While I hate to be "that guy" and post my work after the bare minimum of 2 reviews (I have 3!), I'm afraid if I don't do it now I'll again become bored with this site and drift away for another year. So bear with me.
This piece is probably extremely derivative, but what isn't? It's the first section of a novel I was planning to write over the summer, but a friend dissuaded me from doing so with his criticism of the unoriginal nature of the plot line. I however, would like to get back into it. So please, criticize this, but mainly just encourage me to write more--lie, I don't care. I need the external motivation.
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It was a small river where we lived but it became a big one a couple miles down the road to the west, and we would ride alongside it to where it opened up into the ocean everyday during the summer. The town grew in the opposite direction, with the suburbs stretching out to just off the shore and the real city part a little ways inland. I lived halfway in between the beach and downtown, three houses away from Jimmy Richardson and across the street from Mike Patterson. The three of us spend the better part of 15 years together, but I haven’t seen either of them in 20 years now. It’s probably for the best, I suppose.
Mike and I were 12 when we found it. Jimmy had turned 13 two month back, but on account of his dad losing his job and his mom being long gone he didn’t have a birthday party or even any cake. My mom sometimes made me an extra sandwich to take to him at school, but I didn’t ever give it to him because I knew he wouldn’t want the charity. I couldn’t verbalize it then, but Jimmy was a proud boy.
We found it in the woods up north in the hills above the river, but we didn’t say a word about it until we were back in my living room and Mike was through being sick in the bathroom. It had been pretty gruesome, but that didn’t stop me and Jimmy from giving him a hard time once the initial shock had passed. We all laughed about it in a month’s time, but we shouldn’t have. We weren’t done running down the steep slope and falling and slipping in the mud, and Mike wasn’t done throwing up at the site of blood.
In the summer between 6th and 7th grade we found a body, and that’s when it all began.
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School got out June 14th that year, and we would only have until the end of July before I went to visit my aunt and uncle, then school would start back up and the fun would end. That had more or less been the plan from 3rd grade on, when I first moved to Wilmington City.
Only a month and change of pure, unadulterated summer freedom. It hardly seemed like enough, how were we supposed to build a tree house, chart unmapped territories, woo girls, and learn to play guitar in that short amount of time? It was even more daunting a task considering none of us had any real money. My parents gave me 10 dollars a month, which they thought I saved up, but I really pooled it with Mike’s 15 dollars and we spent it in two weeks on snacks and sodas. Jimmy didn’t have anything to add, but we understood and bought him a Coke every once in a while. We would have done it more if he had asked.
So time and funds were short, but spirits were high. June 14th finally came, and school dragged on for a hundred hours and the games we were playing went from mildly amusing to mind numbing. For some reason they made us stay in that classroom even though we weren’t being productive at all, when all anyone wanted was to get out and breathe that first glorious free breath of air, the air that fills your lungs up better than it had for the last 9 months and you realize that you hadn’t been taking full breaths at all until now, just little gulps of air that kept your body working but failed to stimulate your mind. I figure I was probably too young to be stressed about school, tests were always easy for me and homework was an occasional evil that could often be avoided.
Two o’clock, half an hour before the bell rang for the last time. That’s actually false, every day during summer the bell rings at 7:45 in the morning and then again at 2:30 in the afternoon, calling out for someone, anyone to listen to it and file back into the classroom like they are on a conveyer belt where scrap metal is smashed into thin sheets by a hydraulic press, coming out more useful than before but with every piece looking exactly the same. The man running the machine just has a glazed look in his eyes and pulls a lever, this wasn’t where he dreamed of ending up, but the press smashed his aspirations down when he realized he couldn’t be a doctor when he couldn’t even handle high school biology.
I caught Jimmy’s eye from across the room. He was stuck playing a game of checkers against Samantha Wilkins, who was generally recognized as the best looking girl in our grade but also as one of the meanest. I could see the amusement on Jimmy’s face as he watched her fume over the checkers board; seemingly hoping that her glare could coerce the little wooden circles as well as it did real people. No dice. Jimmy jumped another of her pieces and was kinged again. He smiled at me out of the corner of his mouth, careful not to attract Samantha’s attention and face the subsequent condemnation for gloating. Jimmy could read people well, and nearly everyone liked him because he knew what they wanted and could more often than not give it to them. Whether it was placating Samantha by withholding any celebration or pleasing the teacher by offering to help clean the room after class, Jimmy managed to win over people’s affections at no cost to himself.
Mike was the opposite. He wasn’t an unlikable person by any means, but he did little to endear himself to others. By some unfortunate circumstance, he wasn’t in the same class as Jimmy and me, but we still saw him everyday at recess and lunch. The three of us were popular enough for my taste; most of our grade knew us and generally had no aversion to playing a game of handball or basketball with any of us. Once in a while though, Mike got a little crazy. Losing didn’t sit well with him, and it showed, often violently. He never hurt anyone, but it wasn’t unheard of for a teacher to have to intervene and make sure the conflict didn’t escalate. His competitiveness wasn’t his fault, though, I blamed his dad. See, Mr. Patterson wasn’t Mr. Patterson at all, thank you very much. It’s Dr., and see to it that you remember it. He didn’t spend 8 years in college for some little ten year old to call him Mr. The good doctor had high expectations for his son, no doubt hoping that the boy would grow up and go to medical school himself. Unfortunately for both parties, Mike was an exceedingly average student. Never failing, but never excelling. Not like your friend Jimmy, he always gets straight A’s. I don’t care if he’s just smarter, you’ll have to work harder then, damn it! Coming home to that, it really wasn’t surprising that Mike was wound a little too tight.
“Go fish,” I said absent mindedly, to no one in particular. The fact that we were playing Clue seemed to have escaped me at some point in the last hour. I looked down at the cards in my hand, but instead of seeing a candlestick I saw a burning torch, bursting through the cobwebs of some unknown cave and having its orange glow reflected back off a pile of jewels, each the size of your fist. The library was shuffled to the back of the deck; I’d had enough of them for a while. Finally, the revolver, catalyst of endless fantasies throughout my childhood. Somehow being allowed to hold a real gun only further stimulated my imagination rather than tempering it like my dad had no doubt hoped for. He was a cop, and a respected one, and he carried his gun everywhere and no one said a word about it, because that’s Officer Jackson, he’s the one that saved that little girl from those terrible kidnappers. He once apprehended a burglar without getting out of his squad car; so let’s overlook the fact that he has a .45 sticking out of his jacket while he buys milk.
I was going to be a cop too and nothing I could say would change that fact. My dad had that one planned out from the beginning; my first toy was a miniature police car that I proceeded to choke on as soon as I was left alone. Choking on his dream for me as it was shoved down my throat—I was an admirably prophetic child. I had no desire to be a cop, I wanted to go to college and study fossils and build great bone models of dinosaurs that would be displayed in museums across the world. But I still needed that gun, because I was going to be the Indiana Jones of paleontology.
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There's more, but I figured that's probably too long of an excerpt as it is. If it is too long I can delete some and save it for another post.
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The curiosity of the first 'part' was wonderful! Hmmm..could we be dealing with a mystery?