Hunting the Fairy Tale

Chapter 38 - The Knight of Slaughtaverty

Declan

I can hear some irritated sounds coming from the desk next to mine in the English class. The sounds are growing in their intensity, and I turn me head to see what Hunter is up to now. 

Looking at him, I'm hit by a strong wave of déjà vu. Suddenly I'm a pale 13-year-old foreigner sitting in me homeroom class far, far away from the green hills of Ireland. A rather skinny boy, blinking in trepidation at whom I believe to be the school thug grunting and muttering at the desk next to mine.

Aye, was unfair of me to just assume that Hunter was the school bully just because he had a brilliant shiner and was growling at his pen. I did, after all, have a couple of stitches in me left eyebrow at the time. Galen missed our dad and did not get along well with me mam's second husband. 

When me brother gets angry or upset, things turn ugly. He has the kind of bad temper any demon from middle hell would be jealous of. It was just two days before our first day of high school in a new country, and the plonker hit me in the head with his new school bag. At the time, it had been loaded and ready for the big day too.

It might sound pretty vicious, and he did mean to hit me with the bag, but he really didn't think that it would do that much damage to me. Galen tends to leave thinking until after the fact. Well, I had a cut in me eyebrow, and though it wasn't quite as blue and swollen as Hunter's eye, I could just as easily have been mistaken for a thug. 

Me, a timid and fearful lad, pissing himself with anxiety because he didn't know if he'd fit in at the new school.

I was also strongly starting to suspect that I was about to lose a second father. Me mam and me aul fella used to go at each other day and night, yelling and swearing, and then Dad moved out and Mam cried for exactly six months before she married a foreigner and had Emily. 

They were alright for a couple of years and then the yelling and swearing started up again. It stopped for a wee bit when we moved here from Ireland. I didn't know that me mam was originally from Briar Cove and that Rob had been her first love from the same town. I don't think he'll be her last love, though.

There was a reason they broke up when they were still high schoolers, and that reason popped up again while me mam was plugged with Emily. Emmy's dad, Rob, likes women in quantities not fit for building a healthy marriage.

We all left Ireland to settle down in Briar Cove, and three years later, Rob picked up and left with some flapper. There's been many a steady stream of them since. When he left, Emmy's heart was broken the most. She loves her dad.

Me mam has always liked drinking, and after Rob left, she went down the deep end and became a true pisshead for a while. For the last year, she's been trying to stay sober, and she manages to do so most of the time. Every now and then, she goes on the tear, and then we end up with a few rough days like we did last week. 

She's back at work today, sober and ready to pretend that she didn't fall off the wagon and make our lives hell.

During the time of the memory now running through me mind, making me grin nostalgically, Rob was still very much married to me, aul wan, and we were new to Briar Cove. It was me first year of high school and me first day in a school that was not in Ireland. Too many firsts for me to handle. 

I missed the smell of peat smoke; I missed the misty rain, and I missed hearing people calling out howya to passers-by. I missed me friends and me family. I even missed me dad a little, even though we never got along, and he preferred Galen.

The administration of Briar Cove High made the wise decision to never place Galen and meself in the same class. Even in year eight, when we all still had the same subjects, they separated us. Probably to avoid confusion since we look so much alike.