Friday was my last day of summer school at Mather. I got a lot of phone numbers and promised to call a few people. I doubt I will.

Later that evening at the dinner table, my mother asked me, "Wasn't today your last day of school?"

Without looking up and through a mouth full of rice, "Yeah."

"Well, what did you get!?" she was getting agitated.

I reached into my left pocket and just sort of... dropped it, I dropped a balled-up piece of pink paper onto the table. It seemed as though everything got quieter. My parents were tensing up, I felt it. That paper was there on that table for what had to be a minute. But I still didn't look up.

Finally, my dad put his hand over it, left it there a second, and sort of snapped it up. He took a moment to uncrumple it, being as obnoxious and noisy as possible. He smoothed it over on the table before finally attempting to decipher it. Then just set it aside.

"Well? What is it!?" my mom asked again.

"He got a B."

Then there was Saturday, the most extreme day of my weekend. It started very well, with Jen and I going to see Pirates of the Carribean (at the same theater where I snuck in to see Finding Nemo). We went to an arcade right after to bum around for a little bit, but we had to get home eventually.

I was on top of the world, nothing could bring me down from the elation of having been with Jennifer for while, or so I thought.

When my dad came home, he was not in a good mood. I swore not to let it get to me, but once he turns on that vacuum cleaner, a domino effect takes place in which he starts to become more aggressive and finds fault with everything. Then he saw fit to rearrange my room.

"Hey! What the hell!?"

The next few moments were a bit of a blur. When he knocked everything off of my desk, I jumped off of the couch and ran into the room. We had a fight. I walked out of the house and to the park, where I stayed for a few hours.

When I came back, my desk was gone, replaced by a bookcase filled with christian books that were given to me over the years that I never read. All of my magazines were gone, as were my CDs, and a lot of mementoes that I kept. Midnight that night, I took out a box from the attic and rooted through the garbage bags to salvage what I could.

But before that, I was sitting on the floor of my room plucking the strings of my viola, which I hadn't touched in a few days. The door was open. My mom passed by and saw me. She said to me, "David, we're never going to pay for your viola lessons. They're too expensive, and you don't deserve them."

Every vision I ever had of playing for the symphonies, just vanished.

On Sunday, nothing happened.

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