"So Tom how are you feeling today?" said the man in the suit.
"I feel like shit. Stop asking questions." said the boy in the large sweater.
His arms were folded and he was staring straight into the carpet of the room. Ripping apart the fabric of the poor object with his eyes.
"Tom I noticed in the past you don't like to talk about your father a lot, why is this?" said the man in the suit lowering his head to get a better look at the boy.
"I don't talk about my father because he doesn't exist. I am my father. Stop asking questions" said the boy raising his voice. The room was extremely hot, and the fan running from the ceiling wasn't helping much out either.
"Tom it's not good to suppress your feelings and give me blunt answers, just slowly open up to me..."
The man became cut off as the boy firmly stood up and said "fuck off."
He walked out the room and slammed the door on the man in the suit. The boy in the large sweater's name was Tom Harrison. He had long scraggly hair, baggy clothes, and a grim look on his face everywhere he went. He walked out the building and immediately contacted one of his friends and asked what they were doing.
As Tom skated down to a spot to meet up with his friends, he rode past an empty catholic church and its emptier parking lot. He wondered what were the types of people that went inside that building, maybe they were young children just being dragged into the building by their parents, maybe someone who really wants that promotion at their job, or people who just traded drugs for sex, and needed some spiritual "cleansing". They were all kidding themselves. They were all climbing Jacob's ladder, only to fall, get back up, and just habitually start climbing again with new bruises.
The spot that Tom and all his friends loitered at was simply called the Tree, as it was just a tree that overlooked the town on a large hill, at the time no one could think of a better name, so it just stuck. It's been called the tree since Tom could remember. The only people, who really loitered at the spot, were just kids being anything but kids, out casted townies, and drug dealers. There used to be a homeless man who would stand at the top of the hill and scream drunken obscenities at people. He would stand at the very edge of the hill and talk about his life, and conduct interviews with himself as if he had an audience. Tom was the only person who seemed to listen.
Tom's usual routine consisted of him sitting down at the Tree smoking a cigarette and staring out at the town. The smoke from the cigarette would whirl and twirl with the wind and always reminded him of the Factory. No one knew where the hell the Factory came from or who produced it, it just sprouted up one night and became this huge metal fortress that pumped smoke out from the stacks. Just pumping out that smoke, nonstop. The smoke seemed to hover over the town, putting the town in a haze, a dense haze where people and places were anything but what they seemed, and for some reason that was okay. The Factory scared Tom, in fact it was the only thing he didn't look at while sitting down whenever he was at the Tree. The Factory's essence, it's aura, it was dark. It put Tom in a very uncomfortable mood. No one ever talked about that damn Factory or its smoke, it was just there and it was known.
Tom was sitting with a bunch of his friends all of whom he personally didn't like that much, but just hung out with for some sort of social interaction. There were a lot of his friends, maybe twenty or so, but once you named a few of them you named all of them, at least in Tom's eyes. There was Craig Richards, a dropout who just skated everywhere he went as he didn't have a car or any money for one. There was Seymour Daltrey, he was always talking about the newest events, updating everyone on what was going on in the world and in their town, because honestly if it wasn't for Seymour none of them would know exactly what the hell GDP stood for. There was also Wilson Morrison, who had the uncanny ability to attract problems wherever he went, and who in Tom's eyes, did things only for attention. In fact, Wilson was particularly scorned by a lot of people, but he sold drugs so that was okay. Then there was Tom's best friend, Matt Gilmour. Matt wasn't like the others, he was smart and charming and looked up to by most of the group. He stood up for his friends and had a large amount of confidence that Tom only wished he possessed. While Tom really looked up to Matt, he also greatly envied him. If there was one thing that Tom had in common with all of his friends, it was that they all didn't know who they were, so they just pretended to be something else
