for him [bxb] ✔️

22 // driven forward

The months wore on with the combined pressure of standardized tests and the celebratory obligations of the senior class. It had taken the sole months of March and April to prepare for the town wide graduation that every person of standing would attend.

Those months I had begun to put more focus and more care into my own well being for the future and tests became a mere breeze as I studied hours at a time for the packets filled with the bubbled sheets of paper.

I had also taken the task of limiting time at the minimal job in the music store to solely weekends and this had given me much more time to enjoy those last moments before the year thrust upon us the responsibilities of a young adult.

With money I had saved from the year of work, nearly $3,000 dollars, I was able to prosper with the investment of a 1970 Volkswagon Beetle in a charming baby blue color. It was the most pristine of vehicles at the time and I had been awarded to purchase it from a family friend who had later introduced himself as my mother's secret lover.

Until then, I used my late grandfather's silver carved key ring to take my new friend out around our small and quiet town. Old friends would wave and wish me well wishes with the new aluminum brushed piece of machinery. Others would stop and laugh at the presence of such a feminine car being owned by such a boy like me.

There would be times when I would sneak out in the late hours of night with nothing but a wad of crumpled cash and a rusted lighter, and I would sour through the empty roads right back to the hill I had been shown from the man we called sir and further so to the abandoned strip mall which would soon be rebuilt bigger and better as the world became ever more commercialized.

Freedom was only at the tip of my fingers.