# Working title: Face of the Earth - Chapter 1(Language)



## ScientistAsHero (Mar 22, 2011)

1.​ 

There's something appealing about the scent of fresh-cut grass. I imagine that, until my dying day, it will always take me back to familiar places where I spent my early days: to streets lined with old pickup trucks and thunderbirds, to yapping dogs and children pedaling their bikes near dinnertime. 

I know that all sounds very quaint and charming, like something you'd hear at the beginning of some sappy coming-of-age novel. But such is hindsight. In my mind, the story of my life will always play back like a film, complete with a music score and voice-over narration, to make the dramatic parts more poignant. Maybe Tom Hanks will narrate, or even better, Morgan Freeman. Or maybe I've just seen too many movies.

But one particularly hot August afternoon in 1996, I wasn't thinking about any of those things. I was sixteen, almost seventeen years old. I didn't pay the scent of the grass much mind; instead I smelled the stink of sweat rising off my body, and felt the droplets running down the bridge of my nose, and cursed God, nature, whoever was responsible, for causing the grass to grow in the first place. I cursed my Dad for making me mow. There were only two weeks left of summer left before I'd be going into my senior year of high school, and by my figuring I should be spending them inside in front of the television watching the Highway to Heaven marathon that had been going for the past few days, or asleep, not pushing this infernal machine out here in this god-awful heat. 

The roar of the Lawn Boy had become a barely-noticeable droning in my ears, punctuated intermittently by the occasional running over an unseen stick or twig, at which point there would be a sharp crack and a shard of wood would go flying across the yard. Dad had always told me to scour the yard a couple of times for debris before I began mowing, but I didn't listen. Teenagers don't listen to a lot of things their elders tell them, especially pertaining to chores they didn't want to do in the first place.

The front lawn where I mowed wasn't big, maybe a hundred feet long, but together with the back yard amounted to about an hour and a half's worth of work, counting mowing around the trees, which always made it longer. It was divided by a paved driveway that ran from the sidewalk to a carport next to the house. The grass was dry and brown from the past month's worth of drought. At the edge of the lawn was a row of maple trees that bordered the road and that offered our yard a small modicum of privacy. Under the trees was a patch of perpetually grassless dirt, where as a kid I'd dug holes and made dirt racing tracks for my Hot Wheels cars. In the back the lawn continued on for about a quarter of an acre before it met with the edge of the woods. A squat wooden fence surrounded the entire yard, forming a distinct border between our property and the start of the foothills beyond. In the middle of the back stood an enormous oak tree, and underneath that sat an old, rusty shack that Dad kept his lawn tools in.

The house itself was an old place, but it was in good shape. It was an old place and it showed its age, but Dad had performed a major renovation when he and Mother moved in, and after that had done a bang-up job of keeping up with its maintenance over the years. It was a two-story place, currently painted country blue with ivory trim, with a sharply-angled roof pitch and a large front porch with a small refrigerator off to the left, where Dad kept his beer. I'd seen photos of how run-down the place before my folks had moved in, and it amazed me how much work they'd put into it. I guess Dad always considered it a point of professional pride that, as a carpenter and later as a home repair contractor, his own abode should be in tip-top shape. Every year in the early fall, when you could feel just the tiniest relief from the insufferably hot summer, Dad was outside touching up any spot of blistered paint, recaulking seals, and replacing broken shingles on the roof. When I was a kid, I used to watch him out there, on top of a ladder or crawling around underneath the house checking the foundation, and I begged him to let me help. It seemed like forever until he finally let me. But it only took a couple of years before I viewed it as a chore, as something I was involuntarily recruited to do. 

We had lived there since I was a few months old. Dad had started putting money aside when he and Mother discovered they were pregnant. It wasn’t much; he worked as a carpenter and handyman and barely cleared four hundred dollars a week. But his stash, combined with a not-insignificant loan from Mother’s parents, made it possible for them to get our place on the corner of Kimball Street that would be my home for the next seventeen years.

