Small Town Boys
by Quinn Evans
1986
Charlie Mitchell is a small boy in a small town, known for sticky fingers and bleeding knees and full-of-holes hand-me-down t-shirts. It’s May of 1986, and he is eleven years old, and he is running down the cracked pavement streets of Ridgedown, Nevada, a town full of peeling paint houses built on the fundamentals of being far too hot and far too bigoted. A town that has only the basics of what a town is supposed to be, with a shining population of 5000 and only one grocery store.
Charlie is eleven, and he is running. He is running away from a group of 8th graders, all far too big and far too violent to be picking on someone his size. But they are. They are, because that’s how Ridgedown, Nevada, works.
He’s running, but his legs are too short for his body and he’s never been known for being fast. He’s also never been known for being agile, which is proven as he trips over his ripped laces, tumbling to the ground, kicking up dust and scraping his knees. His skin is still far too soft considering how much he gets hurt. He falls, his knees bleeding, and hands dirty, his breath knocked out of him, an intense panting now in its place.
The older boys catch up to him, and he only sees their blurred shadows as a strong kick hits his side. He can already feel the bruise blossoming on his skin. The kicks keep coming, and Charlie lies there, closes his eyes, and counts the bruises. He doesn’t cry though. Charlie rarely cries.
One of the boys hauls him off the ground, flipping him over and pulling him up by the collar of his shirt. Charlie’s legs kick wildly in an attempt to regain his footing and steady his breathing. He opens his eyes. It’s Jack Henderson, who lives over on Maple Street. His dad owns the electronics shop, and he’s the one of the ten kids at school that has an NES. He breathes heavily into Charlie’s face, and he notes that his breath smells like the nearly plastic mac n’ cheese that was being served in the school cafeteria at lunch that day. Jack smiles, his teeth perfectly straight because his family could afford to fix them up. Charlie’s teeth are crooked, and there’s a large gap in-between his front two. He is too busy comparing his own teeth to Jack’s to notice his mouth open to say something.
“Fag.”
Charlie is tossed backward onto the ground and off the street, and he feels the remaining air leave from his lungs. He lies there, breathing heavily, wondering what that word means.
It is three hours later when Charlie comes home, bruised and dirty, with dried blood caking his knees and upper lip. He lets himself into the too small house with the spare key they keep under the broken plant pot on the covered porch. No one is home. His mother works late hours at that one grocery store, and his father is gone a lot. He likes his mother quite a bit; she knows all his favourite superheroes, and once a week they’ll go to the Blockbuster on Main Street, and she’ll let him rent whatever movie he wants. And they’ll watch it together. Charlie is proud to call his mother his best friend. His mother maybe his best friend, but Charlie does not know his father. He doesn’t know him, or where he goes during the days; his mother does, but she never tells him when he asks. Charlie asked his friends at school, of which he has few, and they said that his dad was probably drinking, told Charlie to see if he smells like liquor when he comes home.
He never does. He looks tired and he smells like antiseptic and stale air. Not liquor. Never liquor. Charlie thinks he may never know where his father goes during those days.
But right now, like usual, no one is home. So Charlie goes up the creaking stairs to his room and curls up under his ripped Star Wars sheets, then hums to himself until he falls asleep. He knows that the dirt and blood from his knees and face will stain the covers, but he can’t bring himself to care. All he cares about right now is the word, and what it means, and if it really does apply to him.
Fag.
It is two hours after that, around 8:00 pm, when his mother returns home from work, hair messy and eyes tired. It is 8:15 when she enters Charlie’s room, waking him up from his nap, and gasping slightly when she notices the bruises and the blood.
Now, Sandra Mitchell is not a bad mother. She works late, but she always makes sure she leaves enough food in the fridge for Charlie to have dinner. She doesn’t make a lot of money, but she always makes sure that Charlie has enough clothes, even if they are just her old sewn together t-shirts. She always makes sure that he has enough.
