THE BOY WHO TALKED TO AIR #Wattys2018 (Wattys Longlist)

1. STARTING OVER

The rain beat violently down on my mother's rusty Chevy Citation, as we traveled to Sherbrook, Maine to start our new lives. It had been a continuous downpour since we left Scranton, Pennsylvania at six this morning, and the rain was a depressing reminder of how much I was going to miss my old life. My name is Justin Spencer, and it is June 15, 1988: the day my mother and I decided to run away from our past. Being the stubborn 15-year-old that I am, I protested the move, but Mom ignored my pleas with deaf ears as usual.

How was I supposed to forget the only people I had ever known, and pretend as though the only life I had ever known never existed? On the other hand, I suppose I wasn't going to miss it all that much.

The only friend that I had in Scranton-or anywhere for that matter—was Alex Reilly. Alex was a boy with a mild learning disability who had lived next door to me. We shared a common interest in old horror comics, such as: Tales from The Crypt, Adventures into Terror, and Dark Mysteries. We would spend hours during our Friday night sleepovers, just reading, and discussing these stories that never became tiresome to us.

Horror comics were our escape from the mundane, but that was about the extent of our friendship. Now that I think about it, I was probably going to miss Alex's comic books more than Alex, himself. It's kind of sad really.

I guess I've always been sort of a loner. I could tolerate people in small doses, but after a while, they would pierce my ears and nerves with every annoying mannerism that their bodies could conjure. This had been the world that I lived in, ever since I was old enough to think logically. I would put on a fake smile and carry on conversations with those who wanted me to speak, but on the inside, it was a chore that drained my body of all its energy. After such mental exhaustion, my body would require days of solitude and rest to fully recover. I sometimes wondered if my father had suffered as much as I had with being an introvert.

My father died when he was 28, from injuries sustained in an automobile accident. I was still an unknown face in my mother's womb when he passed, but Mom named me after him to honor his memory.

Mom didn't talk about my father much, but certainly not because he was a terrible husband, who did awful things to her. It was quite the opposite; my father was a good man, who she missed greatly. I would sometimes catch her sobbing late at night, as she looked through old photographs of their wedding day. It killed me to witness Mom during these private moments, and so I avoided them when I could.

Mom wasn't alone for long though, and she remarried a few years later, to a man named William Jacobs. I was around six years old and still naïve to the world when Mom brought William home to meet me. The idea of having a father figure in my life was something that I only dreamt of, and from that day forward, William became the only father I had ever known. Unfortunately, William was not the sort of dad I envisioned when I thought of role model fathers. I suppose my idea of an ideal father figure was distorted by my beliefs that every head of the household, was like your typical sitcom dad.

Unfortunately for me, the Steven Keaton's, and the Ward Cleaver's of the world were only mirages on a big dumb box. William was not the sort of stepfather that would take you fishing, or to watch a ballgame on a Sunday afternoon. That's because William, was a functioning alcoholic—devoted to working his job as a security officer for the DMV—and drinking just enough alcohol to get him through the day. He didn't start his real drinking until he arrived home, when he usually downed a twelve pack of Old Milwaukee, while taking shots of Jim Beam and cursing at the Pittsburg Pirates on the RCA.

During his spare time, he was usually emotionally and physically abusive to Mom and I. She finally had enough of William's alcoholic, aggressive behavior, and asked for a divorce. This made William livid, to the point where his only response was to deposit his fist through the drywall of my mother's bedroom. Despite a restraining order against him, and being served with divorce papers, he continued to call our house daily, with tear-filled promises of changed behavior. My mother was fearful, and wanted to protect me, and it was the only reason why we were moving away from Scranton.