Haniffer Solowitz was a jackass.
I hated that guy. He’d grown up on Kessel station with us and he had a girl’s name. His father, Flint, had named him after his own grandmother. Then Flint had fled the station one night on a freighter bound for The Troubles.
Hannifer’s mother was not against the occasional bit of whoring to get food and money. His upbringing left a lot to be desired. Still, even that could have worked in his favour sympathy-wise if he hadn’t been such a jerkasaurus. The kid fought like a wolverine. Every day. It took nothing to set him off. We’d go make him mad when we were bored which, on a station this size, was all the time.
He hated women. Something about his mom. After puberty, though, boy! He’d go through them like a chainsaw. It made me ill. And they’d flock! The more hearts he broke, the more got in line to be broken. I can’t deny that we were all jealous but it made almost the entire male half of the class sullen. We’d made fun of Hannifer’s mom and his girly name all his life so we couldn’t blame him for not speaking to us.
I think that secretly, we would have welcomed pointers from him on how to get girls. It was too late for that now. We’d alienated him and he’d risen to the challenge instead of becoming a recluse. Oh, how the tables turn.
He hung out with people much older than us. Twice, I’d seen him through the shields at the station’s bar playing 3poker with tug pilots. They liked his spunk well enough but I’d watch their smiles fall when he won their money.
I remember once he showed up a black eye and keys to a racer. It was the kind of pretentious racer that only had room for two, if you know what I mean. It was also streamlined and arrow-shaped which was totally unnecessary in frictionless space. It would never have been able to withstand atmosphere so the design was just pretentious. He called the front airlocks ‘suicide doors’. And it was bright red.
And I would have given my left nut to have a ride in it, let alone own it.
If Haniffer’s stock amongst the ladies had been gold before, now it was hypercrystal.
I guess he just outgrew this place. He dropped out and started gambling full time. He even ran The Run a couple of times in that little racer of his. The tug pilots let him go out on short-haul missions with him. Some of the tug pilots were known smugglers. I doubt his mother even noticed he was gone.
She died in a messy decompression accident when he was away one time. He came home and trashed the bar when he heard the news. He was tasered and put in the brig. He was in prison during his mother’s funeral. It was an automated process and no one else showed up. The preacher's recorded voice spooled out the non-denominational ceremony to an empty room before her body was ‘locked.
He never came back after that. I had heard that he’d gone straight to the bar after getting out of jail and apologized to the owner. The owner had laughed and said it was okay. He’d seen his share of rough customers. Hannifer had asked if there were any real card games going on and the bar owner had pointed at a table full of legitimate gun-runners who belonged to a credited smuggler’s guild. The stakes were guaranteed to be high.
God only knows what he offered just to get into the game.
He walked away with one of their ships, though, and left Kessel station after winning The Run with it.
I didn’t see him again until ten years later. I remember I was eating spaghetti. The fork was paused, halfway to my mouth, as I goggled at the tri-d.
The Princess was pinning a medal on him for being a hero of the rebellion. I didn’t even know that the empire had fallen!
I should have been jealous but after a close-up on that crooked smile of his, I felt good. I felt like he was one of us and that one of us had made it.
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