Abusing Spring Break

Sleeping-In

I began experimenting with writing from a male narrator’s perspective, and the result is this beginning excerpt from a young adult novel I am continuing to develop. The premise is a teenage boy from a divorced family, falls for a girl at school, runs into her at the library, mistakenly thinks she is a spy, and finally discovers that she helps battered women find new homes. When she of course finds herself in a precarious situation with one of the abusive perpetrators, Karl gets involved in her campaign against violence and learns a little about his own past in the process. Enjoy the first three pages!

Chapter 1: Gimme A Break

         Three days ago, the high pitched screeching noise my high school calls a bell released my fellow sophomores and I from our seven months of servitude. It was only to be a temporary reprieve from the lack of windows, droning lecturers, and mundane tasks, but as evidenced by the ecstatic hoots, hollers, and scampering sneakers high-tailing their way out of the building, Spring Break at Overland High was over due.
         Beautiful girls, mostly seniors heading off to exotic beach destinations where the drinking age was only 18 years old, blatantly disregarded the dress code on that final day of third quarter. My buddy Karl and I basked in their disobedience, lingering by his locker to watch the curvy girls in skin tight strapless sundresses bounce down the hall. Brushed with glitter, their supple, pre-baked skin, taught against dainty necks, collar bones, and shoulders had seemed almost more radiant than a pot of gold itself. Sweet heart necklines dipped just low enough that I would have willingly emptied my life savings account to head to Cancun or Matzlan or wherever it was I could see them dressed only a bikini. Karl nudged me.
         “Look at the buttons on her dress, doesn’t it look like if you made her laugh hard enough they’d pop right open?”
         “Think of a joke, I’ll give it a try,” I offered. Karl was referring Georgia, a buxom senior who had not always been a Kansas City resident. She’d lived somewhere in the South, not Georgia, that would be obvious, but something like Alabama. I think I’d seen her wear an ‘Old Miss sweatshirt on a spirit day during the winter. She had a slow soft sexy drawl straight out of movie, and wore more make-up than most of the mid-western girls I knew. Her hair was long, medium brown, and seemed to curl every which way as it tumbled down her back. She was a goddess in Karl’s eyes, and I believe it was his goal to  get a pink pouty lipstick print from her someday. Though, my attention was quickly drawn away by another angelic sound.
I’d heard Jenny laugh somewhere behind me. When other girls, like Georgia, giggled, she laughed; I tingled everywhere when I’d heard her the first time. I tingled everywhere now anticipating the glimpse of her in spring break attire. I mean everywhere.
         I leaned back against the locker, so I could look back behind me, down the hall. And there Jenny was, wearing a white cottony sheer dress. Was it see through or was my imagination filling in the blanks? It had sort of a high waist that came right up underneath her boobs. The top of the dress was sort of like two little triangles that covered just the necessities, but did it in a way so that I didn’t think she looked too skanky. She looked just right.          
         “Ah shit.” I grabbed my belt buckle and shook my jeans to relax a little and Karl chuckled.
         “Okay, Brody-mister, lets get out of here. Enough of that for us.” I think he was in the same situation as me because he sort of forced me to walk in front of him as we passed Georgia and headed down to the student parking lot.
         That was three days ago. Karl hadn’t needed that moment in the hallway as bad as I had because he and his family have an ocean front condo down in Florida. I’d gone with him a couple of years ago, but finances had been tight at home since my mom was getting divorced again. I hadn’t wanted to ask her about spring break money this year, and I had blown a lot of my summer savings to buy new gear and send myself to conditioning camp  before football season. Making the JV team had been worth it, but spending the week with Jenny might have been better.
         I had glanced at my lime green clock radio probably an hour ago, when I had rolled out of bed to hang a blanket over my window. It had been past noon, and the sun’s rays were sneaking through the mini-blind slats with such intensity I could no longer sleep. With the red and yellow Kansas City Chief’s blanket snuffing out the sun like a candle, I’d gone back to bed, but Mom had other plans because here I was tossing and turning again.
         A Celine Dion song was blaring on a stereo downstairs. Celine was a female pop star who had risen to stardom in the 1990’s, maintained a stage show in Vegas through 2008 or so, and developed her own perfume line, all while raising her own kids. She was every aspiring supermom’s role model, I guess. The high notes of her power ballads had carried my mom through some of the lowest points of her life, but they couldn’t stir me from my mid-day slumber.