So when she sees her son, eleven years old and covered in dirt and bruises and blood, she feels like she’s failed, because this is not enough. It is not enough for him to come home like this, and not have anyone to fix him up. It is not enough for her to be his roommate, his friend. She needs to be his mother. She needs to be enough.
But she is not enough, and there’s nothing she can do about it.
She takes him to the downstairs bathroom in her arms and places him gently on the counter by the yellowed sink, grabbing Band-Aids and rubbing alcohol to clean him up. She lightly dabs at his cuts, and runs her fingers through his hair when he winces in pain. She gently applies the bandages to his knees and cheek, making sure that she puts on the superhero-patterned ones that he likes. She cleans the dirt off his face with a washcloth, and gives him a clean shirt to wear, and when she’s done, she thinks he’s awake enough to answer some questions.
“What happened, sweetie?”
Charlie isn’t a liar. “Some boys pushed me down.”
His mother frowns slightly, the whispers of worry lines appearing on her forehead. “Do they push you often?”
Charlie isn’t a liar, but he also doesn’t want his mother to worry. He isn’t a liar, but he won’t always tell the whole entire truth if it’ll make those worry lines more permanent, if it gives her a reason to feel guilty about working so late.
“No.”
The whispers on her face quieted, but she still pushed on. “Did they do anything else?”
Charlie didn’t want his mother to worry, but he was also incredibly curious. “Mom, what’s a fag?”
And at this, Sandra Mitchell cried. Charlie continued to wonder why being a fag was such a bad thing.
1988
It’s August of 1988 when Charlie finds out why his Dad is out so much.
He’s 13, and his parents have sat him down on the dusty living room sofa, and his father looks broken. His mother tells him that his father has a bad disease, a disease called AIDS, a very bad disease that is hurting him. His mother doesn’t cry when she tells him this, and she doesn’t touch his father. Charlie doesn’t cry either. He doesn’t think that he really cares that much. After all, he doesn’t really know his father.
]
Charlie continues to not cry when his few friends as school stop talking to him in public, and, eventually, stop talking to him in private after he tried to hold one of their hands. He just wanted to feel a little less alone. But now he’s more alone that ever, and he still doesn’t cry, not even when Mrs. Jensen from church tells him that his father deserves to rot in hell, that AIDS is God’s punishment for the dirty sins the homosexuals commit.
Charlie still doesn’t cry.
1989
It’s February of 1989 when Charlie’s father dies. He’s still 13, and he’s in an ill-fitting black suit and a stained white button-up shirt, and he is standing over a shallow grave, watching a cheap coffin be lowered into it, watching as his mother doesn’t cry.
He and his mother are the only ones at the modest funeral; Charlie thinks that is rather strange, but then he remembers what Mrs. Jensen said, and how everyone at church had agreed, and he doesn’t think it’s that strange anymore.
He watches his father get buried, and he still doesn’t cry. He thinks that maybe he deserves to get buried too, if he is a fag, like all the boys at school say. He wonders if he’ll end up like his father. He looks back at his mother’s darkened face, and decides that he doesn’t want that. He wants to be something more than a bad memory.
1991
It’s October of 1991 when Charlie meets Nathan Jacobs. Nathan is a tall, but slight boy, with a condescending gaze and a wardrobe full of clean and expensive blue polo shirts. He has shiny blonde hair, and smells like hand-sanitizer, and he has the neatest handwriting in English class. He could probably afford to have an SNES, or even a Neo Geo, but his father thinks that video games are mind-numbing garbage. His father is also the youth minister, and hates the Mitchell family passionately. Charlie is drawn to Nathan like a magnet.
