A Different Kind Of Bars

Chapter 2

Eventually, opening my eyes and then closing them got boring so I nodded off.

As I dreamt I remembered Johnston and me riding are bikes down Splinton Avenue when we were kids. We had stuck out our arms and cruised down the hills, forgetting all of our seven year old problems. Surprisingly we had many of them at the time but nothing we could not handle.

Johnston and I both had no parents. Mine were both dead and Johnston's were gone in a different way. His dad was serving a life sentence in a Maximum Security Prison in Colorado.

His mother on the other hand was fairly close to where we had lived. However she was an alcoholic  and barely sober. Apparently she was always with a different man who always paid for her house and drinking problems. When they ran out of money or she ran out of interest in the man, she would run off and find another one. The way Johnston had explained it she was always running. Running from her problems. Running from responsibility. Running from everything.

Johnston said she did not want him around so him and I stayed together. As we rode down the hills together we would scream as we hit all the po-
Thump.

I awoke from my slumber in mere seconds. It had felt and heard as if our truck had hit some potholes in the road. While rubbing my eyes, I decided I needed to stretch so I started to pull myself up to a standing position.

As I did so, the chains connecting my hands to the floor held me back like a leash holding back a wild dog. I sat back down, my whole body sore.

I looked over and saw Jim staring at me. His shades were off and he was staring at me with a hungry look in his eyes. It seemed to tell me: "Try something, anything, I want you to step out of line so I can shove you back into it."

I was tempted to rebel; at least put up a fight before going down. However knowing that Jim wanted that exact thing  to happen made me not do it. I did not want to satisfy him in any way.

Instead I sat with my back straight, sticking  my chin out defiantly. Those actions made Jim scrunch his face in anger, fuming like he had just eaten a jalapeño pepper covered in hot sauce.

My stomach growled with the slightest thought of food. It had been quite a while since I had eaten anything, resulting in me being extremely hungry. I was just about to ask Jim about getting food but decided that I had come on this truck with my pride and would leave with the same amount of it.

Instead I would think of something else to get my mind away from eating. I thought of my old neighbourhood. Well at least the one I had been living in before I was brought to court. It had been a pretty good neighbourhood compared to some of the previous ones I'd live in.

I had had enough money to live in a two room apartment. I slept on a twin sized bed that squeaked whenever it was pushed on. The paint on the once upon a time green walls was stained and peeling. The whole apartment was like that. Nothing special to most people but to me it was.

I had only live their for two months but it was the first official apartment I had ever lived in. After a few days, I had cleaned it up. I tried my best to keep it moderately clean but on most days it was still littered with garbage and empty pizza boxes.

My stomach growled loudly, even Jim heard it. He now knew I was hungry and smiled; a taunting smile. My stomach seemed like it was a bottomless pit and my appetite matched it. Now it would be almost impossible for me to think of anything but food. The next hours would be torture...and they were.