One Shots 3.0 [boyxboy]

Tommy Sullivan is a Freak

This town is shit.

I know a lot of kids my age think their hometown is shit, but mine really is. When I was a kid, my best friend and I were watching TV - I can't even remember what show it was now, or maybe it was a movie - but it was set in Chicago and one of the characters referred to the city as Chi-Town. Tommy liked that; he started laughing because he was nine and at nine you think swear words are funny and said, 'Chi-Town. That sounds like Shite Town. More like here. That's what this place should be called - Shit-Town.' And after that, that's what it was called, for us anyway.

Shit-Town, Alberta, population 12,000. The average income per family is about fifteen grand a year; more than half of the adult residents are on welfare; alcoholism has touched every single person I know; and we have a meth problem.

Seventy percent of every year's freshman class manages to graduate, and less than ten percent of those go on to third level education. I know four girls who had more than one kid by age sixteen. I know one baby who was born with a meth addiction.

Nestled in the mountains, surrounded by trees, miles from the nearest city, picturesque - the most depressing place on earth.

I can't wait to get the fuck out of here.

Of course, Tommy took that initiative years ago.

Not that there isn't a reminder of him spray-painted on the wall of the high school gymnasium. I can try to erase Tommy from every other inch of town, cleanse every landmark of my memories of him, but I'll never get him off Shit-Town High's gymnasium wall.

It's the worst part of my school day, which isn't so bad really, all things considered. I'm going to graduate - I decided that when I was seven, curled up in the foetal position on the living room floor, spluttering and trying to catch my breath after my dad had stumbled away from beating me bloody to grab another beer from the fridge. I was going to graduate, and I was going to get into university, and I was going to get the fuck out of here.

So, I study, and I do okay. I'm not top of my class, but I'm in the top ten percent. I play basketball, because I need to keep fit - it's been years now since my dad laid a hand on me and I need to make sure it stays that way. If my school had any extra-curriculars I'd do them, because those are important to universities, but it doesn't, so a few of my like-minded friends and my girlfriend and I try to do something to raise money for charity once a month or so, just to have something to fill that space.

And, I'm popular. I did this on purpose too. You need allies if you're going to get out of this place alive, and after Tommy left...

I call them my zombie apocalypse friends. They're not real friends; they're not the people I'd choose if I had all of humanity to choose from, and I doubt they'd choose me either. They're the people you find hiding in the back room of the supermarket you're ransacking during the zombie apocalypse, who you team up with because you have to, not because you like them. Not because you have anything in common. Not because you connect with them on some cosmic level. Just because they're there. In the same place, at the same time. Trying to survive. Just like you.

I meet Lucy Ross at her locker twenty minutes before classes start every day, and we make out for fifteen minutes before I walk her to her first class, and then make my way to mine. Lucy's first class every day last year was Health, which is right by the gym, so I didn't really have a choice about seeing The Tommy Thing every day. I mean, I could avoid the gym, except for when I have basketball practice, which is only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but I have to walk Lucy to class. At first she used to look between it and me and ask, 'Are you sure you don't-'

And I'd interrupt her and say, 'Of course not babe, it's fine.'

Because as far as anyone else knows, I am over The Tommy Thing. They don't know that it still bothers me that I have to see that shit, and they don't know that I capitalise The Tommy Thing in my head when I think about it.