No More Dead Kids

  No More Dead Kids

  Thomas Marshall

  © Copyright Thomas Marshall 2019

  Black Rose Writing | Texas

  © 2019 by Thomas Marshall

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

  First digital version

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-68433-206-9

  PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  Print edition produced in the United States of America

  Author Photo Credit: Megan Keely Smith (Courtesy of Aidan Blant)

  Thank you so much for checking out one of our Young Adult Fiction novels.

  If you enjoy our book, please check out our recommended title for your next great read!

  What the Valley Knows by Heather Christie

  “A taut, compelling family tale.” –KIRKUS REVIEWS

  For Mom & Dad.

  Because of Dr. Bridget Besinger and Richard Fliegel.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Recommended Reading

  Dedication

  PART ONE: Millennial Fish

  CHAPTER 1. - New Americana

  CHAPTER 2. - Soul To Squeeze

  CHAPTER 3. - You Are Going To Hate This

  CHAPTER 4. - The Kids Aren’t Alright

  CHAPTER 5. - Why Generation

  CHAPTER 6. - Father Of Mine

  CHAPTER 7. - Everlong

  CHAPTER 8. - Parents

  CHAPTER 9. - A Proper Polish Welcome

  CHAPTER 10. - Going To Pasalacqua

  CHAPTER 11. - Modern Jesus

  CHAPTER 12. - Mr. Fish

  CHAPTER 13. - Do I Wanna Know?

  CHAPTER 14. - First Date

  CHAPTER 15. - 400 Lux

  CHAPTER 16. - Shake Me Down

  CHAPTER 17. - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

  CHAPTER 18. - Sappy

  CHAPTER 19. - Just Impolite

  CHAPTER 20. - Talk Show Host

  CHAPTER 21. - Disarm

  CHAPTER 22. - Kitchen Sink/Migraine

  CHAPTER 23. - A Martyr For My Love For You

  CHAPTER 24. - Butterfly

  CHAPTER 25. - Lay, Lady, Lay

  CHAPTER 26. - Story Of My Life

  PART Two: American Road

  This is a story of The West.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For more Information

  BRW Info

  PART ONE: Millennial Fish

  CHAPTER 1.

  New Americana

  I REMEMBER WHEN I used to think people our age were adults. I remember when I used to look up to my father. Now I’m taller than him.

  When I was at the start of my junior year of high school, I really had no idea how much would change over the course of the next two years. I could never have imagined how Ken, Lila, the road trip, or any of it would change my life, but I’ll get to that and all that Holden Caulfield kind of crap about my younger and more vulnerable years later.

  In short, I am a millennial. More specifically, I’m a 90’s kid. I am a member of the New Lost Generation, Generation Apathy, Generation Why; the kids that were around for Web 1.0 but were raised on 2. The generation that saw the technology around them grow faster than they did, born in a period of Unraveling and growing up in a time of Crisis. The last group of human beings to remember 9/11 as an event in their lives rather than a history lesson. The sons and daughters of the Baby-Boomers who stayed together for the kids. We are not just the outsiders or the inbetweeners, we are the lost.

  But that’s just Juvenoia at work.

  Sometimes I do think I’m an adult, sometimes I think I’m the only adult in the room, especially at home. And other times, like times when I pass by the Starbucks that used to be a Blockbuster Video, I want nothing more than to go back. I want to grow up, I desperately want to grow up, I just don’t want to grow old. It’s just that, right now, I’m stuck somewhere in between the two. But again, I really don’t want to be whiney about growing up or finding myself or anything because everybody does that.

  This is the purgatory of adolescence.

  . . . . .

  I got my junior year class schedule about a month before classes actually started the first week of September, and by the time that came around, I was excited to be back at school. I spent the last night of that summer, a warm but temperate Sunday, with Dan just sitting on the hood of my car, parked by the cliffs eating California burritos and watching the last halcyon sun of summer set into the ocean.

  “Think there’ll be a green flash?” I asked, making conversation out of what was a nice silence.

  “I dunno,” he answered with a shrug, “what classes are you in again?”

  “Creative writing, A-PUSH, Honors pre—”

  “We don’t have any together this year, right?”

  “No, and I told you that you should’ve taken Mr. Darcy’s with me.”

  “I didn’t think Darcy was that great freshmen year, and I don’t want to be in a class with a bunch of weird freshmen, especially creative writing,” Dan said, crumpling up the tin foil and yellow paper with the last tortilla bite of his burrito and throwing it away. I didn’t bother to get him to save the leftovers for me (my favorite part of the burrito), and I didn’t bother to tell him that it was the English class that sucked two years ago and not Mr. Darcy.

  “Whatever, I like him. What classes are you taking, again?”

