Home is a Four Letter Word

chapter one

Late February

Home was a place Jake liked to call 'The Middle of Nowhere,' Ohio. It was a forgotten rural town with less than two-thousand people, most of whom had never left and never would leave. Everyone knew everyone, and even the people Jake didn't know always seemed to know him. Privacy was a foreign concept Jake had never had the good fortune of knowing.

Home was where doors were left unlocked and where neighbors walked in without knocking. The Holmes' homestead was a two-story farmhouse on thirteen acres, built three years before Jake was born. It was big, but it needed to be. It was home to one horse, two dogs, three cats, four humans, and an ungodly amount of chickens that Jake had given up on trying to count. It had more than enough room to host any guest that walked through the door. On any given day, Jake could trudge through the kitchen after a long day of school and find his mother chatting up Mrs. Martin from the church choir or Aaron sitting at the table eating whatever pie she had baked that morning in a bored trance. Everyone knew everyone's business, but everyone had everyone's backs. Jake's life had been a constant state of community. He didn't know if that community expired when he left it for college or if home would welcome him back with open arms for the rest of his life.

The only thing in his life that set him apart from being swallowed whole in the blueprint of defined belonging was his name. Jake Lee Holmes, the only of his kind. Jake came from a family of Jim's—his father being the last of five. The Jim Holmes namesake ended with Jake, and he couldn't have been more grateful to have one more thing that separated him from becoming just like the man. The Holmes' had lived in this town for years, their bloodline running all the way back to the days when it was nothing more than a thought in a few lonely farmer's minds. His name was his, but it also wasn't. His name was a promise. A promise to honor it by living to leave a legacy, not living to leave it behind.

It was the small things about home that made Jake want to stay in it forever. It was knowing exactly where the cops camped out in the church parking lot to avoid getting ticketed going twenty over the speed limit on the way home. It was a small diner in the middle of town being the only place to eat besides the McDonalds twenty minutes away. It was the tar and chipped roads that kicked up dust in the rear view mirror, passing rickety mailboxes that were somehow still standing after being hit by every drunken idiot in town.

It was getting detention for calling a teacher 'ma'am' because she was 'only thirty-two' and it made her feel old to be spoken to like that.

Jake's mother had made him call every woman 'ma'am' since he was old enough to realize he couldn't call every woman 'mom.' The women that watched over him in Sunday school always got a kick out of the fact that by the time he was three, he had claimed every woman in the town to be his mother, yet no one told his actual mother that he had been doing it for over a year. Needless to say, he clearly knew the difference now, and apparently Miss White didn't find his courtesy as endearing as the church ladies did.

It was twenty minutes into said detention and Mr. Mooney couldn't stop glancing over to Jake as if it could help him figure out what the hell he was doing there. The first time he had gotten a detention was in fifth grade when he was dared to bring in a worm from recess and put it on Katherine's desk. The teacher was livid, but Katherine was unbothered—she picked the poor thing up with her own hands and took it back outside without a word. That day made his mother mad more than anything. He wasn't allowed to hang out with Aaron for a week after that because she had deemed him a 'bad influence.' Jake wasn't convinced that his best friend still wasn't the worst influencer in his life, but this time, this detention, he had no one to blame but himself and whatever ex-boyfriend scarred the word 'ma'am' for Miss White.

"Are we allowed to have our phones out or is that a no-no?" The voice of the girl furthest from the door shook him from his trance.

"No, Miss Price. Homework only."

The room fell back into comfortable silence. Today's detention was fairly empty. Besides Jake, there were only two other people. The first was Samantha Price, who—Jake found out during lunch time banter—had been caught hooking up with her boyfriend in the band's practice room. For whatever justifiable reason the school came up with, her senior-year boyfriend was exempted from the repercussions. She was two years below Jake, but he still knew of her through his sister who had befriended the whole damn high school upon her arrival freshman year. Through a frustrated boredom, she resorted to attempting a nap to pass the time.

That left the second—the boy two rows over from him who stared at the dirty chalkboard with a disinterested glare. He was leaning back against the chair of his wooden desk with his arms crossed over his chest looking utterly unbothered by his current situation as if a) he was familiar with being here, or b) he believed the incident that resulted in his punishment was in all ways justifiable. His name was on the tip of Jake's tongue, but he couldn't place it, nor did he think he'd ever had a conversation with him in his life. Jake tried squinting at the side of his face as if watching the way he blinked or how he pushed a stray strand of his thick dark hair out of his eyes would help him place the familiarity. Nope, still nothing.

Dissatisfied with the crowd he was stuck with, Jake's attention drifted back up towards the white analog clock mounted over the classroom door. 3:22. Thirty-eight more minutes remained and he spent every single one of them watching the clock arm move with the tick-tock that echoed through the room's silence taunting him to drown it out.