The town had grown up around our house, and for that reason it sat squarely in the middle of downtown Ryarsville. If you stood facing the house, on the left side was a laundromat called Stan's Suds, from which you could hear the steady, relentless churning of spin-cycles at all times, day or night. Since I grew up with the noise, I never even noticed it, and it was only when people would come over to the house and inquire about it that I even paid it any mind. I remember one night when I was six or seven and the electricity to the whole block was blown out during a summer storm. After the howling rain and thunder stopped, I lay awake for hours in my bed, unable to get to sleep because of the absence of the familiar sound of the washing machines and dryers next door. On the right side was an abandoned office building that was empty nearly the entire time I was growing up, except for a brief six-month spell when I was nine or ten and a tax filing agency set up shop there.

I untied the handkerchief from the metal handlebar of the mower -- a trick Dad had taught me to avoid blisters -- and it died quickly. After the incessant noise for the past hour and a half, the relative quiet was strange, muffled, and I could suddenly hear the sounds of the neighborhood -- a car backfired; a child screeched from a couple of blocks away; a door slammed. So many things went on all the time, all at once, outside of my realm of my perception, I often thought. It fascinated me. So many little stories interweaving, touching all at once.

I pushed the mower into the shed, and walked into the house through the back screen door. Raiding the fridge produced nothing but a half-empty two liter of root beer, but I was dehydrated so I drank the remainder of it in several large, quick gulps. I opened the freezer door and stuck my head inside, letting the frigid air wash over my sweat-covered face and sticky, plastered-back hair. If Mother caught me doing this, she'd have a conniption, as she was wont to do when electricity or air conditioning was being wasted, but she wasn't here right now and wouldn't be home for another couple of hours. For now, at least, I had the house to myself and could squander our utilities as I saw fit.

I walked into the living room, picked up the remote control from the coffee table and turned on the television. In the fading light of late afternoon, I lay on the couch, my face to the ceiling, my back soaked in a sheen of my own sweat. The air conditioner rattled quietly from its perch in the wall adjacent to me, but it could only do so much. Southwestern Alabama gets insufferably hot in the summer, as do most areas of the state, but we were close enough to the Gulf to be affected by the humidity as well. The evening would bring only a slight reprieve. My eyes traced their way over the bumps of the popcorn-textured ceiling. From my right side, quietly, I could hear intermittent bangs and galloping sounds of a western on TV. I had turned it on for the background noise only; I had no desire to know what was going on in the story or even what show it was. Silence has always been a horrible thing to me. When there is nothing making noise, no hiss of distant cars or rattling of the air conditioner, the silence floods my ears and fills my mind with chaos. 

Mother wouldn't be home for another couple of hours; her double-shift on the check-out lane at Glidden's Market made sure of that. And Dad had been working until dark every day for the past two weeks on some rich guy's home renovation over in Marta. I would have the house to myself for a little while yet. I figured I would lay here for awhile longer, maybe half an hour or so, then maybe try to sit out on the front porch and write a bit until the sun went down. Who knew? I might even make myself a coke and put a little bit of Dad's Ron Vicaro in it for some added flavor, then retire to my room for the night when Mother and Dad got home.

I had just begun to get excited about my plan when I heard a muffled clopping outside on the walk. There was a sudden gust of hot air as the front door opened and a thin, curly-haired blonde girl walked in wearing a red-and-green striped tank top and a pair of tattered blue jeans.

"Keep that door shut," I said groggily from where I lay on the couch. "You're letting the hot in."

"Trevor, get up. This is important," she said. She didn't say it aloud, but the tone in her voice said it for her: _Don't fuck around right now._

I didn't get up, but rolled over on my side so I could see her. I'd meet her halfway, I supposed. She was wearing thick-heeled sandals and she clamped across the hardwood floor to the reclining chair in the corner and sat down. Her hair was disheveled, the locks now sticking up randomly, and she had slight bags under her eyes, as if she'd been crying. 

"What is it?" I asked, propping myself up on my elbows. My hair clung to my face. Lack of physical exertion was dropping my temperature a bit, but I was still covered in a light sheen of sweat. She said nothing, but got up again and paced back and forth the length of the room a couple of times. "What's wrong?" I asked again.

