I was kicked out of the house at fifteen. Not with a suitcase and not with screams, like in the movies. One day my mother just looked at me like I was a stranger and said: “Ilyusha, it’s better this way. You don’t belong here.” I was standing in our cramped kitchen, which smelled of borscht, her cigarettes and something sour, like melancholy. The floor seemed to have collapsed under my feet, and I kept looking at her hands — thin, with bitten nails, fiddling with the edge of her apron. She didn’t cry. Only her eyes were empty, like a turned-off TV.
Before that, I was an ordinary boy. We lived in a two-room apartment on the outskirts, where the wallpaper was peeling off, and the entrance hall always stank of cat urine. I snuck straight A’s home from school, fixed electrical outlets when my mother asked, washed dishes while she smoked on the balcony. I hoped that at least once I would hear: “Well done, Ilyusha.” But that was before Yuri.
Mom’s new husband burst into our lives like a tank. Tall, with a heavy look and a voice that made you want to curl up into a ball. He didn’t hit me. He didn’t yell. He just looked through me, as if I was empty space. And my mother… she was no longer the one who sang me lullabies. Her laughter was gone, as if someone had erased it with an eraser. When Anya, their daughter, was born, I became a shadow. She was their “real” child: pink booties, smiles, photos on the refrigerator. And I was superfluous.
In the evenings, I ran to the entrance, sat on the cold step, and listened to the hum of the elevator. You could breathe there. The air at home was compressed like a spring ready to snap. I knew it would explode soon.
And it exploded.
“Where did the money from my wallet go?” — Yuri stood in the doorway, holding his shabby wallet like evidence. Five thousand rubles is a laughable sum, but for him, it was like a million. I swore I hadn’t taken it. He narrowed his eyes: “Don’t lie, kid.” Mother was silent, fiddling with the same damn apron. Then quietly, almost in a whisper: “Ilya, admit it. We don’t want to call the police.”
I looked at her and didn’t recognize her. Where was that woman who stroked my head when I was sick? I was silent. I grabbed a couple of T-shirts, notebooks, an old player with a cracked screen into my backpack. And left. The door slammed behind me like a gunshot.
The boarding school greeted me with the creaking of iron beds, the smell of bleach, and the cold of concrete walls. No one pretended to be family here. The older boys tested my strength: they would push me in the hallway or hide my boots. Once they put a dead mouse in my bed. I didn’t scream, I didn’t complain. I just threw it in the trash and remembered: here, the fastest and smartest ones survive. I became like that. I learned to keep my mouth shut, to guess who was lying and who would rat.
But inside, it still ached, as if someone had forgotten to turn off the pain. There was a computer lab in the boarding school — old computers that hummed like tractors and were always freezing. For the first time, I saw code — lines where every word made sense. It was like poetry, only better: they worked. I would sit there all night until the teachers sent me to bed. The computer science teacher, Uncle Sasha, noticed this. He was bald, with an eternal smell of coffee and tired eyes. One day, he threw me a book — a tattered textbook on C++.
“Here, read it. Maybe you’ll get out of here.” I read. I wrote my first programs: a calculator, then a simple game where a square ran across the screen. Every time the code ran without errors, something warm lit up in my chest. As if someone had finally said: “You can do it.”
At the boarding school, I became friends with Vitka, a skinny kid with a permanently disheveled fringe. He was one of those who laugh at everything, even at himself. One day, he stole a loaf of bread from the cafeteria and shared it with me. We sat on the windowsill, chewed, and chatted about how we would run away and become rock stars. Vitka dreamed of a guitar, and I dreamed of a normal life. He didn’t live to see graduation — he got into bad company, then went to prison. But I remembered that loaf of bread. It was like a promise that I was not alone.
I graduated from school with a medal. Not for the praise — I just wanted to prove to myself that I was not trash that was thrown out. I entered a technical university in a neighboring town. The dorm smelled of fried potatoes, cheap cologne, and someone’s socks. I lived on my stipend and part-time jobs: I unloaded boxes at a supermarket, washed floors at a cafe. At night, I wrote websites for pennies. My first order — a page for a car service — brought in five thousand. I bought myself new sneakers and a pizza. For the first time in years, I smiled so hard that my cheekbones cramped. This was my money. Honest.
I found friends at the university. Lyokha, an anime fan, was always carrying his laptop around and showing me how to make animations in JavaScript. Katya, a red-haired girl with a loud laugh, taught me how to cook eggs so they didn’t burn. They were the first to see me not as a shadow, but as a person. But I still kept my distance. I was afraid that if I let them too close, they would disappear too.
By the time I was thirty, I had my own company. Small, but mine. An office in the center, glass doors, a coffee machine that hummed like my old computers at the boarding school. A team of ten people who believed in me. I believed in them. We made websites, applications, even launched a startup — a service for online courses. Sometimes I looked at my office and thought: “But I did this myself.”
Every success was a silent rebellion against the past. Against the day I was thrown out of the house, against the shadow of abandonment. I built something from nothing, and each line of code was like a quiet shout — I am here. I am worthy.
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