seven Dwarfs, Doc, Sneezy, Grumpy, Happy, Bashful, Sleepy, and Dopey, but I'm kind of the opposite. It is not easy for people to love me. I'm ugly, and gay, and a little overweight, and I've been an orphan since I was two.
Yes, that's right, I don't remember my father - he died in a car accident along with my mother - but I was taken in by this very wealthy man, my father's brother Max and his wife Thelma. I think Thelma talked him into it since she well knew he was my only living relative. He was an options and futures trader - he knew everything about how to invest a buck and make more money out of it. But that was his weakness. He was greedy, too. I don't want to say too much bad about him, because he took me in and all, and by the time I was a teenager he was all about how I spent my money, but he had in fact fed me and clothed me and got me into my teen years.
So anyway I used to buy Powerball tickets just to make him mad, and one day I won, not just thousands, but millions. Powerball authorities were negotiating with him, since I was still a minor, over such things as taxes and how the money would be delivered. Now my parents didn't quite know what to do with me. I was like seventeen, barely still in his care. It didn't mean that much to me right away because I was still in high school and not quite ready to think about independence, and because they'd always provided for me anyway. So there wasn't much I could say when they said such things as, "look, we're going to put the money here for a while." The end result was that I didn't actually have a whole lot of cash when I walked out the door every day.
But at night, Max would review the accounts and get more and more furious. He'd look at the bottom lines and here I was, a fat, ugly, pimply gay kid with millions and I hadn't even earned them. I had done nothing, and it made him mad.
Meanwhile at school I had some kind of notoriety, and everyone wanted to be my friend. But all of a sudden I didn't quite care for them, because I could see how false it was. I really had only one friend at school, this guy named Pierce, who I think was gay too but I never really knew, because I was too shy to ask. Pierce was the same to me before and after the news came around, so to me, what was good about Pierce was that he was just being himself, and liked me for who I was, and was my friend whether I was just an ugly kid or a millionaire.
One night Max was doing the usual, reviewing the accounts, and he exploded. He couldn't take it any more. He yelled and screamed and came as close to hitting me as possible. I say that because I don't believe he'd ever hit me, and I don't think he ever did. But on this night he almost did, and that was enough for me. I knew I had to get out of there, ready or not.
My one ally in this world was our driver Henry. Henry was told to take me out one night and I got the sense that something shady was up. But Henry, who might have been told to kill me and dump me in the river, instead bought me a bus ticket to Omaha, two cities over, and gave me twenty bucks for the trip, apologizing profusely that he couldn't give me more. He'd apparently spent most of his free money on that ticket and had to borrow the twenty from one of his friends. He had seen that explosion and knew I had to leave. He knew $20 wasn't going to be enough to sustain me but it was all he could do. And, there was that undercurrent there. Like he was not to bring me back home under any circumstances.
In Omaha things were tense because $20 didn't go very far. I figured I had to find a job while I still had some clean clothes (Henry had given me a small bag of them) and, surprisingly, I did. But I had to stay at this shelter for a while until I could figure out how to get enough money to pay rent. I didn't dare call my parents. I knew my mother was worried but she too would know that coming home was not an option. I just stayed at that shelter for a while and believe me it was not a great place. People were always rifling through each other's things and saying mean things to each other.
But I had a few good friends there. One knew how to heal different maladies; he just knew that kind of stuff. Another was always sneezing and we teased him a lot about that. Another was in a terrible mood all the time but was really one of the sweetest guys ever. Another was happy all the time, but that irritated the heck out of me because it couldn't possibly be sincere. I felt like slapping him sometimes and saying, "Hey! You're in a youth shelter with no money! Wipe that smile off your face!" But I didn't; instead, I tried to pick up some good mood from him for the purpose of survival.
There was one guy who was really shy, and we'd always try to get him to talk to some girl, but he couldn't. He had all these feelings but just couldn't express them when the time came; he was always too shy. Another guy was always sleeping. I figure it was because he was up all night, and it was his tactic to avoid interacting with anyone because he really didn't like it. I don't know, maybe sleeping in the evening was his way of guarding his wallet, because I think he might have had a job like I did, only with worse hours, but anyway, most of the time when we got up a game of cards, he'd be asleep, and couldn't play.
The last guy we called Dopey, because he really was Dopey in two different kind of ways. One was that he had that goofy sense of humor that always surprised you and made you think about things differently. Another was that he always seemed to find a way to find drugs and other kinds of things that were strictly illegal.
Mind you, we got into a lot of trouble for this kind of thing. It was a youth home, strictly guarded, and kids that did bad stuff got sent on to juvey or some place that had much better security. I actually liked it there; I liked these guys, and I started cooking and cleaning around the place because I even liked the people that ran the place. Sure, it was full of trouble, and lots of guys were getting into trouble all the time. But in the end, it was a good place for me. I aged out when I was there and still asked them to stay, so they made me a kind of cook and janitor and let me. It was an improvement in my living circumstance which now meant I had my own room.
My parents didn't even know I was there and so didn't come looking for me. You would think I would be mad about the millions of dollars, that they were still sitting on, but I was barely aware of it. I could only get at it through them, and had no intention of going back to them and telling them to fork it over. There was one point where Max had said I should pay him for raising me the fifteen years he did, and I'm sure he had it calculated all out to be worth several million, or just enough so that I would owe him all that money, because in his mind, I did owe it to him. He had done his best to teach me how to earn money honestly by doing options futures or currency broking or whatever, and it wasn't his fault that I didn't learn. But by washing dishes for a couple of years I felt like I proved that I
could work for money, and would, whether I rightfully had several million in the bank or not. I have to admit that several times, I considered going back, hiring a lawyer, and getting it off him, since it was, legally, mine, and I'm not actually sure that he was able to rob from that fund or not; all I know is that I wouldn't put it past him and I figured he was probably able to justify it somehow.
Much to my surprise I saw him one time on the streets of Omaha in a particularly bad district. This was now four or five years after I'd disappeared and I was pretty sure he didn't know I was alive or was in Omaha. But there he was and he recognized me instantly. Actually the truth is he looked terrible, like he'd been on drugs steady for those entire four years. And in his pain I think he wanted to give me some of it, which I accepted as a kind of peace offering. It was a little pill of something that he said would make me very happy like I owned the world. I felt like I didn't really need to own the world, I just wanted to be his friend and then work on possibly getting some of that money back.
But unfortunately the little pill put me in the hospital, where I was in a coma for like a week, and when I woke up, Max was long gone. It's like he somehow got me there but denied any association with me whatsoever once we got there, and when I asked where he was, since he was the last person I had seen, nobody had even heard of him or knew anything about him.
They were glad when I came out of that coma because otherwise I'd be hanging around that hospital for a long time and I had no apparent family in the area or anyone who could help them out. They were also glad that I came out with a reasonable sense of who I was and the ability to take up my life where I had left off. I had all my friends at the youth home who were all glad to see me again and who accepted my somewhat altered version of what happened that I could be in a coma for a week. They by now looked up to me as a kind of leader, as I was older than most of them, and it kind of mattered how one portrayed things.
But the best outcome of the whole situation was that Pierce showed up one day at the hospital, and Pierce and I became an item, which was actually pretty good news, the best of all the things that happened to me. Life was pretty day-to-day in Omaha, and had been for years, and this was about the best thing to come along for a while, so I'll stop it here with "happily ever after."