Charlie is 16, and he is nothing like Nathan. He’s stopped wearing him mom’s old shirts, and has started wearing his dad’s. He’s still kind of short, still all scraped knees and sticky fingers, but now he’s a little different. Not a good different, though; if anything, he’s just become more awkward. He’s too sharp in some places and too soft in others, his legs too short and his arms too long. And, of course, he’s more socially inept than ever. Nothing like Nathan. At least he doesn’t avoid the looks in the hallways anymore. He’s so used to the dirty glares, to being shoved into lockers, to the word ‘faggot’ being thrown at him as if it is his name. He knows what that word means now, by the way.
Charlie is 16, and he is at the local arcade with a handful of dirty quarters, and he sees Nathan Jacobs wiping down the Crystal Castles machine with an antiseptic wipe before playing. And, like a magnet, Charlie is drawn over to Nathan and is standing beside him before he even realizes what is happening.
Nathan looks over at him, and says, “You know you’re everything I despise, right?”
And the blunt awkwardness of that phrase makes Charlie smile, because wow, maybe Nathan really is just as weird as him. Charlie laughs, and Nathan smiles a bit, and they take turns playing Crystal Castles, and Nathan wipes down the machine every time. And as Charlie looks at Nathan’s half-smile and bright eyes, he wonders if he is a fag after all.
It is three weeks later, and Nathan and Charlie are leaving the arcade, and Nathan looks around nervously.
“What’s wrong, Nate?”
He smiles curiously at the nickname, and suddenly Charlie is being pulled into the alley beside the arcade and pushed against the brick wall and kissed with the fervent passion of a 16- year-old boy who is being forced to stay in the closet.
And Charlie kisses back. And wow, wow, wow. Yeah, he’s definitely a fag. (And he really doesn’t care because wow, he can’t believe he ever thought that this could be a bad thing).
Charlie continues to kiss back every time after that, and eventually arcade trips turn into him and Nate sitting on the bleacher at the back of the school, fiddling with each other’s hands while Charlie smokes a pack of unfiltered cigarettes he stole from his mother’s purse. He isn’t sure if she noticed he took them, but he’s sure that even if she did, she wouldn’t say anything. She doesn’t really talk to him much anymore. And he doesn’t care, because with Nate, Charlie feels like a real entire person again, and he hasn’t felt like that in a while.
So when Charlie returns home that night, after walking up the steps and giving Nate a subtle kiss on the cheek, he’s shocked when Sandra Mitchell is standing inside with tears in her eyes. Before he can even get out a What is it, Mom?, she is talking in a shaky and frantic tone.
“I-If you keep doing th-things like th-that, you’ll end up-p just like your father.”
It is November, 1991, and Sandra Mitchell is a bad mother. She is a bad mother because she used to be so good, because she used to be Charlie’s best friend and she used to put bandages on his knees and watch stupid movies with him and kiss him goodnight. She is a bad mother because now she won’t even spare a glance in his direction.
It is November, 1991, and Charlie Mitchell cries. He cries because, in the same breath, he lost his mother and his best friend.
1993
It is June, 1993, and Charlie is 18 years old, and he is driving his second-hand beat-up 1976 Buick Regal down the highway. Music is playing far too loudly from the shitty speakers, and there is a wistful smile on his lips and a backpack on the peeling leather back seat.
He is 18, and he is driving past a sign that reads: Leaving Ridgedown. Come back soon!
And he smirks, because he is not coming back, not ever, not to this town with its far too hot weather and far too bigoted inhabitants. Not to this town, with its shining population of 5000 and its one grocery store. Not to this town made of cracked pavement streets, and peeling paint houses, and bad mothers, and being the poorest kid in town.
No.
He is leaving. He is leaving with loud crackly car-speaker music, and a backpack full of bittersweet memories, and a pack of unfiltered cigarettes, and blonde boy in a blue polo shirt sleeping in his passenger seat. He smokes one of the cigarettes, and wonders if his mother is worried about him. He takes a drag, and decides that he doesn’t care anymore. He is leaving. He is leaving with a rainbow bumper sticker on the back of his ugly car.
Not a fag. Gay.