  He’d explain, and I’d take note, thinking of the times we’d be able to see each other during the day; mainly before school, during lunch, during the break after Mr. Darcy’s class, and in the hour I had after school before practice started. He’d then ask, and I’d explain to him how much I liked Mr. Darcy, how even last year when I wasn’t in his class he’d still be cool to have coffee during break, and we’d chat. I’d tell Dan how I was skeptical but excited to take Mr. Darcy’s new class instead of an arts elective; Dan played classical guitar, or at least he took the class.

  A flock of gulls passed overhead.

  “Hey Alex,”

  “Yeah?” I answered.

  “How many times do you think you’ve seen the same bird twice?” Dan asked in a faux-philosophical tone.

  “Shut the fuck up, man,” and we laughed.

  The sun passed behind the horizon. I always loved watching the sun set from the cliffs; you could look out onto that vast ocean and see the gentle curve of the earth across the horizon and watch as blue night crept its way across the big sky behind the setting sun and the pinpoint stars materialized behind the blue and into the black. There wasn�
��t a green flash, but we didn’t mind. I was seriously starting to doubt the phenomenon even existed. The sun set, as it always does, and night fell, as it always did, and I drove Dan back to his house where we played Zombies on Call of Duty for an hour then I went home, driving on The 5 with the top down and the radio blaring just for the hell of it before returning home. I laid in bed, listening to music through headphones and not to the drone of the reality TV that my mother watched late into the night in the other room.

  And then it was the morning. Cereal, coffee, the brushing of teeth, packing and leaving, and then I was at school. I went to the library and went through my planner until some people I knew but hadn’t seen all summer showed up. The kind of friends, you know, good friends but not close ones. The friends you do stuff with and have fun with, but never more than that. Not the people that you just know, but also not the ones that you know a lot about. Or even really desire to, for that matter. I like it like that.

  In the half-hour before school started, we caught up on each other’s summers, on movies we saw, new music we listened to, trips some people took, internships others had, and then the bell rang and the day started. Junior year, and all the shit that comes with it. I already had the next few months of SAT prep, college searching, and general school doing scheduled, but actually being in the year, it was just like any other.

  The day at school was more of the same, “Yes, Alexander Kaoruac, present. Yes, like the writer. No, not related. Actually, it’s Japanese. My dad’s dad, I’m only a quarter. And, yeah, it’s spelled differently.” For some reason this seemed to disappoint the AP Lit teacher, I couldn’t tell if we were already off to a bad start. I liked it when teachers liked me, and that’s why I was happy to find myself in creative writing with Mr. Spencer Darcy after lunch.

  As I entered the classroom a little early, his sophomore daughter, Delilah, was leaving, carrying an old hardcover of Renata Adler’s Speedboat, and an even older copy of The House of Mirth, she smiled at me as she passed and I sat down, waiting for class to start.

  Even Darcy’s class went through the typical circle jerk introduction around the room, with ‘two truths and a lie,’ a social skill I never quite seemed to master.

  “Alex, I’m a junior, um, I’m an only child, I row, a lot, and I’ve never been outside the country.”

  “I’m going to guess you’ve probably gone to Asia to visit your family?” a freshman looking boy asked. Yeesh. I took a breath and let it slide.

  “Nope, actually, they’re pretty much all here, but—”

  “You’ve probably been across the border though, right?” a girl adjacent asked.

  “Yup, you got it,” I said and was happy to move on.

  The desks and attached chairs in the class were set up in a circle, all slightly facing toward Mr. D’s desk at the front of the room. After a few more extravagant but believable facts and wholly unbelievable lies, I was glad to hear from someone who was apparently worse at it than I was. He was slouched forward in his chair (the chair slightly removed from the circle itself) his scrawny and pale elbows resting on the desk in front of him, his hand supporting his head while his messy dark hair hung over one of his eyes. He sat, silent.

  “Um… Kenneth?” Mr. Darcy said looking at a class roster.

  The kid barely bothered to move as he addressed the class.

  “Hi, my name is Kenneth, I am a freshman, and um, I think that’s two facts, so, I’m also adopted,” reticently, and a bit annoyedly.

  “The two facts have to be other than your name and grade…” Mr. Darcy reminded him with a jaded aggravation.

  Kenneth clenched and unclenched his fist around the pencil he was holding, I could tell that there was an anger behind his apathy. He spoke as if the whole ordeal was a public chastening, “I’m a lifer here at Twain, and I want to be published this year.”

  The other lifers, those who had gone to Twain Pacific Elementary, Middle, and High Schools, knew he was one too, and he seemed either vain or cavalier enough to state his goals to the class, so it must’ve been the first.

  “So… you’re not adopted?” the same, overly participatory girl asked.

  “I only wish,” Ken half-muttered and I wondered if that was the punchline he had been waiting to say. The class moved on, I didn’t really. The introductions concluded, a syllabus was passed out and read, an assignment was assigned (read a few short stories then write a personal narrative), and with that class was over.