Charlotte Widby stopped, looked at me evenly, her green eyes glassy, and said: "I think I'm pregnant."

My mind couldn't process the information immediately, and instead took this moment to become captivated with the current goings-on of Gunsmoke on TV. I remembered reading somewhere that it was the longest-running show in American history, airing from 1956 all the way to 1975, and that it had avoided getting the axe on one occasion at the behest of a CBS executive's wife who was a fan of the show. 

"Trevor Guinn. Did you hear me?" Charlotte asked, and I realized I'd been lying there wordlessly staring at the television.

"Yeah, I heard you," I said. "Wow, that's... just... wow."

"That's not helpful at all," Charlotte said with an edge to her voice.

"Well what do you want me to say?" I asked, and I could feel my blood pressure rise. "Congratulations? I'm sorry? What? For fuck's sake, give me a minute to take it in..."

"What am I gonna do?" Charlotte said. "Mama's going to kill me!"

"Are you sure? I mean, that you're..."

"Of course I'm sure!" she said. "I'm already two weeks late."

"Whose is it?" I asked.

"It's Aaron's. Of course it's Aaron's. Who else's would it be?"

"Well, does he know yet?"

"He knows. Whenever he gets upset, he gets real quiet, real red in the face. He doesn't ever say anything, he just goes off by himself. I told him yesterday, Trevor, and I haven't heard from him since. I've tried calling him; I tried a million times last night, and a million times today, but he won't answer. I've gone by his house, and no one knows where he is. He never went home last night."

"He can't just run away," I said. 

"Trevor, you gotta come with me."

"Where?"

"Down to the grocery store. I need to know for sure. I can't do this on my own. There's a possibility I'm not even pregnant." And then, slightly hopeful: "Maybe I'm wrong. It's happened before. Leah Greenwood thought she was knocked up last year, and it turned out she just had premature ovarian failure."

"Lucky her. What about your mom?"

"Are you retarded? I haven't told her yet. I don't want to say anything until I have to. She's gonna kill me."

"She's not going to do any such thing," I replied, without much conviction in my voice. To tell the truth, I didn't know what Charlotte's mama would do, although I was relatively sure the situation wouldn't end in filicide. I figured telling her that would be cold comfort.

I got up off the couch. I felt dumbfounded, flustered, and not a little bit irritated, all at once. The status quo had been shattered in the matter of a few seconds. I didn't know what this meant for her, for us. An impulsive, selfish part of my mind took this opportunity to remind me that, ultimately, it wasn't my problem. I immediately chided myself for thinking such a thing. Charlotte had been my closest friend since the fourth grade.

"Come on, then," I said. "Let's go."

My father had given me an old Chevy Blazer that I drove around town. It was on its last legs, but it got me from A to B. The first time Dad had let me drive it was when I was 13, almost 14, and he was out working. He had ridden with one of his workers, a Hispanic guy named Earl, and had forgotten his level. Instead of sending Earl back across town, he called home from a pay phone at the Hilltop Package store and requested I come out and help him. After an up-until-then leisurely day spent reading comic books and sleeping, I was initially less than enthusiastic, until he told me I could drive the truck. I spent the rest of the afternoon helping him put up drywall, thinking what a hip guy my dad was.

Now I took the keys from the coffee cup by the shelf by the front door and we headed out. It was almost ninety outside, and fuck-all for us but the truck didn't have a working air conditioner. On dry days it wasn't really so bad; you could roll down the windows and let the wind blow the sweat off your body, but on days like today, after only a few minutes of driving, it felt awful to press your sweat-soaked back up against the leather upholstery of the seat. 

We traveled in silence, east down Kimball Street, then left at the four-way stop and onto Larabie Avenue, on which we'd go about three miles until we got to the Save-A-Lot.


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## froman (Mar 25, 2011)

Good stuff. I like it. The (oh so important) first paragraph is great and really hooked me in. The casual and descriptive tone kept me chugging through till the end. I like how you put in a lot of sensory descriptions aside from sight. That is a great way to put a reader inside of the story, to make it three dimensional, rather than just skimming the surface, and is something that I always tell myself to do but don't do enough.

