As per routine, Trey was already seated in the corner booth of the coffee shop. Hanging out there after school till late had begun as a protective mechanism for him, it later turned into a habit before officially becoming a lifestyle.
Life had been miserable back in Manchester, he was constantly bullied, assaulted and taunted. And now here, at Winston, Rhode Island, everything was exactly the same. When his father had gotten the promotion, he had expected things to be different here, but it wasn’t. There were still the jocks that picked on him, the pretty girls that wouldn’t talk to him, and the bullies that made his life a living hell.
He wasn’t the only one in his family that had been disappointed with Winston, his father had also expected things to be better. With the better pay, he didn’t think that his wife would mind being moved all the way to another continent, leaving all her friends and family behind to start a new life. He honestly didn’t think she’d mind that he made such a life changing decision with talking to her first. But most of all, he thought she would have been happy for him.
How wrong he had been. Well, partially anyway. Trey’s mother had been genuinely happy for her husband when she heard he had gotten a promotion. But it was the catch it came with that threw her off balance. She was going to have to sell her shop and leave all she knew behind to begin a life in a country she had never been to with a family she loved and that was what was important, right? Being with family.
Trey couldn’t tell anymore; his mother began drinking immensely and his father began staying late at work to avoid the drama and the battery of accusations his wife paraded him with; calling him selfish, saying that he hated her and just was looking for a way to punish her for a crime she didn’t know she committed. Often times, she would drunkenly beg him to forgive her so that they could all move back to England and be happy again. The begging fell on deaf grounds. His father had worked hard for the promotion and they were going to stay.
Sometimes, Trey would go weeks without seeing his father and during those weeks he would not have had an actual conversation with his mother because she was drunk out of her mind. As a result, Trey had learnt how to take care of himself; doing his own laundry, cooking his own meals, keeping the house together. And being his own ‘parents’.
Imagine being beaten the crap out of in school and then coming home to a house like that-a drunken mother and an absent father. He avoided the house as much as he could and that was the reason he spent so much time at the coffee shop. So how does a teenager handle all that, he had a creative outlet. His art. He spent all his free time documenting his life in comic book form in his series of brown leather bound books.
His books contained his life, they were his life. Sure he had turned them into something it wasn’t, entertaining and suspenseful. It was almost like an actual superhero comic book but for the fact that he wouldn’t show anyone else. He admired the suspense because he, as well, was also in suspense. He didn’t know what was going to happen between the times he dropped his pencil and when he picked it up again. He called it his ‘comic journal’.
Expressing how he felt had helped him deal with what he went through every day. And he had hoped often times that kids like him…that went through what he did also had a way of expressing themselves.
He hoped that one day after he overcame the mess hole of a life he was living, people would read his work and appreciate what he went through to be wherever he will be. But until then… “Ginseng tea, extra cream, extra sugar.” He said to the waitress that came to his table to get his order.
In school that day, he had gotten sucker punched for no reason and when he had tried to defend himself he had gotten detention and was called a trouble maker. How misunderstood he felt.
He brought out his pencil case and his current brown leather bound book. And flipped to page that had kept him busy during detention. He briefly went through it before turning to a fresh page. Good thing is that at least he knew that the antagonist in his comic had a crappy day.
