Chapter One:::: The Man in the Picture
"You suck, did you know that? I mean, look at you! You're an adult and you don't even have a job yet!" said the shrill, highly agigtated voice.
No, that's not me, that's TO me. That's my sister. Little sister to be exact. She's a year and two monthes younger than me.
How dare she accuse of THAT! I'm not an adult. Not even CLOSE. I mean, sure I'm 18 and all, but I look like I'm 15 and you have to be 19 to go to the bar. So, no, I'm deffinately not an adult yet. Now only if I could get her to see that. Although, why should I really care? She's my LITTLE sister even though she looks to be in her 20's... Oi vay. She needs to chill out, that's what she needs.
"Job?" I asked, a little half-smile upon my face. Half-smiles are my only chance against the patronizing side of her, which will rear it's head in second or two. "I have a job."
"Of course you do," she replied. SEE? Patronizing! Sometimes I hate being right... "Let me guess. You're a writer?"
That's the problem with my chosen profession. People don't see writing as a real job because it's so hiddeously unstable. I mean, writers don't know for sure when they're going to get paid. They don't know if they'll even sell what they wrote, or even write another one ever again. When people define a real job, they think stability and reliability. Which is the exact opposite of a writer unless of course you are J. K. Rowlings or Bruce Coville. Practically famous.
You know sometimes that as you grow up you know exactly what you're going to be when you 'grow-up'? Well, that's how it was with me. I knew I was going to be a writer. I knew when I was little, I started writing when I was ten years old, and I guess I've always known.
"A writer. Yes I am," I muttered in reply, "Actor too y'know." I really am an actor. Sort of. In June2003, I was an extra in a movie called "Shattered Cities" that's about the Halifax Explosion. You can see me in the singing scene near the end perched next to an old woman against the tent. I'm the one with the yellow bandana around my head.
"Actor? Right. Whatever." My sister sauntered into the kitchen, "When you get your first big paycheck, then call me."
Which was odd because I got paid for my work as the Extra, but I didn't reply to her comment, I just staired dully at the computer wondering when exactly my family stopped being connected with my life.
Now, I know that most teenagers want their families to leave them alone, but I'm not most teenagers. I sometimes put up that wall, but usually I do want them around. To be interested in what I have to say and be curious about more than just what my grades at school are.
How encouraging is it to writers when the only family they have has either impossible standards or just hates to read? My father, he hates to read, but trys to encourage me anyways. It would mean something, but he can't really give any good criticism since he has never read anything I wrote in my life and usually when I talk to him, he tunes me out, but I'll explain that later. I've never met my Mother, but I'm told she used to write... My brother has these impossibly high standards that no matter what I try it's never good enough or he can do way better and my sister just dosen't have time. Ever. She coaches little kids soccer teams and plays soccer herself so I don't blame her.
Okay, about the talking thing, I have this terrible problem sometimes. I'll be in the middle of saying something and then I'll have to pause and think about what I'm saying before I can continue. My sister likes to make fun of me for that. Sometimes, I'll forget the ending entirely and I'll kinda sit there in silence for a while. It was really bad when I was younger, so now that I'm older I've taught myself to just stop before I start speaking and piece everything together as I want to say it and then I'll say it. Sometimes I'll be ahead of myself entirely during a conversation with somebody else and I'll anticipate what they're going to say or ask so I can piece together my reply and reherse it in my head before I have to actually say it. Which, you could say, is one of the reasons I became a writer in the first place.
As you can guess, I'm really not the most popular person in the world.
"Are you just going to sit there forever musing about how bad your little life is?" snapped a voice, breaking through my subconscious mind and jerking me (hatefully and grinning, I'm sure) back into the real world.
I turned to my sister, "Thinking about it. Why?" I'm always thinking, trying to figure out my crazy existance and where I belong and all that other knee-deep stuff.
"I wanna check my email."
"Oh." I replied, "Fine I guess."
I removed myself from the chair (it was a kitchen chair... one of the last two because the first two of our four kitchen chairs had met an awful doom monthes ago. The other of the last two remaining had the back more or less ripped out of it via a skate incident many winters ago) and I went up to my room.
My room is upstairs, the first door on your right once you step off of the straight stairs. We have swirly stairs on the other side of the house.
My room used to be very very hiddeously ugly. The carpet, which didn't fit the whole floor, was a maroon-red color. The wooden part of the floor which wasn't covered by the carpet, was painted a light rosey pink color. The same color as the walls. And let me take this oppertunity to tell you that I don't like pink. I hate it in fact. Blue, red, black, silver, even YELLOW I could handle, but not pink. Well, the carpet is still maroon-red. The wooden floor parts are still pink, but now my walls are a dark forest green color. As to not waste much time to describe my unmatching furniture, I have a desk that's piled up with junk, a blackboard that's not on the wall, but propped against the desk, a bookshelf piled high with books, hardware of our old (very VERY old... like 1970s-ish old) computer and my sewing things. Oh yeh, and I got a bed too that's pushed up against the window. The matress is just high enough that it is level with the windowsil so I put my stereo (that won't play cds) on the sil. And that's it for furniture.