There were a couple of areas where you got a little repetitive, like talking about the sweat and that his mother wasn't going to be home for a couple of hours. Not very major but enough to make me notice. A few minor grammar issues but I don't like pointing those out. It's not really important until the story is done anyway. Also the chapter ended a little abruptly. All in all it was quite good. I'd like to read more if your willing to post.


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## ScientistAsHero (Mar 26, 2011)

Hey, froman, thanks for taking the time to read it.

I see the repetition you mention... it's amazing to get someone else's observations of your writing and then go back and read it based on that. Things are brought to light that you weren't even aware of. (Like the sweat... I am appalled when I read it now that I mention it so frequently.)


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## froman (Mar 26, 2011)

> (Like the sweat... I am appalled when I read it now that I mention it so frequently.)



Well it _is _Alabama. I'm sure that it's a huge part of life down there. I grew up in Alaska so I wouldn't know. I sure as hell couldn't handle that type of humidity. I'd probably last about six hours before jumping on a plane and heading north.


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## Karaoke//Toucan (Apr 4, 2011)

Personally, I like the repetition. Makes it a little more real for me, I guess.


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## jburden (Apr 27, 2011)

I like the story so far.  You've done a good job of establishing the narrator's voice.  The people and place of the story are clear.  I think you did an especially good job of setting up the immediate physical environment; the detail about the laundromat next door is great.  

I did feel that your description of the setting in the first few paragraphs was a little heavy in the sense that you put pretty much all of the description of the house, yard, etc., up front so I felt conscious of the fact that you were setting the scene instead of settling into the story.  I think the story could benefit from mixing up the description so that you aren't so methodical in starting with the house then working your way out.  For example, take some of the stuff about the neighborhood (the laundromat, the other sounds) and mix it into the paragraphs that start with "The roar of the Lawn Boy" and "The front lawn where I mowed."

Also, I see some more of the repetition that froman mentioned; if you look at the paragraph, the first and second sentences are almost totally redundant.

All in all, though, it's good stuff.  I'd keep reading if I came across this in a journal or magazine.


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## jburden (Apr 27, 2011)

Sorry - in my previous post, I meant to point out the 6th paragraph.


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## ScientistAsHero (May 11, 2011)

2.​

I'd met Charlotte in the fourth grade. This would've been what... '87 or '88, I believe. She was a new student, just moved down from western Tennessee, and she sat in the desk in front of mine. We attended Jefferson Strathmore Elementary then, one of Ryarsville's two elementary schools, which we all  just referred to as Strath for short. The school’s namesake had been an early mayor of the town. Back in the 1920s, Mayor Strathmore had been something of an education proponent; he had championed building a new school building to replace the old, wooden one that had been around since the end of the Civil War. Of course, he also decreed in the most polite, evangelical way he could that only white children were allowed to use the new facilities, and that negro children would be kept unto themselves, as the Israelites were kept from the Canaanites, he explained. Some people in the town at the time of my childhood believed that Jefferson Strathmore Elementary should be stripped down from the front of the school building, that the name of such a bigoted and sanctimonious man had no place on the walls of an institution where social acceptance and equality were taught. But the name stuck, and to the best of my knowledge the school is still called that even today. 

Charlotte had been a skinny girl, with sandy-blonde ringlets of hair and a dash of light freckles across the bridge of her nose. At first I didn’t pay her much mind. In fact, we didn’t speak so much as a word to each other for the first couple of weeks after she arrived. I never saw her with any other girls, or anyone for that matter.

One Wednesday morning Mrs. Cokely gave us a new writing assignment. We were to write an informative essay about the scientific invention of our choice. The essay was to be at least one half-page in length, hand-written, and penmanship would be graded. It was due in three weeks. After Mrs. Cokely had finished talking, I turned to Charlotte and said:

“What are you going to write your essay on?”

In response, Charlotte turned to me, rolled her eyes and sighed.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” she said. “Writing is stupid anyway.”

“Writing’s not stupid,” I said. “I like writing.” 