  I caught Dan in the break between that class and the next and told him about that strange kid Kenneth, wondering if I knew him from somewhere.

  “Wait, Kenneth Chester?” Dan asked.

  “Yeah, why, you know him?”

  “Was he that kid that was suspended for like a month in the middle school last year for threatening that teacher and throwing his chair across the room and shit?”

  “Holy shit, you’re right,” I laughed, “I knew I knew him from somewhere.”

  “The ‘unfortunate episode’ as the email from the headmaster called it.”

  “Shit, I didn’t know he still went here. His parents must have some money.”

  “Still waiting on Chester Auditorium…alright, see you later,” he concluded as the bell rang and we parted ways for the next class.

  I had a feeling that was where I had known that strange disaffected kid from, but I still felt as though I knew him more.

  CHAPTER 2.

  Soul To Squeeze

  KEN LINGERED ON my mind that afternoon, even at practice. We were out on the water, doing long steady state drills in the eight, and so I had a lot of time to just fall into a rhythm with the boat and think. I thought about Ken as I rowed and listened to the oarlocks, the rhythmic feathering and squaring of the oars as they thudded along the hull of the long, narrow boat in unison. What kind of person does a kid like that grow up into, do they grow up? It just sucks to be becoming and not just be. I’m tired of becoming who I am, I just want to be whoever that is, but at this point, I don’t even know who that is, and I’m dangerously close to not caring at all. I can only take so much before I stop caring, just like my dad can only apologize so much before it stops meaning anything.

  I just feel like I’m in between so much, not a kid and not an adult, middle class, middle of the class. I know how much of an asshole it makes me seem like to complain about being middle class, but it really does suck to feel forgotten when you’re not rich enough to have everything, but you’re not poor enough for anyone else to care. But honestly, the only reason I complain is because I can. The only people who can complain are the ones that don’t really have any business complaining in the first place.

  It still sucks, though. But I don’t really care when my parents fight about it anymore. I used to care, but that didn’t do anything. I used to feel like I mattered too. I was smart before I came to Twain Pacific High School, the only non-denominational private school in the county. Before I went here I used to go to a run of the mill San Diego County public school, and all the teachers there knew me specifically. They knew me because I had to make them know me. If I got lost in that school, I’d have been lost forever. Trying used to set me apart, now I’m just another student here, average even. It used to be like turning on a flashlight in a dark room, now it’s that same flashlight outside during the day. How can anyone blame me for settling for ‘good enough’ here?

  Well, now I’m just hurtling through my junior year, with all the shit that brings with it, after a summer of freedom and SAT prepping. And it was a good summer, I had a car, and I used it to spend as little time at home as possible, whether I was at Dan’s, just driving around, or sitting in my room knowing that I could drive. I love driving. My parents would never have bought me a car though, but du
e to the unfortunately fortunate death of my childless great-uncle, I was willed his car a month before my sixteenth birthday last year. It surprised me, because he wasn’t really close with any of us, and then my dad had to drive the car all the way back from Tempe after the funeral. And then it was just parked in front of our house, waiting for me to learn to drive in it.

  Thinking about it, your first car is never your choice, and that money you’d saved up as a kid from birthdays, lemonade stands, and yard sales getting rid of old, cherished Bionicle or Thomas the Train collections for ‘my first car’ never even comes close to the sticker price when that time comes around.

  When I first saw the car parked there a year ago, a silver-gray 2005 Mustang V6 soft-top convertible with the Bullitt edition rims, I thought it looked like a life-size Barbie car. But it quickly grew on me, and after this summer, I’d fallen madly in love with that symbol of my minimal adolescent freedom. Now I mainly just use my car to drive back and forth, to and from school and practice; it’s a shame, for such a powerful and beautiful car to be relegated to such a mundane existence, I wish I could drive it somewhere grand.

  Having a car wasn’t just about freedom though, it was about being that much closer to normal. I didn’t want to spend another year being dropped off by my mother, and thankfully, I didn’t have to. I learned more about my hometown that summer of driving than I had in all sixteen years of living in it before. I even kind of understand the geographical difference between Bankers Hill, Hilcrest, and Mission Hills now, kind of. What a gorgeous city, apart from the crazy massive homeless problem.

  I was born and grew up in the wonderland that is Ocean Beach, California, 92107. The sort of hidden gem of San Diego that stands as the last authentic hold out of the beach bum, the retired hippie, the street kid, the punk, the original hipster, and the hodad and grom alike. Newport Avenue is at the center of OB, a street leading to the Pier and the Beach, and it’s the hub and last bastion of the true Southern California beach town. It smells like piss and stale beer, and weed, so much weed, and you never don’t hear either Sublime or the Red Hot Chili Peppers from a stereo or your own heart as you walk those three blocks to the water. That’s home to me, and I love it.