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Ben Tennyson whole-heartedly believed that things couldn't possibly have grown worse if every cosmic force existing beyond his human conscious conspired to make it as such, and as he stalked past a collection of unhealthy-looking bushes, having caught the tail end of his unbearable ginger haired blood relative's newest insult, he cursed his mother and father in his mind for ever instilling in him the belief that a ride-around in his grandfather's less-than-functional motorhome would actually do him some good. He'd been receptive to the idea at first, to any idea that would put a reasonable distance between himself and those two glowering thugs, Cash and J.T; between them, Ben was certain they'd secured enough of his lunch money to last them the rest of their lives, and the weary ten-year-old boy wasn't exactly open to funding any more of their expenses.
As the walk past tall pine trees and across displaced wood chips continued, the boy realised with displeasure that this, awful as it seemed to be, might have been his only option. His parents' finances had been stretched too thinly to afford the thought of any real holiday, a prospect that almost went unnoticed by the pre-teen due in part to it's sheer frequency - Ben was born in Bellwood, raised in Bellwood, and was likely going to grow old and frail within it's limits if something wasn't done to change the status quo. A road trip across American grounds to appreciate the finer details of his nation of residence was the closest thing he'd have to experience travel, and it would have been with his handy-man of a grandfather, too. It wasn't perfect by any measure of the imagination, but Ben would have gotten along without losing too much of his sanity.
Then he'd walked into the R.V, and there she was.
Gwen Tennyson, in all her sickening, geekazoid, cootie queen-esque glory. His worst nightmare made manifest; she was everything the sixth grader couldn't stand about girls in a neatly wrapped package, ten minutes of the sarcasm and general prep-school uppity nonsense having Ben pulling out the roots of his hair - she'd made it clear his feelings were mutual ones, too, and he reckoned that a simple stroll through the woods near their campsite would rid him of his cousin's disease-ridden dweebery for long enough for him to wallow in the misfortune of his situation.
He didn't have the heart nor the self-awareness to acknowledge it, but the problem he had, the real problem, wasn't at all attributed to Gwen or to this lacklustre excuse for a summertime vacation; it was the fact that the prepubescent male, for something that could have been anywhere inbetween three months and two years, had been suffering under the weight of exhaustion. This wasn't the get-some-sleep type of fatigue, or the category easily fixed by a bottle of some energy drink - no, this was something different, something perpetually inescapable, something emotionally numbing. This was the predictable line of Ben Tennyson's life, and there was nothing he could do to alter it's scope.
Ben's day-to-day existence was a blur of missed homework assignments, mediocre grades and school bullies that was so piercingly ordinary that it had forced the child to acknowledge his own insignificance in the world's grand scheme. He wanted fun, he wanted excitement, but these were concepts becoming increasingly distant from his reality and to fight against such childish injustice would be futile in every conceivable way. Once this little excursion had run it's course, it would be back to his father's awkward dinnertime jokes, back to Cash and JT's persistent jeering, back to his teacher's harping in regards to the latest algebraic formula he'd refused to learn and back to an eternal discontent from which Ben could never return.
