Nonconformity | Henry Creel

Nonconformity

**Peter enters in chapter 3****.   

I felt as if I could explode. My nerves were alight with a panic I had never experienced before. How does one even get in a situation like this? Every Time I thought back to the events of that morning, my mind went foggy and disbelief took hold.

I'd been homeless for six months prior to what I labeled 'the incident." Homelessness was an unbelievably difficult pill to swallow at first, but I was a nightmare. I always had been. I accepted, I adapted, and then I began the journey to overcome the situation that had been forced upon me. And yet, that 'pill' was still stuck in my throat, no matter how forcibly I tried to swallow. I didn't want to live like this. I didn't want to be judged by those more fortunate than me, or worse, pitied. I missed showering frequently, I missed my bed, I missed the comfort of my room back at home.

However, I knew my leaving was for the best. After my dad died, my home began catching fire. It was a slow boil at first, a tenable scorching of the wooden and concrete bones the house was built upon. During that stage, my mom would come home late every once in a while, drunk. I'd find her the next morning passed out on the couch, surrounded by cigarette stubs and empty liquor bottles. I told myself she was simply mourning my father; but even back then, I doubted it. They had never been close. They never fought, but they also never loved one another, at least not from what I could tell. They lived completely separate lives, with me being the only link that tied them together. I think my father resented me for that. I didn't mind, I never liked him all that much, either.

After the slow boil came the fire, which slowly began eating away at the walls, covering them in ugly, black scorch marks that would permanently mar my childhood home. That was when mom brought home Wyatt, a beast of a man with the social skills, maturity, and intelligence of a twelve-year-old boy. Mom spun it as a new opportunity for me to have a father figure in my life, one that was "hopefully better than your father," she would say. And, like a fool, I accepted him.

When Wyatt's name crossed my mind, I forced myself to stop fixating on all that had gone wrong in the past year. I had more urgent things to worry about, the most pressing of which being the pair of boots I heard shuffling around outside.

The police were undoubtedly searching for me, equipped with guns and loud voices and questions I had no idea how to answer.

Another difficult part of being homeless was the competition. We all needed the triad that fueled human life; food, water, and shelter. At its core, homelessness was survival of the fittest, and I'd be damned if that wasn't me. And so I began stashing, rationing, and stealing whatever I deemed necessary. I'd been camping out in an old, abandoned apartment complex since I first ran away. The mattress I slept on had odd stains and broken springs, and the complex itself was in the deepest, darkest bowels of disrepair. But it was enough. The roof over my head (which was slightly broken and tended to leak) was the best I could ask for, and I counted it as a blessing.

That made people jealous, apparently. And by 'people,' I mean the three men who had awoken me from my sleep that morning. At first, I tried fighting them off. During the ensuing struggle, between punches, kicks, bite marks, and screaming, a knife was brought to my throat. Gone was my initiative to fight. They had then spent the next hour taunting me, ransacking my place, and keeping me quiet with the occasional slap.

I don't remember what happened after the leader of the group began lacing the knife across my throat, drawing blood and biting pain. All I knew at that moment was an intense fear, a pinprick of white in the back of my head, and an electrical surge that coursed through my veins like a lightning strike.

When I came to, I was standing over the bodies of the three men. Each body was battered and broken, with limbs jutting out at unnatural angles. They were dead, and I feared I would join them. My heart was beating too fast, my mind was running at speed I couldn't possibly maintain, and I was plagued by raw, all-consuming exhaustion that threatened to knock me off my feet. I couldn't move, I couldn't breathe, I couldn't think straight.