ALWAYS EXAGGERATES
My father always, always exaggerates. When he was younger, he always lurched up and down the house, screaming that he was one step away from filing for bancarrota because he had to pay my brother and my high school tuitions. I never wanted to go to a catholic high school in the suburbs and would have been perfectly content going to a public school that was nearer by. That never dawned on him, though I was miserable every single day of my high school career and more than willing to burn the school down at the most convenient opportunity. My father was always claiming that we were poor as well, but I always countered by telling him that poor people lived in a box in an alley and not in a house. He would just shake his head at me and insist that we were poor. So poor that he got himself a new car every few years and had air conditioning throughout the summer. We even had a pool in the backyard, though I had long outgrown it by the time I was 14. It simply wasn’t deep or wide enough for me to do much but stand around in it. But my father loved doing laps in it and considered it his workout routine. He claimed to be too poor to afford a gym membership.s