Free Falling by Emery C. Walters

Author:Emery C. Walters [Walters, Emery C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Queerteen Press
Published: 2015-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4: That Goth Girl

Sometime right after Thanksgiving, our next door neighbors did a flit. That is, they left in the middle of the night to avoid paying the rent. We live on a decent enough street of small, mostly two-story homes, but they’re cheaply made, and it’s hard to find something for a family that’s not in a bad neighborhood. So it was only a week later when a new family moved in.

There were the parents, an elderly uncle or something, and the girl. The girl was about my age and even rode the same school bus as me. I smiled at her as we waited for it with the other kids, snow falling around us, real winter yet to come. I thought of her as “That Goth Girl.” We were both pretty shy and of course I was always thinking of Jamison; so we didn’t talk. Nobody did; we all ignored each other and pretended we didn’t know exactly what kind of neighborhood we came from, decent sort of, but not really nice, and that we also didn’t know what kind of home life some of us had. Let’s just say our walls were thin and our houses were close together. We knew when someone’s dad was drunk or when someone’s mother was screaming her lungs out over some omission of chores. We had to all pretend it wasn’t like that, so nobody could or would acknowledge anybody else. Maybe we should have; maybe we could have helped each other, I didn’t know and now with Jamison in my life, I didn’t care.

I cared enough to stop a few fights when they started, and to make sure nobody was verbally abusive, like we’d all grown up with. Hanging around Jamison and his father was giving me a whole new way to think and to act. I guess what they had was class, and I wanted to be like that too.

Anyhow, the new girl was far before—or maybe—after her time, in the way she stood, what she wore, and how she did her make-up. It wasn’t exactly hippies or Emo, but more like something a little past James Dean and beatniks and things like that. She did Goth her own way, like nobody I’d ever seen before. I called it “nonconforming to the rules of nonconformity.” I admired her for that, but of course, I had other things on my mind.

Like I said, she lived right next door to me and I knew what she had at home; bloody fucking nothing, just like the rest of us. Oh sure, my parents cared a lot, at least my mom did and my dad tried, well, more like pretended, to do what he could, but he didn’t know how anyhow. When I’d had my appendix out I’d been more scared of their finding out I was gay than of their not supporting me physically. Well, that’s sort of what I mean but not quite. Maybe it was a matter of class;

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