I flopped onto my bed and thought about writing. Writing is on my mind a lot. Too much in fact I think. The only thing that's on my mind as much as writing is adventure. I've been stuck in this town for a long time. I was born in BritishColumbia and we moved here, to NovaScotia, when I was two years old. My town is a boring little anti-diversity place where the nice people are not nice, just very patronizing and prideful. Prideful in a bad way though. Not that happy-dancing-Proud-2-B-Canadian gaflory. But, like I said, I'm not that popular.
There are only two good things in this town and that is Tomo and Ergo. Tomas Bates, Tomo, is a Frenchman from Quebec. Erving Castel, Ergo, is from Alberta. My name is Tibor Goodwin. They call me Tibby. We all met in the HighSchool because of three things we had in common. The film business being the writer/actors that we were I guess it's not out of the ordinary to pick up people of your kind. Us artsy people see ourselves as a differnet breed than the rest of the people of the world, so it's easier for us to spot one another. The Second thing is our names. Tomo, Tibby and Ergo. There are no weirder names than ours. At our school, all the kids have normal names... except for Tina Devine but she turned out to be not what we thought she was. The third thing was sense of adventure. Now how many people do you know that will pack one bag, not including food, and head out to the beach to spend an entire week playing their own version of "Survivor"?
Tomo, Ergo and myself had plans for that very night. Weird plans that involved acting like hobos and scaring each other quite badly in the middle of a road on a dark dark night.
It must have been at least 2 o'clock in the morning, because it was just that dark. We had decided, when it was last daylight, that we should go for a walk. Out camping or something, like a trio of vagabonds, roughing it in the wilderness of our small town.
We had our bags packed with tiki-torches and tiki-mats, which were generally matts and torches made of bamboo that we bought that afternoon from the local dollar store, and I recall we also had a 2-litre thing of Mountain Dew.
The most recent streetlight was half a mile behind us, so we were walking down the middle of a dark street called 'Harmony Heights' with wild tree all around us telling each other random Urban Legends. We hadn't seen a car for a mile.
I spurred up a fake Legend from my mind:
"So, there was this guy and he was walking down a dark street in the middle of the night and suddenly he sees the headlights of this car. So he gets the pricklies on the back of his neck, but he ignores it and this car stops. He's scared now cause he had heard this rumor that there was this axeman on the loose right? So, he jumps into the forest to hide and the car stops..."
Right then, we hit the bottom of this hill and the headlights of a car come streaming down over the hill and I swear Ergo yelped and jumped three feet in the air.
Of course, what else to do but Tomo and I burst out laughing at him.
"Quit laughin' at me!" Ergo pouted, "I wasn't scared!"
"Sure ya weren't," I grinned.
"So uh," Ergo fidgeted slightly, "What happened next?"
"The guy runs into the woods, scared to death and he's runnin' thinking that this is the axeman right? So he triips over this root and falls off the edge of this small cliff. He hits the bottom of a ravene and strikes his head on a rock, dead. Turns out the guy in the car is an undercover cop who thought that the running man was the axeman. So the cop is heading back to his car and a man jumps out from the side of the road behind the cop and axes him right in the back! Turns out that this axeman was just about to get the running man when the headlights came up over the hill."
Tomo stopped in his tracks, stairing deeply off to the side of the road.
"Whatcha lookin at Tomo?" Ergo asked nervously, "Ya see the axeman or something?"
"Look..." Tomo muttered, gesturing in the direction of the side of the road. He walked over, bent down and picked IT up.
"What is it?" I asked.
"It's... it's a photo. Of a man in army garb," Tomo said, studying the picture. "Looks old. Like the forties or something."
Ergo grabbed it away from him, "Ah, something's written on the back." He turned it over and read it outloud, "Regiment 34, Groundhog Division. Huh. That's all it says."
"We can go to the library tommorrow to see what War was in ...or near... the Forties, check out this regement and find out who this guy is," I said, "Maybe even find out who owns the picture and return it to the owner right?"
"Sure thing," Tomo replied, "That's what we'll do."
"...I'm tired," Ergo muttered.
We ended up going back to Tomo's place that morning at 4am because it became too cold... us not bringing blankets and in only t-shirts and shorts. At least the tiki-torches kept us kind of warm.
I was looking forward to the trip to the library, wondering all about who the man in the picture was.
A/N:: Dun dun dunnnnn! Okay, posting as I write here, sooo... might be a while... :P
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