Onyx
It all began with a game…
“Guess what I found today?” Garrett asked, rushing into our room, excitement bubbling off him. He was always the easier going one of us. Which, considering we were all assholes in our own right, that was saying something.
Paxton stood up, lifting his arms above his head and stretched. “Ummm, a needle in a hay stack,” he replied dryly. Sarcastic prick, that’s what we liked best about Pax.
Garrett shut the door behind him with a soft click before twisting his backpack around his body to the front and removing a worn and tattered old box. “Monopoly!”
I raised my eyebrows curiously, but didn’t dare speak. I had never heard of this Monopoly thing. Paxton rushed over to yank the busted ass box from Garrett just as Dane sat up in his bed.
“I haven’t seen a board game since I was six and still playing Shoots and Ladders with Lacie,” Paxton muttered as he dropped to the floor, his back pressed to his side of the bed.
Our room wasn’t large, but we made shit work. The door to enter had a wooden four-drawer dresser on each side. We each claimed two drawers and shared the small closet in the front corner of the room. On the far wall from the door, we had two small bookshelves filled with Bibles and acceptable Amish reads. Having two sets of twin-size bunk beds, we lined them on each side of the wall and made a path through them to the back area. It’s where we spent our free time, when we had it.
“Grams loved to play Monopoly because she said it took so long to finish, it was promised time together,” Garrett shared openly with a hint of longing in his voice.
It’s something that happened with him every time he thought of life before coming here. If I could remember the life I had before landing my ass in this Amish orphanage, then I might have found myself feeling and acting like him. Dane and I, though, we weren’t like Pax and Garrett; they knew life off the farm—could remember it, hold onto the memories. We could not.
Garrett had been here for two years. He had just turned twelve when he arrived. That’s twelve years of family, memories, and love to get him through the next four years until they set us out into the world. Not that Garrett had a spectacular life, but he had one outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Paxton went about setting up the board game as Dane made his way over to sit down and study it.
“How do we play this?” he asked, never one to be afraid to ask questions. Dane was all about the details in everything we had to do. He always said that details were knowledge and knowledge was power.
“Well, we’re missing some pieces, but we can make this work,” Paxton explained while organizing the paper bills as Garrett and I joined them on the floor, each of us taking a side of the board.
“I didn’t find any game pieces, so here is some paper and we can draw our icons,” Garrett proposed, handing out the white scratch paper and pencils.
As each of my friends worked on setting up parts of the game or drawing their icons, I wondered what other teenage boys were doing that weren’t living like us. Would they be playing a game like this? Would they be outside riding bikes? Those were all questions that wouldn’t get answered.
What I did know was if we got caught playing this game, there would be hell to pay. The people running the orphanage had little tolerance for rule breakers.
We were the defiant four, as Amos called us.
If there was a rule to break, we broke it. If there was a punishment to take, we took that shit too. It was all part of being here with nowhere else to go, but we didn’t care. Living to work wasn’t really living to any of us. The only excitement we had came with bending situations the way we wanted them.
“So the goal of the game is to have the most money at the end. You buy property so you can charge rent and build up your properties with houses and hotels for more rent,” Garrett explained while we all listened avidly. “If you land on a fee, you gotta pay it. If you land on chance or community chest, you pick up a card and do what it says. We’re missing some cards, but we’ll make it work.”
Dane, Paxton, and I replied in unison, “We always do.”
It was our group motto, We’ll make it work, we always do. Relying on each other was all we had. These three were my brothers, and we made due with what little we had.
“These are the usual game pieces,” Garrett lifts the box, showing Dane and me the pictures of a dog, a horse, a cannon, and a ship. “I think we can just make whatever we want.”
I began sketching my choice of pieces as did my friends. Dane was the first to proudly place his paper on Go.
“A gun because I’ll always protect what’s mine,” he explained when we all looked down at the sketch of a handgun.
Dane loved to shoot when Amos would let him go hunting with him. While eating squirrel and rabbit was far from my favorite, the pride on Dane’s face in providing something for our fucked up make-shift family made me choke it down with a smile.
Paxton was next to lay down his paper. “A money bag because money is everything in this world.”
He wasn’t wrong. Even at a young age I knew money was the key to having anything and everything in this life. It was the root of all evil, yet the maker of living life easy. It all came down to money, something none of us had.
Garrett dropped his down. “My briefcase. Owning property means paperwork, and this boss man will be keeping my shit straight.”
Smirking because that sounded just like him, I added the last detail to my drawing before I placed it with pride in the square.
“Is that a self portrait of you on the Monopoly Man’s body?” Dane asked, studying the sketch, his brows squinting as he took in the drawing.
“Yup, I’m the man in charge of it all!”
The funny thing about that day was how it set us up for the future. Four misfits thrown together in a bad situation who rose above it all. We came from different blood, different backgrounds, and different mindsets, but together we would conquer everything in our path.
With every roll of the dice, we made decisions, bought properties, lost properties, managed costs and upgrades, as well as avoided the dreaded Go To Jail square. Just like in life, the get out of jail free cards didn’t exist in our game either.