A 90's Friday Night Lights meets Fifty Shades, only the town is the sadomasochist and the two young lovers their pawns.
July Elizabeth Edwards is stuck in the existence her pretentious, rural East Texas town has allotted her. A shift in social statu...
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Pure Pines in the 90s was a small town in East Texas. The kind with a football field, a few churches and one privately owned burger joint that fed the masses on game day. There were two things different about this town that probably should have come as a warning for anybody passing through it. One, it wasn't our town. It was our grandparents' town and their grandparents before that, and two, it wasn't even a town at all. It was only an unincorporated community tucked behind a massive curtain of pine trees so tall they hid a multitude of sins. They called it Pure Pines, Texas. And that was the start of the elitism.
If you blinked, you'd miss the place and speed right past it down the interstate, but if you took the wrong turn down a dirt road, a street or two past the high school or behind one of the churches, you'd find miles of all kinds of different houses, built by the people who called it home. Pure Pines was in between two small towns north and south of it, and two somewhat larger towns each thirty miles to the east and west of it.
Those larger two towns had the shopping malls and big chain restaurants. The smaller two next to us offered grocery stores, mom-and-pop type food places and a few other small business destinations for errand running. You didn't even have to get on a major highway to get to one of them. They also had the only police and sheriff's departments. Imagine growing up in a town so pure it didn't need law enforcement of its own. Looking back, I think that's how they kept us all in line. We didn't realize we were walking the tight rope without a net.
Every Fall, come the first hint of football, hot chocolate, or what we call make-a-pot-of-chili-weather, yellow school buses from the outskirts of the surrounding towns within a fifty-mile radius pulled into our little burger joint to eat before they headed back to their own neck of the woods. They were here on Friday night for football of course, and select other days of the week for girls' volleyball, and any other sport or academic match our little 3A school competed in.
To say that everyone knew everybody in our town was a gross understatement, but the older I got I would come to know it as a mass overstatement. We knew the people on the buses too. You had the Spring Hill Panthers, White Oak Roughnecks, Pine Tree Pirates, Waskom Wild Cats, Bullard Bulldogs, Elysian Fields Lions, West Rusk Raiders, and then there was us, The Pure Pines Palominos. Even our school mascot was a blonde. A palomino is a genetic color in horses that have a gold coat and a white mane and tail.