Come to think of it, my mom had mentioned she was going to be working on her resume this week. She’d been a secretary before she and Ralph were married, and although it paid okay, she said she just couldn’t go back to a 9-5 job in a cubicle without windows. Ralph’s alimony payments were not enough to take care of us both forever, although he was giving her a little extra until she was “back on her feet.”
         I mulled over their dysfunctional relationship as I readjusted an extra pillow over my ears to muffle out the Titanic hit: “My heart will go on.” They were pretty pathetic these days, and mom could do nothing but bitch. The whole “back on her feet” comment had sent her spewing and spatting obscenities in his direction for days as though she had been the one demanding a divorce, but the truth was when he left her, it broke her heart. The trouble was he had never taken the time to listen to her and she’d never really been happy with who he was, so for  11 long years, she nagged, complained, pouted and grumped around the house until she had whined him right out her life.
         Ralph wasn’t an emotional guy, but the divorce was messing with him too. I answered the door bell the day he’d come over with the divorce papers. His black hair, usually neat and tidy with a pomade finish, hadn’t been trimmed for two or three weeks. A scraggly goatee peppered his face, and his attempted smile turned into more of a wince when I backed away from his attempt to buddy-punch my shoulder.
I don’t know why I backed away. It’s not like I was angry or hurt or had feelings for the guy; he wasn’t my real father, but I guess he had been there for the better part of my memory.
I think my first Ralph recollection originated from a 100F day when I was four or so. The three of us had sought refuge from the heat at the Ocean’s of Fun adventure water park in Kansas City, Missouri. My mom was not the best swimmer in the world, but she’d enrolled me in swim lessons every year since I was born, and I swam like a fish.
         When we arrived at the water park, I had quickly become bored floating in the lazy river while I watched other kids being sloshed and tossed around in the wave pool or spit out on a gush of towering waterslide water.  Ralph had recognized my sense of adventure, kissed my sun bathing mother on the forehead, and said ‘come on sport, this isn’t the spot for men like us is it?’  With that, he swooped me up under the arm pits, tossed me high into the air, and half caught me again as we splashed into the water. We rode every water slide that I was tall enough for at least 3 or 4 times apiece. By carrying me on his back he’d even snuck past a couple of the lazy workers, on to the giant tube slides where riders were supposed to be over 48” tall, I think that was the day Ralph had convinced both my mom and I that he should be a part of our lives. 
         So here I was laying in bed, stuck with my mom’s obnoxious divorce music and those silly sun drenched memories that meant nothing now. Foot steps thudded up the stairs, growing louder with each approaching stride. I hunkered father under the covers.
         “Brody…up-and-adam. Let’s get a move on your day—” mom barked these commands, while disrobing the blanketed window and swinging open the casement glass. A warm spring breeze wafted through. My blankets were getting uncomfortably hot. She’d recently planted rosebud trees. The flowery scent and chirping birds outside seemed sickeningly sweet to me at the moment. It must have been part of her evil plan.
         The blanket was lifted away from me. I felt exposed. Brare. Weak. Powerless. Mom ruffled my hair.
         “Come-on you lazy little beach bum. Lets get those sandy curls of yours some sunshine. We’re taking a trip to the library.”
         “Hell-no”
         “Oh yea.”
         “Why?”
         “Because?”
***
         Eventually I lost the battle of one-worded wit, and despite my desperate pleadings, my kicking and screaming resistance, and my heartfelt begging, Mom was through with pampering me. In old fashioned disciplinary form, she grabbed me by my ear, and tugged. Since it only takes eight pounds of pressure to rip an ear off, the tug landed me upright and on my feet in no time at all.
         I trudged behind her as she marched down the stairs. A po-dink single layer sandwich sat on the table with a glass of milk. My stomach gurgled with anxious hunger.
         “Yours is in the fridge, I didn’t know how long that battle was going to take.”
         My sluggishness began to dissipate, and I hurried over to the refrigerator. I caught a reflection of myself in the shiny stainless steel. My curls were disheveled, but the rest of me looked pretty fine. I flexed my pecs and twisted my arm to flex my shoulders and tri-ceps. I was going to have a good throwing season this year during track, I could already feel it.
         The sandwich in the fridge was a three layer BLT, with multiple stratums of thick, juicy bacon, crisp cool lettuce, thick delicious mayo, and a tinge of mustard on the top layer. I sank my teeth into it, hardly taking time to savor the flavors. The truth was sleeping from 11:00pm to past noon was enough to create hunger pains.
         With a few bites left in my hand, only crumbs on my plate, and mom finished with the dishes, she began packing her purse. What a sneaky devil she was; she knew I couldn’t tear myself away from the delicious lunch, leaving it unfinished, so there was no escape back upstairs before she was rearing and ready to leave for the library. ...to be continued