“Well then, that must mean you’re stupid too,” she said, and turned her head back toward the front of the classroom.

To a fourth-grader, that was about as bad a burn as you could get. I had nothing. I started to open my mouth, just say the first random thing that popped out, but I knew that wouldn’t get her goad like she’d just gotten mine. I kept silent. That was how I met Charlotte Widby.

I didn’t talk to Charlotte again for several days, until the following week, actually. I saw her out on the playground, from the grassy field where my friend Sam and I were playing tag. She was standing over next to the bin where the dodge balls were stored, all by herself. Several other girls in my class were nearby playing tetherball, laughing and talking. But not Charlotte. 

“Why aren’t you playing with the other girls?” I asked, approaching her.

She leaned back against the wall, glaring up at me with contempt in her eyes, and without missing a beat said: “Why don’t you mind your own damn business?”

“Fine,” I said, turning to leave. “I was going to ask if you wanted to come play tag with Sam and me, but if you’d rather stay here thinking you’re all cool and everything ‘cause you’re standing here swearing, then be my guest.”

I started storming back toward Sam, but Charlotte spoke up.

“What business is it of yours what I do, anyway?”

I whirled around.

“All I’ve done is try to be nice to you,” I said. “And all you’ve done is be rude in return.”

Wordlessly, Charlotte approached me, and when she was close enough, promptly punched me in the shoulder. She didn’t hit that hard, but I staggered back and clutched my shoulder like a big, wussy nine-year-old baby.

“I don’t like it here,” was all Charlotte offered in explanation.

I turned and left, and when Sam asked what had happened I didn’t tell him anything.

Two days later, I sat in science class with my legs crossed and my bladder burning, desperately holding my hand up in the air until Mrs. Cokely called on me. I requested a bathroom pass and she begrudgingly gave me one. She didn't like having her class disrupted, but I guess the idea of someone having an accident in her class appealed to her even less. I walked out into the empty hallway and made my way hurriedly down to the boy's bathroom. It was afternoon, only about an hour and a half until school let out for the day.

After I'd done my business, I killed about ten minutes of class time by making funny faces in the mirror. At one point a janitor came in to relieve himself but while he stood at the urinal I acted as though I were washing my hands until he left. I walked back out into the hallway and saw Charlotte emerging from the girl's bathroom on the opposite side.

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

"I had to pee, dipshit," she said. 

"You're a potty mouth," I replied. I had never heard a girl my age curse like she did. Although I'd heard my parents use words like that before, and people on TV, something about Charlotte saying them made her seem dangerous, grown-up.

We walked in silence until we approached the classroom door. I started to veer right but Charlotte kept going straight.

"Where do you think you're going?" I asked.

"I don't feel like going back to class right now," she replied, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world. "I'm going to go outside and play for a little bit."

"What?" I nearly shouted. "You can't do that! That's... that's... that's against the rules!"

Charlotte continued on, toward the entrance to the school building. "You can come with me if you want," she said.

I don't know why, but I straightened out my direction and began following her.

"Don't be stupid," I said, "You are going to get in so much trouble if you do this."

"Well it looks like you're doing it too," was her reply. "So if I get into trouble, you get into trouble."

We walked out into the warm afternoon air, and down the front steps of the school building. I was beginning to break out into a sweat, imagining that any minute now a squad of police cars was going to pull up, sirens blaring, lights flashing, and I would be taken off to jail. What would my parents think? Would they even bail me out?

To our right was the playground. Charlotte arrived there first, and once she'd opened the chain-link fence and passed through, she stretched her arms out to her sides and spun around in a circle. She had a smile on her face.

"We have it all to ourselves!" she said. "What do you want to do first?"

Still concerned by the prospect of undercover agents hiding in the shrubbery, ready at a moment's notice to come out of hiding and take me into custody, I said nothing.

Charlotte jumped on the merry-go-round.

"Come on, you big baby!" she shouted. "Get on!"

"Ssshh! Keep your voice down!" I hissed. "Are you trying to get us caught?"

"You're a chicken shit!" she cried, and cackled loudly, as though what she'd just said was the funniest thing that had ever been spoken. And then she began to chant: "Trevor's a chicken shit! Trevor's a chicken shit!"

"Am not!" I cried. And, although my mind told me better of it, I walked up to the merry-go-round and ran around it, holding onto the outer bar with my hand to get it going faster and then faster still, and when it was going as fast as I could get it, I jumped on.

Charlotte was in the middle, holding onto two of the bars.

"Try this," she said, and unsteadily laid herself down, so that her feet were pointing outward and her head was near the center.

I gripped the handle hard and managed to get myself into a sitting position across from Charlotte. After I'd had a moment to steady myself again, I laid my head down against the metal of the merry-go-round. I could feel the metal rivulets pressing against the back of my skull.

I saw the clouds above, only swirling around in a circular streak, like they were caught in some unfathomably powerful whirlpool in the sky. The inertia from the merry-go-round tugged at my feet. I saw a flock of birds overhead, smeared into a grotesque circular shape just like the clouds. When the police found me, I thought, I would be in no state to resist arrest. 

The police didn't find me, but about ten minutes later Mrs. Cokely came outside and sharply demanded we get inside now, and from the tone of her voice we didn't protest. 

Five minutes later, Charlotte and I sat beside each other in Principal Oughtry's office. Neither one of us said anything. There was no sound except for the steady clack clack clack of the secretaries computer keyboard from a few yards away.

I don't know about Charlotte, but right then the delirious sense of freedom I'd experienced outside had dried up and I was wondering how far into my fifth grade year I'd spend in my room. 

Charlotte looked over at me, and I remember how even and focused her eyes were. There was no trace of fear or worry in them at all.

"You're gonna be my friend," she said.

And that was it. There was no request, or questioning in her voice, just a simple statement-of-fact. 

As it turns out, I was.


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## jburden (May 14, 2011)

This is another good installment.  The characters and the language they use seem true to themselves.  I can identify with the narrator because his experiences are close enough to the archetypal experiences of kids in our culture, yet he’s also unique enough to seem believable and interesting.  It’s easy for writers to slip into cookie-cutter writing of stereotypical experiences when talking about childhood, but I think you manage to avoid that here.

  The one critique I have is that there are points where the language you use doesn’t seem right for fourth graders.  When Trevor tries to talk with Charlotte on the playground, it sounds very much older/more articulate than 4th graders.  





> “All I’ve done is try to be nice to you,” I said. “And all you’ve done is be rude in return.”


  This line interrupted the narrative flow for me.



 This tone problem isn’t persistent, though.  The scene where Charlotte says he’s stupid for liking writing worked well.


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## ScientistAsHero (May 15, 2011)

Thanks for reading so far, Jburden.

One thing I was wondering about in particular -- do you think that the second chapter being devoted to describing the way that Trevor and Charlotte met is too much detail? Strictly speaking it's not completely necessary to the story, but since this is somewhat of a character-driven work I wanted to elaborate on the main character's histories together and in that respect I think it adds a lot. (And there will be other scenes detailing their past history together as well elsewhere in the novel.) But I had thought that maybe some people would look at it as extraneous or unnecessary. 

I'm always wondering how much detail is too much... on one hand I feel like one of the strengths of books as opposed to other mediums is that you typically don't consume them for "instant gratification" like you do with, for example, a 1.5-hour movie, which means that there's a little more room to meander over character's histories, personality quirks, etc. On the other hand, I realize that oftentimes what I would think to write as an entire chapter could be sized down to a paragraph if I wanted it to.


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## jburden (May 15, 2011)

VS,

That's a good question.  I do think that you could cut a chunk out of this section and have the story be better for it (or rather, several small chunks here and there).  I think it all depends the next section(s) and how the various pieces flow together.  There are really good details in this section that do help develop the characters, so I hesitate to say what's too much.  I think it would be safe to say that you could get rid of some of their dialogue and related description without getting rid of the details, though.  When writing short fiction, if your editing process doesn't sting and make you think, "But I don't want to give that bit up!", then you're probably leaving too much stuff in.


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